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Me and My Monkey
Frank Buckland wanted to save—and eat—as many animals as possible.Buckland with his pet monkeys.This is the first entry in Edward White’s The Lives of Others, a monthly series about unusual, largely...
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An Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits
How Mary Toft convinced doctors she’d given birth to rabbit parts.Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history.News travels fast in...
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Boon Companion
Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname is one of history’s greatest travelogues.Evliya Çelebi painting (c) Sermin CiddiEdward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten...
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Rise Up
Alexander Bedward’s mythical powers of flight.Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history.It’s impossible to know exactly how many...
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In the Joints of Their Toes
The ruse that gave rise to the spiritualist movement.The Fox Sisters.Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history.On July 13, 1930,...
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Conservatism with Knobs On
How Rotha Lintorn-Orman became the unlikely founder of the British Fascisti. Rotha Lintorn-Orman. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from...
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Songs of Mira Bai
The Rajput princess whose spiritual anthems rejected the patriarchy. Drawings by Kanu Desai. From Mirabai: Ten Pictures from the Life of India’s Greatest Poetess of the Past. Edward White’s The Lives...
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The Great Crime
How a forgotten American diplomat resisted the Armenian Genocide. An Armenian looking at the human remains at Deir el-Zor, 1916. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual,...
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Cooking for the Pope
Bartolomeo Scappi, the Renaissance’s most innovative chef, revolutionized the culinary arts. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus (detail), 1590–1591, oil on panel, 28″ x 23″. Edward White’s The Lives of...
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Otto the Strange
Otto Peltzer—gay, androgynous, intellectual, and modern—represented a new model of male perfection in Weimar Germany. Otto Peltzer training at Georgetown University, while on a visit to the United...
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Unspeakable Affections
Brilliant Chang and the Sinophobia that birthed a moral panic in early twentieth-century London. Brilliant Chang Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures...
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A Girl Full of Smartness
As an entrepreneur, civil-rights activist, and benefactor, Mary Ellen Pleasant made a name and a fortune for herself in Gold Rush–era San Francisco, shattering racial taboos. Mary Ellen Pleasant....
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What Insanity Is This, Dr. Euclides?
After his best seller about the War of Canudos swept through Brazil, Euclides da Cunha went to Amazonia. It nearly killed him. Joricramos, Euclides da Cunha. There’s an argument that 1922 was the...
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Roaring Girl: London’s Sharp-Elbowed, Loudmouthed Mary Frith
How Mary Frith’s reputation changed from bawdy rogue to defender of the patriarchy. Moll CutPurse smoking. When James VI of Scotland took the English crown in 1603, it was heralded as a blessed...
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The Short, Daring Life of Lilya Litvyak
Lilya Litvyak. On June 22, 1941, the Third Reich launched its ill-fated invasion of Russia. It was pestilential in scale; more than three million Axis soldiers swarmed Russia’s borders in a matter of...
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The Hollywood Darling Who Tanked His Career to Combat Anti-Semitism
Ben Hecht One December day in 1939, Frank Nugent, a film critic for the New York Times, took his seat at the premiere of Gone with the Wind and waited for the carnage to unfold. So long and overblown...
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A Mother’s Ninth-Century Manual on How to Be a Man
Albert Edelfelt, Queen Blanche of Norway and Sweden with Prince (later King) Hacon, 1877. Being a red-blooded, blue-blooded male in the Carolingian Empire was a risky business. Those who grew up in...
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Arthur Cravan, the Original Troll
Arthur Cravan, the Dadaist poet-boxer, was neither a good poet nor a good boxer, but he was a legendary provocateur. Hemingway, Mailer, and Scorsese: much great American art has been inspired by...
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The Misunderstood Byzantine Princess and Her Magnum Opus
The history of the Byzantine Empire is threaded with dynastic clashes and family feuds. The Byzantines do not hold the same familiar spot in the Western imagination as their Roman forbears, but the...
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The Bloody Family History of the Guillotine
In 1788, a French blacksmith named Mathurin Louschart was killed in his home by a single blow to the head. The act was committed in the blink of an eye, but the feud motivating it had festered for...
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