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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. Pleasant in her later...
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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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