Historical Snapshots

A painter named Louis Béroud walked into the Salon Carré of the Louvre to sketch the Mona Lisa on Tuesday morning, August 22, 1911. But when he arrived at her usual place, Louis found four iron pegs and a blank wall where the painting should have been. Louis asked a guard. The man assumed the painting had gone to the museum’s photography studio. Hours passed before anyone understood that the most...

March 5, 1770, was a bitterly cold evening in Boston, Massachusetts. A heavy snowstorm had left the narrow streets cloaked in a foot of snow. It was not a night for lingering outdoors. But just after nine o’clock, a bell shattered the stillness, clanging the alarm for a fire in the city, which was no small matter. Within moments, townspeople hurried from their homes, spilling into the icy streets....

In the first decades of American thoroughbred racing, black jockeys were among the masters of the sport. They rode the best horses, won the richest races, and helped make racing one of the great spectacles of nineteenth-century America. And among them, none stood higher than Isaac Burns Murphy. Many consider Isaac the greatest American jockey who ever lived. By the official record, he won 530 of h...

The mines beneath Monongah, West Virginia, blew apart on the morning of December the sixth, 1907. The blast tore through the tunnels and broke airshafts, leaving three hundred and sixty-two men and boys dead by the official count. Many in those hills believed that the count was too low, for the miners took their sons and their brothers down with them to load coal, and not everyone’s name found its...

Alice Hathaway Lee exuded grace and was full of energy. Enchanting, some said. She stood 5'7" and was slender, with blue-gray eyes and long, golden hair. Family members called her "sunshine." In so many ways, she was what Theodore Roosevelt was not. History remembers Theodore as tough, an adventurer, unafraid. But in his earlier years, people described him with other adjectives. One college classm...

The statue that would become one of the most famous in the world arrived in New York Harbor on the morning of June 17, 1885. The ship that carried her, the French man-of-war Isère , had come to anchor in the Horseshoe, off Sandy Hook, twenty-seven days out from France, the early part of it through heavy seas. She lay quiet now in a fog so thick the harbor could not make her out. Only after she eme...

There is a fundamental teaching in Judaism called Tikkun Olam. It means repairing the world. For Julius Rosenwald, this idea was a way of life. Julius had become quite wealthy in his adult years, likely one of the richest men in America at the time. But becoming so had been quite the journey. His father had lived an American immigrant story, arriving from Germany with $20 but with smarts and a ded...

Hi everyone, Welcome back to Historical Snapshots Conversations. Our guest today is Alexis Coe , and our discussion is about George Washington. There are many conversations we can have about him, but our focus today is on Washington becoming President. A little about Alexis: she’s a Presidential Historian, American History Columnist at the New York Times, Senior Fellow at New America, and New York...

Hi everyone, Welcome back to Historical Snapshots Conversations. Today I’m joined by Katja Hoyer for a discussion about East Germany, from its rise after World War II in 1949 to its collapse with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and some reflections on what has followed. A little about Katja: she’s a German-British historian, journalist, and author who writes extensively about Germany. You can...

Hi everyone, Our guest today is Kerry Chaput , and our conversation is about the Filles du Roi (“The King’s Daughters”), a program initiated by the French Crown that sent approximately 800 women to the colony of New France, now part of Canada, between 1663 and 1673. The purpose was to help populate the colony by marrying settlers and starting families. These women are sometimes referred to as the...

Hi everyone, Our guest today is Sally Bedell Smith . This is Sally’s second time on the podcast. In our first conversation , we talked about King George VI and Elizabeth, and how their marriage saved the monarchy. Today, we’ll be discussing the life of their daughter, Queen Elizabeth II. Sally’s biography on the Queen, Elizabeth the Queen , won the 2012 Goodreads Choice Award for best book in hist...

Hi everyone, Our guest today is Christopher Harding and our Conversation is about the Meiji Restoration, which transformed Japan in the late 19th century . A little about Christopher: He’s a cultural historian & broadcaster based at the University of Edinburgh. He writes about Japan, India & East-West encounter, and is the author of Japan Story, The Japanese and The Light of Asia. You can subscrib...

Hi everyone, Welcome back to Historical Snapshots Conversations. Our guest today is Philippa Lacey Brewell . Philippa is a history writer, presenter and owner and founder of British History Tours, a company for those who love British History, and British History Events. One of Philippa’s tours is about Anne Boleyn, who was King Henry VIII's second wife and Queen of England from 1533 to 1536. Anne’...

Hi everyone, Our conversation today is with Yardena Schwartz , author of Ghosts of a Holy War . The book tells the story of the 1929 massacre in Mandatory Palestine and its aftershocks which continue to reverberate today. For our conversation, we’ll focus more specifically on the riot in Hebron, in which 67 Jewish residents were killed and many more injured. A little bit about Yardena: she’s an aw...

Hi everyone, Our guest today is Sally Bedell Smith , author of George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved a Monarchy . The book is the definitive biography of the late Queen Elizabeth II’s mother and father, based for the first time on special access to their letters and diaries in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle that was granted by the Queen. It will be the topic of our discussion. Abo...

Hi everyone, Today's Conversation episode will focus on a current affairs issue. We'll discuss the changes around U.S. tariffs with Alex Yancher, the Co-Founder and CEO of Passport , an end-to-end international solutions provider that helps top ecommerce companies such as Ogee, Hexclad and Ridge grow profitably in over 180 countries. You can follow Alex on LinkedIn or X , and get Passport’s latest...

Hi everyone, Our guest today is historian Dr. Claire Hubbard-Hall , author of Secret Servants of the Crown: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence . The book shares the remarkable and important story of the many vital contributions women in British Intelligence have made and whose stories history has largely left untold. It will be the topic of our discussion. Purchase Secret Servants of the...

Hi everyone, Our guest today is Oren Kessler , author of the book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict , which won the 2024 Sami Rohr Prize and the Wall Street Journal named one of the 10 Best Books of 2023. It’ll be the topic of our discussion. Oren is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, previously the Deputy Director for research at the Foundation for...

Hi everyone, Welcome to the debut episode of the Historical Snapshots Conversations podcast. Our first guest is Sasha Vasilyuk , journalist and author of the new novel Your Presence Is Mandatory , a historical fiction story based on real events about a Soviet WWII soldier with a lifelong secret and his family who reckon with his legacy. Sasha's research into a largely unknown aspect of the war and...

Today, the word "salary" conjures images of modern work and paychecks. Yet, how did the word come to be? To trace its history is to walk the corridors of time back to a Rome defined by legions, colosseums, and a vital substance that shaped its economy. Salt. In modern times, salt is an unassuming staple on dining tables. But in Ancient Rome, it was essential to preserve food, meat and fish in part...

Many remember Julie London for her acting. Particularly for playing Nurse Dixie McCall in the TV series Emergency!. The role earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination in 1974. But Julie was also a music star, a jazz singer who released over thirty albums between 1955 and 1969. While many of her contemporaries brought big, sweeping vocal styles to the genre, Julie carved her niche with an understa...

Summary: The life story of Edith Cowan, Australia’s first female parliamentarian, who shattered barriers and championed women’s rights and equality. -- On a bright day in 1921, history was made in West Perth, Australia. Edith Cowan, a mother of six and grandmother in her sixties, stood at the threshold of the Legislative Assembly. Her hands, weathered by decades of work and advocacy, tightened aro...

We've had a theme recently of writing about women who dressed as men simply to do what women at the time weren't allowed to. Today, we add Jeanne Baret to that list. She became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe when she sailed around the world in the 1760s and 70s. It was amidst the picturesque hills of Burgundy, France that life began for Jeanne in 1740. She was born into a humble famil...

"If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I'll do it myself." - Josephine Cochrane The plate was delicate, a soft white with blue floral edges, and so thin it seemed the sun could shine through it if you held it to the light. It had come from her mother and from her mother before that; a line of women passing beauty down like a family secret. But now, the plate was broken, lying in...

There is a fundamental teaching in Judaism called Tikkun Olam. It means repairing the world. For Julius Rosenwald, this idea was a way of life. Julius had become quite wealthy in his adult years, likely one of the richest men in America at the time. But becoming so had been quite the journey. His father had lived an American immigrant story, arriving from Germany with $20 but with smarts and a ded...