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In June 1893, a wooden crate delivered by Adams Express arrived at the Agriculture Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Inside was a miniature scale model of a Milwaukee brewery, thirteen feet square, made of gold-plated bronze and white metal, said to have cost roughly one hundred thousand dollars to produce. The man … Read more

Peggy Lipton was one of the most visible women on television in the late 1960s, the face of The Mod Squad and a fixture on magazine covers across the country. Her life looked like a postcard, but the man who walked into her world at the height of her fame would quietly reshape everything about … Read more

In 1971, Diana Vreeland was fired from Vogue. She was seventy years old, had been editor-in-chief for nearly a decade, and had turned the magazine into the defining cultural document of the 1960s. She had coined the word youthquake, put Twiggy and Mick Jagger and the Beatles in a fashion magazine, sent photographers to Morocco … Read more

On November 18, 1986, a woman died in Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia. She was twenty-six years old and weighed eighty-two pounds. Her mother was at her side. The woman had appeared on the covers of American, British, and Paris Vogue. She had shot campaigns for Armani, Dior, Versace, and Yves Saint Laurent. At eighteen, … Read more

On December 5th, 1974, Millicent Veronica Wilson Hearst died at her home at 4 East 66th Street in Manhattan at the age of ninety-two. She had outlived her husband by twenty-three years, and his mistress by thirteen. She had outlived the scandal, the gossip, the department store art sales, the conservation committee that stripped William … Read more

On the night of March 18, 1882, Morgan Earp was playing billiards in Tombstone, Arizona, with his back to the back door. He was thirty years old and well liked in the town. His older brother Wyatt stood nearby with two other men. Gunfire shattered the glass of the back door. A bullet struck Morgan … Read more

In the fall of 1888, a traveling photographer arrived at a small house deep in the Appalachian valleys of western North Carolina. He had been hired to take a memorial photograph of a dead child. As he set up his camera in the front room, he saw the little girl laid out on a table … Read more

Merle Oberon’s entire life was built on a single, heavily guarded lie. The woman audiences knew as a Tasmanian-born British star was actually born in Bombay, the daughter of a twelve-year-old mother, and she spent decades bleaching her skin, silencing relatives, and even passing off her grandmother as her maid to keep that truth buried. … Read more

In 1913, the Santa Cruz River stopped running past Tucson. No dam blocked it. The water table beneath its bed had simply dropped below the sand, and the river went underground and stayed there. Today, more than half a million people live on that dead river in a desert that receives about a foot of … Read more

The diamond was free. That is the part America never heard. When Donald Trump Jr. proposed in a New Jersey shopping mall in November 2004, a jeweler had given him the $100,000 ring at no cost because the store wanted photographs. The cameras had been booked in advance. The proposal was advertising. Thirteen years and … Read more