Isabel of Portugal, mother of Isabella the Catholic, spent much of her widowhood at Arévalo under the shadow of alleged mental illness. Decades later, her granddaughter Joanna I of Castile was confined at Tordesillas. Their parallel stories expose the uneasy boundary between psychological suffering, dynastic propaganda and the politics of removing royal women from power.
On August 16, 1896, a gold strike on a remote Yukon creek launched the last great gold rush of the nineteenth century, enriching Seattle and the merchants who supplied the stampede far more reliably than the prospectors themselves.
Eighty-one years after Japan's surrender, the order born in 1945 brought the West peace and prosperity — alongside a contradiction the victorious democracies never resolved.
The 1755 Lisbon earthquake set the Marquis of Pombal's empirical response against Jesuit Gabriel Malagrida's gospel of divine wrath, and reshaped how Europe read catastrophe.
Through water, steam, glass and foliage, American realist painter Alyssa Monks turns photographic precision into an exploration of intimacy, grief and everything that resists a clear view.
From the gilded nave of Quito to the carved stone of Potosí, South America's grandest colonial churches concentrate along the Andes — with one dazzling exception on the Atlantic coast. A researched guide that tells documented fact from repeated myth.
Chile's great Pacific port grew rich on ships rounding Cape Horn, then lost its reason to exist. The story everyone tells blames the Panama Canal. The record is messier and more interesting, and the decline is the reason the city still looks the way it does. A guide to the hills, the funiculars and the myth.
For 230 years it was the capital of Spanish Central America and, by contemporary reckoning, second in splendour only to Mexico City. Then earthquakes gave the Crown the excuse it wanted. The capital was moved, the churches were left to fall, and the people who refused to leave saved the most beautiful ruins in the Americas.
Founded in 1521 on a rocky islet, Old San Juan is the oldest European-founded city in United States territory and one of the great fortified ports of the Atlantic world. Its walls held El Morro against every fleet that came. The city behind them fell twice. A guide to what to see, and to what the guidebooks get wrong.
