Murder in the Potala

The Dalai Lama is one of the world’s most revered religious leaders… but that hasn’t prevented four holders of the office from dying in mysterious circumstances. This week’s Smithsonian essay takes a close look at the short lives and mysterious ends of the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Dalai Lamas, all of whom expired in [...]

Blues versus Greens: how circus factions nearly brought down the Byzantine Empire

Imagine a force of heavily armed troops advancing on the crowds in the MetLife Stadium or Wembley and you’ll have some idea of how things developed in the Hippodrome, a stadium with a capacity of about 150,000 that held tens of thousands of partisans of the Greens and Blues. While Belisarius’ Goths hacked away with [...]

Colonel Parker: murderer?

The Colonel always was a mystery. But that was very much the way he liked it. It was, of course, a tough trick to pull off, because the Colonel’s name was Tom Parker, and Tom Parker managed Elvis Presley. Since Elvis was the biggest name in the entertainment industry, his manager could hardly help appearing [...]

The mysterious Mr. Zedzed, the wickedest man in the world

Late in November 1927, an elderly Greek man sat in his mansion in Paris and tended a fire. Every time it flickered and threatened to die, he reached to one side and tossed another bundle of papers or a leather-bound book into the grate. For two days the old man fed the flames, at one [...]

History heroes: Marc Bloch

At eight on the evening of June 16, 1944—not long before dusk on the tenth day after the Allied invasion of France–the Gestapo dragged 28 French resistance fighters from the cells where they had been incarcerated, tortured and interrogated at Montluc prison, Lyon. Handcuffed in pairs, the men were thrust onto an open truck and [...]

An ice cream war

The war seemed a very long way away to the citizens of Broken Hill that January 1. It was the height of the southern summer, and the Australian silver-mining town baked in the outback desert heat, 720 miles from Sydney and half a world away from the mud and blood of the Western Front. The [...]

Gavrilo Princip’s sandwich

It was the great flash point of the 20th century, an act that set off a chain reaction of calamity: two World Wars, 80 million deaths, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the atomic bomb. Yet it might never have happened–we’re now told– had Gavrilo Princip not got hungry for a sandwich. We’re talking [...]

One man against tyranny: Georg Elser’s lone attempt to blow up Hitler

Maria Strobel could not believe it of her Führer. Adolf Hitler and his party—a group of senior Nazis that included Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich—had spent more than an hour in her Munich bierkeller. Hitler had delivered a trademark speech, and, while they listened, Himmler and the others had run up a large [...]

“Tamám Shud”

Most murders aren’t that difficult to solve. The husband did it. The wife did it. The boyfriend did it, or the ex-boyfriend did. The crimes fit a pattern, the motives are generally clear. Of course, there are always a handful of cases that don’t fit the template, where the killer is a stranger or the [...]

“They don’t like it up ‘em…” Revisiting the sordid deaths of Edmund Ironside, Edward II and James I of Scotland

To be a king and to be murdered – one might say – is no more than a hazard of the job. To be a king and to be murdered in one’s privy, however, is to suffer a considerable indignity. Yet precisely this fate was visited on at least two British royals, if certain sources [...]