Camp Sumter was open for fourteen months. Around 45,000 Union prisoners passed through it and close to 13,000 never left — a death rate no battlefield of the Civil War came near.
Andersonville: The Prison Camp That Killed More Men Than Most Battles Read More »
More than 900 people died at Jonestown on November 18, 1978. The Peoples Temple basketball team was in Georgetown that day, playing a game and running errands, and its members have spent the decades since answering for having lived.
The Jonestown Basketball Team: The Survivors Who Were A Hundred Miles Away Read More »
At a fireside meeting in Geneva in 1985, Ronald Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev whether their two countries would stand together against an invasion from space. What he meant by it, and what Gorbachev actually said, are two different questions.
Did Reagan and Gorbachev make a plan for an alien invasion? Read More »
Dowding, the radar chain, the dispersal huts at Fowlmere, the first night of the London Blitz and the Polish pilots of 303 Squadron: the summer and autumn of 1940 in photographs, in chronological order.
Battle Of Britain Photos Taken In 1940. For Some Of These Pilots, They Were The Last. Read More »
From the tercentenary of 1913 to a merchant’s house in Yekaterinburg: the last years of Russia’s imperial family, mostly in photographs they took of each other.
In 1969 a three-day Woodstock ticket cost eighteen dollars. Thirty years later, promoters sold the same name on a concrete airbase in a heatwave, and the crowd burned the place down.
Woodstock ’99: How Three Days Of Peace And Music Ended In Fire Read More »
Persia sat out World War I on paper. Russian, British and Ottoman armies crossed it anyway, and the famine that followed killed on a scale historians still cannot agree how to measure.
Persia Declared Itself Neutral In 1914. It May Have Lost More People Than Anyone Read More »
Frank Dux said he won a secret full-contact tournament called the Kumite. A martial arts magazine printed it, Hollywood filmed it, and then reporters went looking for the evidence.
Bloodsport Was Sold As A True Story. Nobody Has Found The Tournament. Read More »
Sparta left almost no written record of its own, so nearly everything we think we know comes from outsiders — rivals, admirers, and a film. The archaeology tells a stranger story.
What ‘300’ Got Wrong: The Real Sparta Behind The Myth Read More »
In August 1823, some ten thousand enslaved people on the coast of what is now Guyana put down their tools and demanded the freedom they believed had already been granted. The rising was crushed within days — and became an argument British abolitionists used for the next decade.
The Demerara Rebellion Failed. It Helped End Slavery Anyway. Read More »
