Historical Snapshots

About Historical Snapshots

Honor people. Understand the past. historicalsnapshots.substack.com (https://historicalsnapshots.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Short stories about people.

Category

history · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

14 Nov 2022

Latest episode

7 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

58 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Jul 2026

   The Day the Mona Lisa Disappeared

   A painter named Louis Béroud walked into the Salon Carré of the Louvre to sketch the Mona Lisa on Tuesday morning, August 22, 1911. But when he arrived at her usual place, Louis found four iron pegs and a blank wall where the painting should have been. Louis asked a guard. The man assumed the painting had gone to the museum’s photography studio. Hours passed before anyone understood that the most famous museum in the world had lost a Leonardo da Vinci painting. And that it had been gone since the day before. Stealing the Mona Lisa had been perceived as impossible. France’s national museums Director had reportedly dismissed the very idea: “You might as well pretend that one could steal the towers of the cathedral of Notre Dame,” he had said. But the painting was gone. The thief, though no one would know it for more than two years, was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter and glazier from a village in the north, near the Swiss border. He was known for being quick to anger at any insult to himself or to Italy, which he absorbed plenty of both. His own brothers considered him a madman. His French coworkers, as he later testified, “almost always called me ‘mangia maccheroni’” — macaroni eater — and stole his belongings and salted his wine. Vincenzo knew the Louvre from the inside. In 1910, after a threatening letter reached the museum, officials hired a glazier firm to fit protective glass over a dozen of its prized paintings. Vincenzo was one of the workmen sent to do it, including on the case that held the Mona Lisa itself. He knew the painting to be small and light enough for one man to carry. And so, on Monday, August 21, when the Louvre was closed to the public, Vincenzo entered in the white smock of a workman, lifted the Mona Lisa from the wall, stripped away its frame and glass case in a service stairwell, wrapped the panel, and walked out. The theft made headlines across Europe and beyond, becoming somewhat of a national emergency in France. Borders were watched, and ships and trains were searched. The police questioned the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who spent several days in jail, and brought in a young Pablo Picasso; both were released, having had nothing to do with the crime. When the Louvre reopened at the end of August, Parisians lined up to see the empty wall. The newspaper Le Figaro called the blank space “an enormous, horrific, gaping void.” Visitors left flowers. Among those who came to look at where the painting had been was a young writer from Prague named Franz Kafka. The painting, all the while, was hidden in a trunk in Vincenzo’s Paris lodging, not far from the museum. It stayed there for more than two years. Then, in late November 1913, a Florence antiques dealer named Alfredo Geri opened a letter postmarked Paris and signed “Leonardo.” It read, in part: “The stolen work of Leonardo da Vinci is in my possession. It seems to belong to Italy since its painter was an Italian. My dream is to give back this masterpiece to the land from which it came.” Geri brought the letter to Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi Museum. On Poggi’s advice, Geri wrote back, expressing interest and asking to see the painting in Florence. In December, Vincenzo brought it there by train and, in his hotel room, produced it from a false-bottomed trunk. Poggi examined the panel and confirmed it. Vincenzo was arrested at the hotel, still expecting to be rewarded. At trial in Florence, Vincenzo held to his stance that he had acted for Italy, believing the painting had been plundered by Napoleon. He was mistaken. Leonardo had brought the portrait to France himself, near the end of his life, and it had entered the French royal collection lawfully after being sold to the King by da Vinci’s will executor, centuries before Napoleon was born. But the story moved his countrymen. The court gave him a sentence of just over a year, reduced to seven months, and much of the Italian press treated him as a misguided patriot rather than a criminal. The painting toured Italy under guard, drawing enormous crowds in Florence, Rome, and Milan, before returning to the Louvre in January 1914. In the first two days after it was rehung, more than 100,000 people came to see it. Before the theft, the Mona Lisa was a treasure known mainly to those in the art world. Baedeker’s guidebook, the standard tourist’s companion of the day to Paris, gave it two sentences — less than the museum’s other gems. During the twenty-eight months the Mona Lisa was missing, the headlines, the manhunt, and the wall people lined up to see made the painting something else. Its life as the most famous painting in the world arguably began while it could not be seen at all. Sources: * Hales, Dianne. Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2014. * Rosenberg, Jennifer. “The Theft of the Mona Lisa.” ThoughtCo, www.thoughtco.com/mona-lisa-stolen-1779626 (http://www.thoughtco.com/mona-lisa-stolen-1779626). * “The Curious Story of the Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa.” Guinness World Records, May 2023, www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2023/5/the-curious-story-of-the-man-who-stole-the-mona-lisa-749918 (http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2023/5/the-curious-story-of-the-man-who-stole-the-mona-lisa-749918). * “The Mona Lisa Mystery: Theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.” Secrets of the Dead, PBS/WNET, www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/mona-lisa-mystery-theft-mona-lisa-louvre/1769/ (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/mona-lisa-mystery-theft-mona-lisa-louvre/1769/). Accessed 7 July 2026. * “The Theft That Made the ‘Mona Lisa’ a Masterpiece.” NPR, All Things Considered, 30 July 2011, www.npr.org/2011/07/30/138800110/the-theft-that-made-the-mona-lisa-a-masterpiece (http://www.npr.org/2011/07/30/138800110/the-theft-that-made-the-mona-lisa-a-masterpiece). * Wexler, Ellen. "Andrew Lloyd Webber Says He's Writing a New Musical About the Time the 'Mona Lisa' Vanished Without a Trace in 1911." Smithsonian Magazine, 17 Apr. 2026, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/andrew-lloyd-webber-says-hes-writing-a-new-musical-about-the-time-the-mona-lisa-vanished-without-a-trace-in-1911-180988559/ (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/andrew-lloyd-webber-says-hes-writing-a-new-musical-about-the-time-the-mona-lisa-vanished-without-a-trace-in-1911-180988559/). * Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vincenzo_peruggia.jpg (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vincenzo_peruggia.jpg) & https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa.jpg (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa.jpg) * Zug, James. “Stolen: How the Mona Lisa Became the World’s Most Famous Painting.” Smithsonian Magazine, 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/stolen-how-the-mona-lisa-became-the-worlds-most-famous-painting-16406234/ (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/stolen-how-the-mona-lisa-became-the-worlds-most-famous-painting-16406234/). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit historicalsnapshots.substack.com/subscribe (https://historicalsnapshots.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   22 Jun 2026

   The Road to Father’s Day

   The mines beneath Monongah, West Virginia, blew apart on the morning of December the sixth, 1907. The blast tore through the tunnels and broke airshafts, leaving three hundred and sixty-two men and boys dead by the official count. Many in those hills believed that the count was too low, for the miners took their sons and their brothers down with them to load coal, and not everyone’s name found its way into a clerk’s book. By some accounts, nearly a thousand children lost their fathers. One woman who came down as part of the relief effort called Monongah “a tragic little grey town, where sorrow meets one at every step.” That day remains the worst mining disaster in American history. The town’s grief found its way to a minister’s daughter named Grace Golden Clayton, who had buried her own father some years before and felt the loss freshly now, watching the children who had lost theirs. She said it was partly the explosion that made her think about how loved most fathers are. So she went to her pastor and asked for a service for the fathers who had passed and for all fathers. He agreed. The date was set for the fifth of July, 1908, on the Sunday nearest Grace’s father’s birthday. The service Grace had asked for was in part a memorial, a mourning for the Monongah fathers, held scarcely seven months after the explosion. Unfortunately, it had the ill luck to fall the day after the Fourth of July, when the town had given itself over to fireworks and celebration and had little sorrow left over for the dead. And what grief remained went elsewhere as a young woman of a prominent local family had died over that same holiday, and the shock of her passing and the funeral that followed drew off the town’s attention. That memorial for the fathers went almost unremarked. Grace never pushed the idea further. But it was, as far as the historical record best reaches, the first known Father’s Day service in America. The day, thus, had to be born again. In the spring of 1909, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd sat in a Spokane, Washington church and heard a sermon for Mother’s Day, for the custom was new then and spreading through the churches. Her mind drifted from the sermon to her own life. Her mother had died in childbirth when Sonora was sixteen, the only daughter among six children. Her father, William Jackson Smart, did not take the expected action of breaking up the family and sending the children to relatives, as a widowed man was counseled to do in those days. He kept his children and raised them on the farm, becoming part of father and mother both, his daughter said, and did so without complaint until every child was grown and gone into a home of his or her own. Sonora went up to the pastor and said, “I like everything you have said about motherhood,” she told him, “but somehow, ‘father’ seems something apart. Do you not think it would be fair and fine to give father a place in the sun?” That question led her to write a petition, with two men from the YMCA signing it beside her, which she brought to ministers around Spokane. She wanted the fifth of June, which was her father’s birthday, but the preachers needed time to prepare their sermons, so they set it for the third Sunday of the month. On the sixth of June, 1910, the Spokane paper announced the day on its front page, and on Sunday the nineteenth, the preachers of that city stood up and preached fatherhood across the town. The people wore roses, red for the fathers still living and white for the fathers who had passed. Sonora Dodd rode out through the streets in a carriage with her baby beside her, carrying flowers and small gifts. The story went out over the wires. Others, too, began to celebrate. Presidents even offered warm words. Woodrow Wilson took part in the celebration in Spokane in 1916. Calvin Coolidge commended the day in 1924. But warm words were not law, and bills to make the holiday official kept dying in Congress. In 1957, Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote, “Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable.” Still no bill passed. Congress finally approved the day in 1966, but only for that one year, leaving Lyndon Johnson to proclaim it. In 1972, Richard Nixon signed it into law, sixty-two years after the celebration in Spokane. Sonora Smart Dodd lived to see it all. She died in 1978 at ninety-six years old. Sources: * "Father's Day Is Conceived by Spokane's Sonora Smart Dodd and Celebrated for the First Time in Spokane on June 19, 1910." HistoryLink.org, 17 June 2010, www.historylink.org/File/9458 (http://www.historylink.org/File/9458). * "Father's Day—Pic of the Week." In Custodia Legis, Library of Congress, June 2015, blogs.loc.gov/law/2015/06/fathers-day-pic-of-the-week/ (http://blogs.loc.gov/law/2015/06/fathers-day-pic-of-the-week/). * "It Started Here: Sonora Dodd, the Spokane Mother of Father's Day." The Spokesman-Review, 18 June 2017, www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/jun/18/it-started-here-sonora-dodd-the-spokane-mother-of-/ (http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/jun/18/it-started-here-sonora-dodd-the-spokane-mother-of-/). * Johnson, Lyndon B. “Proclamation 3730—Father’s Day, 1966.” 1966. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-3730-fathers-day-1966 (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-3730-fathers-day-1966). * Kellogg, Paul U. “Monongah.” Charities and the Commons, vol. 19, 1907–08, pp. 1313–28. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/survey-1897_october-1907-april-1908_19 (http://archive.org/details/survey-1897_october-1907-april-1908_19). * "Monongah Mine Disaster." West Virginia Archives and History, West Virginia Division of Culture and History, archive.wvculture.org/history/disasters/monongah03.html (http://archive.wvculture.org/history/disasters/monongah03.html). * "Monongah Mining Disaster of 1907." Encyclopædia Britannica, www.britannica.com/event/Monongah-mining-disaster-of-1907 (http://www.britannica.com/event/Monongah-mining-disaster-of-1907). * Nixon, Richard. "Proclamation 4127—Father's Day." 1972. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4127-fathers-day (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4127-fathers-day). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit historicalsnapshots.substack.com/subscribe (https://historicalsnapshots.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   18 Jun 2026

   The Love of Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Hathaway Lee

   Alice Hathaway Lee exuded grace and was full of energy. Enchanting, some said. She stood 5'7" and was slender, with blue-gray eyes and long, golden hair. Family members called her "sunshine." In so many ways, she was what Theodore Roosevelt was not. History remembers Theodore as tough, an adventurer, unafraid. But in his earlier years, people described him with other adjectives. One college classmate said Theodore was "thin-chested, spectacled, nervous, and frail." He spoke in a high-pitched voice and, at times, erratically. His laugh, in his mother's words, was like a "sharp, ungreased squeak." And when he danced, "he danced as you'd expect him to dance if you knew him — he hopped." Theodore met Alice on a weekend visit to the home of a Harvard classmate. It was October of 1878. Theodore was nineteen, and Alice was seventeen. He was smitten, or maybe you could even say he fell in love at first sight. In either case, this is where the love story begins. The pair spent the weekend hiking and dancing among friends, and they found time to spend alone. Teddy learned that he could talk to her about politics and poetry, and anything else on his mind. He wrote of their first meeting: "As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me." Theodore set his mind on being with her. In early 1879, he proposed. Alice rejected him. Though devastated, Theodore didn't stop pursuing, continuing to feel deeply in love with Alice. And Alice, who had grown close to Theodore's sisters, soon started to warm to the young man. He proposed again the following year, eight months after his first proposal. This time, Alice accepted, and they were engaged on Valentine's Day. Theodore wrote: "I do not think ever a man loved a woman more than I love her; for a year and a quarter now I have never gone to sleep or waked up without thinking of her." Alice felt the same now, writing him, "I just long to be with you all the time." On October 27, 1880, Theodore and Alice were married at her family's home in Brookline, Massachusetts. Tragically, however, just a few years later, Alice passed away from kidney failure the day after giving birth to the couple's first child. Theodore's mother had passed away just a few hours before. A devastated Theodore asked his sister to care for the young child, left his job as a New York State Assembly member, and settled in the Dakota territories. He became a rancher and sheriff, and he read and wrote history. But more so, Theodore coped with the deaths. After two years, he returned home to raise his daughter and return to political life. The pain of losing Alice would stay with him. He didn't speak of her much but wrote the following tribute: "She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; As a flower she grew, and as a fair beautiful young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for the bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy. As a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her. And when my heart's dearest died, the light went from my life forever." Sources: * “Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Hathaway_Lee_Roosevelt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Hathaway_Lee_Roosevelt) * Felsenthal, Carol. Alice Roosevelt Longworth. New York, Putnam, 1988. * Miller, Nathan, (1992) Theodore Roosevelt: A Life, pg 158, ISBN 978-0-688-13220-0, ISBN 0-688-13220-0, New York, Quill/William Morrow * Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, three-quarter length portrait, standing, facing slightly left. [Photographed Between ? and 1884, Printed Later] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, . * Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Light_has_gone_out.jpg (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Light_has_gone_out.jpg) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit historicalsnapshots.substack.com/subscribe (https://historicalsnapshots.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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• Sally Bedell Smith
• Christopher Harding
• Philippa Lacey Brewell

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3,018

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

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3 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 30 / 100

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19

Social presence

0

YouTube

68

Engagement

32

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