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

3 days ago | [YT] | 7

Behind the Throne

Take a twenty-dollar bill out of your wallet.
The man looking back at you won the presidency in the winter of 1828 — and buried his wife the day before Christmas, in the white gown she had bought for his inauguration ball. She was never First Lady for a single day. He went to his grave refusing to forgive the men who put him in office.
Tonight's story: Rachel Jackson — killed, her husband swore, by a newspaper.
https://youtu.be/8nIr3LtC0yE

1 week ago | [YT] | 11

Behind the Throne

She curtsied before a King. She was the eldest daughter of the most powerful family in America. And for twenty years, the world was told she simply preferred to be alone.
Rosemary Kennedy was the sister John F. Kennedy's family chose to keep in the dark — until a single decision, made without her, took away her voice for the rest of her life.
This is the story of the Kennedy they tried to forget, and of the quiet legacy she never knew she left behind.
Watch the full documentary here:
https://youtu.be/ViRVfSRMXYg
If her story stays with you, we'd be honored to hear your reflections in the comments.

1 week ago | [YT] | 17

Behind the Throne

Every morning for three years, a free Black man held an open razor to Abraham Lincoln's throat — and the President never flinched.
His name was William Henry Johnson. He followed Lincoln from Springfield into a White House that refused to accept him, sat beside the President through six feverish hours on the train home from Gettysburg, and paid for that loyalty with his life.
Then history did something crueler than forgetting him. It remembered him wrong — right down to the grave.
Our new full-length documentary is out now: the wages Lincoln counted by hand for a dying man, the one word carved on a headstone that may not even be his, and the quiet act of care that survived when everything else was erased.
▶ Watch here: https://youtu.be/PYjGHqIxAgE
And tell us below — where do you believe William Johnson rests?

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 30

Behind the Throne

She could not read a single word. Yet she raised the boy who would become Abraham Lincoln — and years before anyone else believed it, she told him to his face exactly how his story would end.
Our newest film tells the story of Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln — the illiterate frontier widow who gave a motherless boy a floor to stand on, a book to hold, and a name to live up to. She was not his mother by blood. But she was the first person in his life who saw what he could become.
Watch her story here: https://youtu.be/quC1n1qkmW8

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 29

Behind the Throne

In 1907, a woman died alone in a charity home in Washington. On the wall above her bed — a single photograph of Abraham Lincoln.
She had been born his slave. By the time he died, she was the only person his wife trusted in the world. She held Mary Todd Lincoln through thirty-five nights after the assassination. And then she wrote the book that Lincoln's own son spent years trying to make sure you would never read.
Her name was Elizabeth Keckley. Her grave has never been found.
We think she deserves to be remembered properly.
https://youtu.be/ufKbP3Hxm3k

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 19

Behind the Throne

Most people who love Lincoln's story have never heard the name Thomas Lincoln.
Not Robert, the eldest, who survived them all and spent the rest of his life trying to protect his father's legacy from the public. Not Willie, who died at eleven while the war was still undecided and broke his father in ways the dispatches from the front never could.
Tad. The one who couldn't read. The one who spoke in a way only the people closest to him could follow. The one Abraham Lincoln called his sunshine — and refused, even in the worst years of the war, to ask to be quieter, or stiller, or easier.
This week, we told his story.
It is not a comfortable one. But we think it is one worth sitting with.
Lincoln's Youngest Son: The Tragedy of the White House Troublemaker — available now on the channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYPST...

1 month ago (edited) | [YT] | 24

Behind the Throne

The son who locked her away was Robert Todd Lincoln — Abraham
Lincoln's only surviving child.

Watching this, it's easy to see him as the villain. But Robert's
own life was its own slow tragedy: he barely knew his famous father,
he was the one who declined to join his parents at Ford's Theatre
that final night, he lost his only son at sixteen, and he stood
near three different presidents as they were assassinated.

We just released his side of the story — and it may change how you
see what you just watched.

▶️ THE LAST LINCOLN — the son who locked his mother away:
https://youtu.be/bb9miSnWIYM

After seeing both sides… was Robert a villain, or a victim of the
name he never chose? 👇

1 month ago | [YT] | 11

Behind the Throne

She was watched by more people in a single morning than most human beings will ever be seen by in a lifetime.
And yet, by almost every account, she spent fifteen years invisible to the one person who mattered most.
This is not a story about the dress, or the cameras, or the night in Paris. This is the story of what it actually cost — in her own words, from the recordings she made in secret, alone in a sitting room at Kensington Palace, speaking for the first time without anyone managing what she said.
https://youtu.be/8TE6BPuQc6A

1 month ago | [YT] | 5

Behind the Throne

There is a photograph from the summer of 1981. Nancy Reagan stands at her husband's side, and she is not looking at the camera. She never was.
For fifty-two years, the world watched and called it devotion. Some called it something else. Very few asked where it came from.
We did.
Our new episode follows a story that begins not in any seat of power, but in a borrowed house in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1923 — with a two-year-old girl watching a suitcase disappear through a door, learning a lesson that would take eight decades to put down.
Nancy Reagan. Out now.

https://youtu.be/jSo9LOkVwiY

1 month ago | [YT] | 4