Princess Diana lived a short but remarkable life. Once known as “Shy Di,” she became one of the world’s biggest celebrities, noted for both her glamor and her humanitarian work, and she forever changed the British monarchy. Decades after her death in 1997, Princess Diana’s legacy endures. 1971 Lady Diana Spencer, the future Princess of Wales, 1971 in Itchenor, West Sussex, England. (Princess Diana, British royalty) Diana Frances Spencer at about age 10, in 1971. Two years earlier her parents, Frances Ruth Burke Roche and Edward John Spencer, had divorced. Her father was awarded sole custody of Diana and her three siblings. In 1975 he succeeded to the earldom, and she became Lady Diana Spencer. 1980 Lady Diana Spencer with Patrick Robertson while working as his family’s nanny in November 1980. By this time she was romantically linked with Prince Charles, heir to the British throne. 1981 Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer announcing their engagement on February 24, 1981. A reporter asked whether the couple—who had reportedly been on 13 dates—was in love. A rather indignant Diana responded, “Of course.” Charles, however, famously said, “Whatever ‘in love’ is.” 1981 The couple riding through the streets of London after getting married at St. Paul’s Cathedral on July 29, 1981. Some 3,500 people attended the ceremony, and about 750 million others watched on television. Although the wedding was described as fairy-tale, Diana later called it “the worst day of my life.” 1982 The couple leaving St. Mary’s Hospital, London, with their newborn son, Prince William, who was born on June 21, 1982. A second son, Prince Harry, arrived on September 15, 1984.
Cryptic codes. Threatening notes. Romantic rendezvous gone wrong. Not every murder gets solved. For all the amateur sleuths out there, we’ve collected the United States’ five most notorious cold cases: The Zodiac killer Those newspapers published not only the killer’s letters but also the ciphers he sent along with them. The papers encouraged the public to help decode the secret messages. One text, known as the “408 cipher,” contained the message “I like killing people because it is so much fun.” Another, the “340 cipher,” wasn’t decoded until 2020. It began, “I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me.” But the letters and the decoded ciphers haven’t been enough to crack the case. Though several suspects have been investigated, the Zodiac killer’s identity has never been proven. (The most scrutinized suspect, schoolteacher Arthur Leigh Allen, was institutionalized in 1975 for unrelated crimes.) And when we consider the theories that the killer was active before 1968 and well into the ’80s, we have to admit that we don’t even know for sure how many people he killed. JonBenét Ramsey No suspects have ever been arrested for the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, a six-year-old beauty pageant winner found dead in the basement of her family’s Boulder, Colorado, home on December 26, 1996. Early that morning JonBenét’s mother, Patsy, had called 911 and stated that her daughter was missing and that a ransom note found in the house demanded $118,000 for her return. A few hours later, though, the family and the police discovered that JonBenét had never actually left the house. When prompted to conduct a second search of the house, her father, John, found her body in the basement. She’d been bound and gagged and killed with a blow to the head and a garotte fashioned from one of Patsy’s paintbrushes and a length of cord. Investigators later revealed that JonBenét had also been sexually assaulted. Suspects soon emerged, including a random intruder, a family friend who had dressed as Santa Claus for the Ramseys’ Christmas parties, JonBenét’s parents, and her nine-year-old brother, Burke. One reason the case remains in the public imagination is that much of the investigation was bungled. Soon after the police first arrived at the Ramsey home, before it could be thoroughly combed for physical evidence, friends of the Ramseys arrived to show support for the family, and the police allowed them to traverse the house freely. Some of the friends even helped Patsy clean the kitchen. If conclusive physical evidence had existed, it was almost immediately destroyed.
Anna May Wong (born January 3, 1905, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died February 3, 1961, Santa Monica, California) was an American actress who overcame discrimination and racism to become one of the first Asian Americans to have a successful film career in Hollywood. She appeared in more than 60 movies and also acted on television and on the stage. Early life She was born Wong Liu Tsong in the Chinatown area of Los Angeles and was later given the English-language name Anna May. Both her parents were of Chinese heritage and were born in California. They owned a laundromat in Los Angeles, where the family lived in a diverse neighbourhood. Wong experienced racism from an early age, and she and her sister transferred to the Chinese Mission School in Chinatown after being bullied at their local school. In the 1910s studios started making movies in Los Angeles, and Wong’s neighbourhood was frequently used for filming. She often visited the sets and soon decided that she was going to be a movie star. She combined her English and Chinese names to create the stage name Anna May Wong. In 1919, at age 14, she made her film debut, appearing as an uncredited extra in the silent feature The Red Lantern. Wong subsequently had small parts in a series of movies. Acting career In 1921 Wong quit high school in order to focus on her acting career. Her first major role came in The Toll of the Sea (1922), and her performance drew strong reviews. Additional success followed in such films as Tod Browning’s Drifting (1923) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), the latter of which starred Douglas Fairbanks. Wong soon became a popular figure and a style icon, known for an eclectic wardrobe that incorporated traditional Chinese dress and flapper designs. However, despite her growing celebrity, Wong continued to be cast only in supporting roles, many of which played on Asian stereotypes. Her career was also hampered by anti-miscegenation laws that largely prevented her from appearing as a romantic lead. Tired of the constant discrimination in Hollywood, Wong founded her own film production company in 1924. However, it soon shut down because of her dishonest business partner. Wong left for Europe in the late 1920s. There she continued to act in movies and appeared onstage for the first time. Her notable theatre credits included a London production of The Circle of Chalk (1929), which featured Laurence Olivier. When talking movies began to be made, Wong became fluent in French and German in order to expand her acting opportunities.
Though we might think of today’s influencers as people with millions of followers on Instagram or TikTok, both of which are relatively recent inventions, the role of an influencer is not so specific to the 21st century. In fact, centuries before social media even existed, trendsetters inspired styles, looks, and fashions that influenced hundreds to thousands of people to follow suit. Ambrose Burnside During his lifetime, Ambrose Burnside wore many hats: not only was he a Union general during the American Civil War, but he later served as a governor and then as a United States senator for the state of Rhode Island. A man with so many roles is bound to reach people, so it may be no surprise that Burnside became a trendsetter. Although Burnside was forced to maintain a clean-cut appearance at West Point, he still managed to personalize his look with sideburns. The hair on either side of Burnside’s face that connected the hair on his head to his mustache featured prominently on his face from his time as a student to his time as a senator. Although Burnside may not have been the first person to sport his signature style, his noteworthiness as a general and politician, as well as coincidence with the invention of photography, popularized the sideburns. In fact, Burnside’s sideburns became so iconic that their original name—burnsides—was directly attributed to him. In 1848, as women throughout the United States sought greater participation in government with the Seneca Falls Convention, figures and voices that had been previously marginalized made their way into public consciousness. Amelia Bloomer, an attendee of the convention, made her and other women’s voices known one year later with The Lily, a newspaper for women’s rights and temperance issues. By 1853 Bloomer had become an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, especially when it came to clothing conventions and dress reform. Bloomer found that the corsets and dresses women her age were expected to wear were too restrictive and potentially dangerous, so she began sporting in public something looser and more comfortable under her skirt: full-cut pantaloons. Although other women before Bloomer had worn the pantaloons, Bloomer’s outspoken advocacy for the garments in The Lily made her their new namesake, bloomers. In 1888 William Dorsey Swann hosted one of his regular drag balls in Washington, D.C., with dozens of Black men adorned in gowns, Swann included. When the police arrived, most of the men fled, but Swann was one of the few who stayed, allegedly pointing out the police’s lack of gentlemanly behavior. Swann’s resistance spurred several different newspaper reports, some referring to Swann as “the Queen” in his procession to the police station. Swann’s late 19th-century arrest became one of the first known acts of resistance to queer oppression in U.S. history, influencing later activists, such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera of the Stonewall riots nearly a century later. However, Swann’s influence did not derive from this moment alone. By being the first person to refer to himself as a drag queen and hosting lavish balls with singing and dancing, Swann left an influence on drag and queer culture that persists to this day.
Dalip Singh Saund (born September 20, 1899, Chhajjal Wadi, India—died April 22, 1973, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) was the first Asian American, first Indian American, and first Sikh to be elected to the U.S. Congress. Before serving, he helped change a law so that Indians could become U.S. citizens. Early life and education Saund was born in Chhajjal Wadi, in the Punjab province of northern India, which at the time was a British colony. He and his family were followers of Sikhism, a religion founded in 15th-century Punjab and characterized by a rejection of idolatry and caste. Saund’s early education took place in a one-room schoolhouse that his father and uncles had saved money to fund. Saund then attended boarding school in nearby Amritsar and continued his studies at the University of the Punjab. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1919. While in college, Saund supported Mahatma Gandhi and the movement for India’s independence. Life and education at Berkeley In the interest of setting up his own canning business in India, Saund went to the United States in 1920 to study food preservation at the University of California, Berkeley. He also worked in canning factories throughout the state and founded a Sikh community near the Sikh temple in the city of Stockton. Saund ultimately changed his major to mathematics, earning a master’s degree in 1922 and a Ph.D. in 1924. Farming, family, and early politics After graduating, Saund learned from his family that the Indian government had been monitoring “anti-British” statements that he had made while studying, so he decided to stay in California. In 1925 he moved south to Imperial Valley, where several other Indian immigrants had settled, and began farming. Because of the 1923 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, Saund could not become a U.S. citizen and was thus unable to buy land. He instead leased and farmed land under the name of an American friend. Saund grew a variety of crops, including sugar beets and Punjab flax, which were new to the area. In 1928 he married Marian Kosa, the daughter of a friend, who later became a teacher. They had three children: a son, Dalip, Jr., and two daughters, Julie and Ellie. Saund became interested in politics, and he often spoke in his area on Indian and political topics. In 1942 he helped organize the India Association of America, of which he was president, and went to Washington, D.C., to promote a bill that would make it possible for Indians to become U.S. citizens. The bill was passed in 1946, and Saund became a U.S. citizen in 1949. County judge In 1952 Saund ran for the office of county judge. Throughout the campaign he faced discrimination, with many voters telling him that they could not accept a judge from India. Nevertheless, Saund won the election by 13 votes. As a judge, he imposed strict sentences in an attempt to rid the community of gambling, illegal drug use, and other criminal activities.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (born October 19, 1910, Lahore, India [now in Pakistan]—died August 21, 1995, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) was an Indian-born American astrophysicist who, with William A. Fowler, won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for key discoveries that led to the currently accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars. Chandrasekhar was the nephew of Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930. Chandrasekhar was educated at Presidency College, at the University of Madras, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1933 to 1936 he held a position at Trinity. By the early 1930s, scientists had concluded that, after converting all of their hydrogen to helium, stars lose energy and contract under the influence of their own gravity. These stars, known as white dwarf stars, contract to about the size of Earth, and the electrons and nuclei of their constituent atoms are compressed to a state of extremely high density. Chandrasekhar determined what is known as the Chandrasekhar limit—that a star having a mass more than 1.44 times that of the Sun does not form a white dwarf but instead continues to collapse, blows off its gaseous envelope in a supernova explosion, and becomes a neutron star. An even more massive star continues to collapse and becomes a black hole. These calculations contributed to the eventual understanding of supernovas, neutron stars, and black holes. Chandrasekhar came up with the idea for a limit on his voyage to England in 1930. However, his ideas met strong opposition, particularly from English astronomer Arthur Eddington, and took years to be generally accepted. Chandrasekhar joined the staff of the University of Chicago, rising from assistant professor of astrophysics (1938) to Morton D. Hull distinguished service professor of astrophysics (1952), and became a U.S. citizen in 1953. He did important work on energy transfer by radiation in stellar atmospheres and convection on the solar surface. He also attempted to develop the mathematical theory of black holes, describing his work in The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes (1983). Chandrasekhar was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1953, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1962, and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1984. His other books included An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure (1939), Principles of Stellar Dynamics (1942), Radiative Transfer (1950), Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability (1961), Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (1987), and Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader (1995).