top of page
The Last Impression: 26 Death Masks (Some Well Known, Some Not)
In the quiet hours following death, long before photography could capture a likeness, artisans turned to wax and plaster to preserve the...
Photographs and Eyewitness Accounts of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
Ruins of San Francisco, Nob Hill in foreground, viewed from Lawrence Captive Airship, 1,500 feet elevation, May 29, 1906 — 41 days after...
Bravo, Lettuce, and Lungfuls of Hope: The Curious Tale of Puzant Torigian’s Herbal Cigarette Crusade
In 1997, amidst a storm of lawsuits, congressional hearings, and public outrage against the tobacco industry, an odd little product...
Charles Dickens and the Secret History of His Final Resting Place
It was a grey June morning in 1870 when a solitary hearse slipped unnoticed through the streets of London. Few would have suspected that...
The Bizarrely Successful History of People Mailing Themselves in Boxes
Long before the age of biometric passports and full-body scanners, some travellers took a more... unconventional route to their...
How Jonas Salk Helped Tame Polio: A Story of Braces, Iron Lungs and Unpatented Suns
If you chat to anyone who grew up in the 1940s or 1950s, chances are they’ll remember the grim terror that was polio. It was a disease...
The Silent Sacrifice of Irena Iłłakowicz: Poland’s Forgotten Spy Heroine
In the great sweep of twentieth-century history, World War II produced its share of spies, saboteurs, and secret agents, figures who...
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt: The Gilded Age Millionaire Who Died a Hero
On the morning of 7 May 1915, as the RMS Lusitania cut through the waters off the coast of Ireland, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt stood on...
The Relentless Fury of Paddy Mayne: War Hero and SAS Founder.
Lt Col Robert Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, SAS, in the desert near Kabrit, 1942. “Wild maybe, but he was definitely someone you would want on...
The Real Story Behind The Exorcist: The Strange Case of Ronald Hunkeler
On a quiet suburban street in St. Louis, Missouri, a red-brick Colonial house on Roanoke Drive stands bathed in the mundane charm of...
Take The Utterly Ridiculous Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)
In his 1938 novel The Unvanquished , William Faulkner portrays Colonel Sartoris as a figure emblematic of post-Civil War Southern...
How the CIA Helped Kill a Dictator—And Failed to Kill Another
In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA dreamed of a Caribbean sweep, one bullet for Trujillo, another for Castro. Only one found its...
Ian Fleming’s Jamaica: The Island That Made 007
In the summer of 1943, as Allied forces plotted the downfall of Hitler and Mussolini, a little-known episode played out in the Caribbean....
The Monk That Lived For 82 Years And Died Without Ever Seeing A Woman.
It’s one of those stories that sounds more like legend than fact, yet tucked away in the quiet, windswept monasteries of Mount Athos, it...
The Year Women Became Eligible To Vote in Each Country
It’s easy to forget how recently women in many parts of the world were granted the right to vote — and just how uneven the journey to...
Madame Abomah: The Towering Life and Legacy of Ella Williams, the African Giantess
In an age when spectacle was king and public fascination with “human curiosities” filled theatre seats from New York to New Zealand, one...
The Eviction of Mary Filan: When The Trump Organisation Ousted a Widow from Her Home
For more than 30 years, Mary Filan — a widowed 74-year-old woman semi-paralysed from a recent stroke — had lived in Apartment 6B, 143-15...
The Summer the Sharks Came: Beach Haven and the 1916 Jersey Shore Attacks
At the dawn of the 20th century, Beach Haven had the feel of a seaside postcard come to life. Situated at the southern tip of Long Beach...
The Prince of Fraud: Anthony Gignac and the $8 Million Royal Ruse
In the summer of 2017, the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach — one of the most iconic luxury destinations in America — nearly welcomed a...
The Curious Rise and Fall of Dickens World: Kent’s Victorian Theme Park Experiment
When it opened its doors in May 2007, Dickens World promised visitors the chance to step directly into the fog-shrouded, gaslit streets...
The Forgotten Treehouses of Paris: Rediscovering Les Guinguettes de Robinson
There was once a time when Parisians traded the grand boulevards and zinc-topped cafés of the capital for something rather more...
The Intimate Male Portraits from Herbert Mitchell’s Collection
In 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art received an extraordinary bequest from Columbia University librarian Herbert Mitchell, a lifelong...
How Did The Beatles Change The Music Industry?
When The Beatles burst onto the global stage in the early 1960s, they didn’t simply ride the wave of pop culture—they redirected its...
That Time When David Bowie and Iggy Pop Were Caught In a Marijuana Drug Bust
If you’ve ever fallen down an internet rabbit hole of famous mugshots, you’ll know the one, David Bowie in a crisp shirt, sharp...
bottom of page