For centuries, the name Mary Boleyn has been synonymous with the "Other Boleyn Girl"—a figure of scandal, a footnote in the tragic biography of her sister Anne, and a woman frequently dismissed as a passive pawn in the high-stakes games of the Tudor court. However, a groundbreaking new study by historian Sylvia Barbara Soberton is […]

As the United States marches toward its semiquincentennial—the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776—the narrative of the American Revolution is receiving a profound and necessary complication. While the American perspective has long been framed as a triumphant, linear struggle for liberty, a new PBS documentary series hosted […]

If you have ever checked your smartphone to see if you have earned enough digital "stars" for a free latte, or scanned a plastic key fob at the grocery store to unlock a discount on milk, you are participating in a consumer ritual that traces its lineage back to a nearly forgotten paper empire. Long […]

In the autumn of 1910, the streets of London witnessed a scene of unprecedented state-sponsored violence that would forever alter the course of the British women’s suffrage movement. Among the hundreds of women marching toward Parliament Square was a figure who, by all accounts of the era’s social hierarchy, should have been a pillar of […]

In the collective American imagination, the Declaration of Independence is a static, sacred object—a sheet of yellowed parchment housed safely behind bulletproof glass and titanium frames at the National Archives. It is viewed as the "birth certificate" of a nation, an immutable decree that instantly transformed thirteen colonies into a sovereign power. However, as historian […]

On Halloween night in 1926, Charles Vance Millar, a prominent Toronto lawyer and financier, passed away at the age of 72. While his death from a sudden heart attack was a loss to the legal community, it was the reading of his last will and testament that would ignite one of the most bizarre, controversial, […]

On August 23, 1948, a train pulled into Detroit carrying two men who would change the landscape of American leisure forever. One was the world’s most famous film producer, Walt Disney; the other was his trusted animator and fellow rail enthusiast, Ward Kimball. They were on the tail end of a research trip that had […]

In the quiet corners of a Leicestershire manor house, a volume of immense historical gravity lay overlooked for nearly three centuries. Bound in weathered leather and emblazoned with the royal monogram of Mary I, the book—a 1555 edition of Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia—is far more than a mere chronicle of English kings. It contains a […]

CORNWALL, ENGLAND — Deep beneath the churning, cold waters of the Atlantic, where the light of the sun fails to penetrate and the pressure of the ocean crushes all but the most specialized equipment, a century-old mystery has finally been laid to rest. A team of British technical divers has confirmed the discovery of the […]

Nearly every American schoolchild can recite the basics of Paul Revere’s "midnight ride." On the night of April 18, 1775, the Boston silversmith galloped through the Massachusetts countryside to warn that British "regulars" were approaching. Yet, history has largely obscured a secondary, equally perilous mission Revere undertook that same night: a desperate race to rescue […]