Behind the Throne

Five rulers. Billions stolen. Zero convictions.
The full story is on our sister channel The Iron List 👉 https://youtu.be/hZlu1iLhkI4

Who got away with the most?

10 hours ago | [YT] | 3

Behind the Throne

A fake prince. A fake heiress. Fake wine. A fake fortune.
Four con artists fooled the richest people of their time. The full story is on our sister channel The Iron List 👉 https://youtu.be/LlqbG5w8lbE

Who pulled off the boldest con?

1 day ago | [YT] | 1

Behind the Throne

Before Abraham Lincoln wrote words that would outlive him, a woman in a dark Indiana cabin opened a spelling book beside him.

Nancy Hanks Lincoln could read only a little and signed documents with an X. Yet she taught her children their ABCs—and gave a future president the beginning of language.

Her life left almost no written trace. Her son’s silence left an even greater mystery.

Watch the full story: https://youtu.be/XM59QojVKiQ

3 days ago (edited) | [YT] | 16

Behind the Throne

Three censuses. Two racial labels. One man. A family name changed to survive.

Eston Hemings was born enslaved at Monticello, and historical and genetic evidence would later connect him to Thomas Jefferson. But after freedom, the hardest choice was not simply where to live—it was which history his children could safely carry.

This story follows the violinist, father, and hidden line of a president whose family silence lasted more than a century.

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

4 days ago | [YT] | 19

Behind the Throne

On December 8th, 1941, the President of the United States stood before Congress and asked the nation to go to war. In the most famous photograph ever taken of him, there is a band of black cloth around his sleeve. The country assumed it was for Pearl Harbor. It was not. Franklin Roosevelt was in mourning for the one person he had never, in fifty-nine years, been able to leave. 🕯️ Her story is in this week's film. What do you think a love like that costs a family, in the end?

https://youtu.be/omgfSQty8h4

1 week ago | [YT] | 13

Behind the Throne

April 14th, 1865. Five nights before the nation reeled from the President's murder, Abraham Lincoln himself sat at the foot of a sickbed on Lafayette Square, visiting the one man in his cabinet he trusted most. Within days, that same house had its own night of horror — one most history books leave out entirely. We tell it in full below. 🕯️ What do you think it took, to keep a family standing through a year like the one that followed?
https://youtu.be/Ij6GJfBwg30

1 week ago | [YT] | 25

Behind the Throne

On a spring morning in 1822, a young woman walked down the road below Monticello with fifty dollars in her hand. Her name was Harriet Hemings, and her father was Thomas Jefferson. No one at Monticello ever saw her again, and two hundred years of searching has never found the woman she became. If you had been in her place, could you have left your mother behind?

Her full story is on the channel now: https://youtu.be/Qw7e2x8ulyY

1 week ago | [YT] | 30

Behind the Throne

On April 12, 1945, the President of the United States died while sitting for a portrait in a quiet Georgia cottage.

The world was told that Franklin Roosevelt was surrounded by aides and medical staff. What the official photographs and history books left out was the woman sitting quietly in the room—a woman who had loved him in secret for twenty-seven years.

Before the First Lady's plane could even touch down, she vanished from the grounds entirely. All she left behind was an unfinished painting on an easel.

Our latest documentary explores the hidden life of Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the woman who became the best-kept secret of the Roosevelt presidency. It is a story about the heavy price of loving someone you are never allowed to claim in public.

Watch the newly released episode here: https://youtu.be/Qeu_2EGqKo0

What does loyalty truly mean when it is divided in secret for almost three decades? We look forward to reading your reflections in the comments.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 28

Behind the Throne

In the summer of 1865, a Washington widow was led to the gallows while her son, who was tangled far deeper in the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, was hiding in Rome under a false name, serving as a soldier in the Pope's army. She became the first woman the United States government ever executed. He came home two years later, stood before a proper jury she was never given, and walked free.

Her name was Mary Surratt, and the boarding house where it all began is still standing on H Street. Almost no one who walks past it knows what happened there.

What would you have done in her place?

https://youtu.be/bEtW58brFe8

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 23

Behind the Throne

In the spring of 1865, the most adored young actor in America walked away from a career that worshipped him and into twelve days of rain, swamp water and hiding. He carried a small pocket diary through all of it, and he kept writing almost to the end — pages that sit today in a case at Ford's Theatre, in the same building where everything turned. What he set down there was not the defense of a hero; it was the argument of a man discovering, one day at a time, that the country he expected to thank him had turned its face away. When you reach the last chapter, tell us: is the man in those final pages the one you expected to find?

https://youtu.be/_1mz1Q1FgN0

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 15