Behind the Throne

Abraham Lincoln called her “Little Sister.”

Her husband was a Confederate general — and Lincoln’s army killed him.

When she came to the White House, Lincoln put his arms around her and wept.

Months later, he signed a piece of paper that changed everything between them.

What happened inside this family was more complicated than Union versus Confederacy.

Watch the full story:
https://youtu.be/VwAgvtHuvoE

9 hours ago | [YT] | 5

Behind the Throne

In 1960, a Washington newspaper offered “free stone” to anyone willing to haul it away.

A Virginia farmer took it—and used it to reinforce two miles of Potomac shoreline.

But the stones had names carved into them.

Among the people whose history disappeared was William Slade: the man who held the keys to Abraham Lincoln’s White House, quietly fought for Black Washington, and guarded secrets historians still debate today.

Then his 12-year-old son made U.S. Senate history… only to be forgotten for nearly a century.

How could a family stand so close to power—and still vanish from America’s memory?

Watch the full story:
https://youtu.be/GV1zLQq8NXI

After watching, tell us: which detail stayed with you the most?

3 days ago | [YT] | 22

Behind the Throne

George Washington's will freed 123 people by name.

Caroline Branham lit his fire every morning for more than thirty years. She was standing four feet from his bed the night he died.

Her name was not on that list.

Twenty-five years later, a stranger came to her cabin with an offer — one that could buy someone's freedom. Just not her own.

Her story, in full: https://youtu.be/9R2BVn8bLGI

1 week ago | [YT] | 54

Behind the Throne

Paul Jennings was born at Montpelier in 1799 — the year George Washington died.

Fifteen years later he was standing in the State Dining Room of the President's House when the order came to get Washington's portrait off the wall. The British were a few miles from the door. By nightfall the building was burning.

For the next hundred years, American schoolbooks taught that Dolley Madison had cut the canvas from its frame with her own hands. Paul Jennings was in that room. Fifty-one years later he wrote down what actually happened — that the frame was screwed to the wall, that it would have taken a ladder, and that two other men, whose names he gives, did the work.

His account, published in 1865, is the first memoir of life inside the White House that anyone ever published. Almost nobody read it. He had been enslaved, and an account by an enslaved man was not treated as a source.

She sold him in 1846 to pay her debts. Three years later, when she was old and going without food, he was carrying a basket to her door — and, in his own words, "occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket."

We did not make this to turn him into a hero. We made it because he was in the room, he wrote it down, and for well over a century nobody picked it up.

If someone in your own family kept a record that nobody ever asked them for — a diary, a bundle of letters, a page written in the back of a Bible — we would be glad to hear about them here.

https://youtu.be/fGJKWmES1ps

1 week ago | [YT] | 58

Behind the Throne

She dressed the First Lady of the United States for twelve years. Then one evening in 1796, she packed her things and disappeared.

George Washington spent the next three years trying to bring her back. He never succeeded — and someone else paid the price in her place.

This is the story history nearly erased: Ona Judge.

Watch here: https://youtu.be/TOQDZs0oNWA

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 65

Behind the Throne

There is no portrait of Sally Hemings. Not one, in any collection, anywhere in the world.

She was the half-sister of Thomas Jefferson's late wife, the mother of his children, and — under the law of Virginia — his property. At sixteen, standing free in Paris, she made the author of the Declaration of Independence a bargain: her children, all of them, even the ones not yet born, would one day walk free.

He kept every term of it. What the record says about her own name, in his will and in the inventory that followed, is the part almost no one tells.

Our new documentary is out now — the story of the bargain she made, and the price she paid.

Watch here: https://youtu.be/So-N6y3Q2GU

If you learned about Sally Hemings later in life — after the textbooks changed — tell us when her story first reached you. We read every comment.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 51

Behind the Throne

They were the two people sitting in the box with the President that night — and history has almost never asked what happened to them afterward.

Our newest story: Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone, the engaged couple beside Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. What that night did to them took eighteen years to finish.
https://youtu.be/fFJuKgRTMw4

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 32

Behind the Throne

In January 1841, in a rented room above a store in Springfield, Illinois,
Abraham Lincoln's closest friends quietly removed everything sharp from
his room.

He was thirty-one. He had stopped attending the legislature. And the
people who loved him were not certain he would live to see the spring.

Twenty years later, that same man held a country together.

Our new episode is the story the monuments leave out.

https://youtu.be/EdY8EnIeOOA

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 32

Behind the Throne

There is a particular kind of woman American history remembers by a nickname instead of a name.

Pat Nixon was called "Plastic Pat" for thirty years — stiff, controlled, unknowable. What the country never knew was that she privately supported causes her husband publicly opposed, and that the stillness the cameras saw was never emptiness. It was a decision, made very early and very privately, about how much of herself the world was entitled to see.

Tonight we tell her story — not the story of Watergate, though it comes for her too, but the story of the woman who stood beside all of it.

Watch: https://youtu.be/Y0sUhti-sXU

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 15

Behind the Throne

He was the most powerful man in Iran. She was the queen he loved. And in
1951, this photograph looked like the beginning of a fairy tale.

It wasn't.

Seven years later, the throne demanded a son she could not give — and he
let her go.

Would you have made the sacrifice Soraya made? Watch her story, then tell
us below. 🕊️

▶️ https://youtu.be/fiLulfGySh0

1 month ago | [YT] | 14