In 1970, he was plucked from Saigon to attend West Point. He got his degree and went home to fight, but instead spent six years in a reeducation camp. Then, somehow, he ended up teaching high school in D.C.

In 1937, Harvard researchers began following the lives of 268 students. Year after year, the men were interviewed and given medical and psychological exams. The goal? Find a formula for happiness.

The underground culture of big waves and wild times in 1961 Malibu, and the gang of teenage boys who worshiped at the feet of the beach’s dark prince, surfing legend and grifter Miki Dora.

On how a childhood spent in New York City’s tenements led a 15-year-old boy to be convicted of murder.

The violent history of a city.

Mince pie was once more American than the apple variety. It was also blamed for “bad health, murderous dreams, the downfall of Prohibition, and the decline of the white race,” among other things. Then it disappeared.

A discovery in a Lithuanian forest brings a tale of survival back to life.

For 60 years, the weekly Evening Whirl attacked the drug lords, whoring preachers, and hypocritical bourgeoisie of St. Louis’ black community, sometimes in rhyming Iambic couplets.

The stories of women who “are operating at unprecedented levels on every floor of CIA headquarters and throughout its far-flung global outposts.”

A Marxist archaeologist uncovers traces of fugitive slave settlements deep in the Great Dismal Swamp.

The lonesome death of Arnold Rothstein, notorious gambler, inspiration for the character Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, alleged fixer of the 1910 World Series, opiate importation pioneer, mobster.

“In some ways, joining the military is an act of faith in one’s country—an act of faith that the country will use your life well.”

Unspoken issues grip a couple's dinner along the Mississippi River.

A trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

Chris Earnshaw began taking photographs of Washington, D.C. more than 40 years ago. By the time he paid a visit to a museum to tout his work, he had in his possession—in plastic bags and filing drawers—3,000 Polaroids of a city long gone.

Nobody noticed Connie Converse when she was trying to get a record deal in New York in the 1950s. Nobody stopped her when she left her life in Michigan in 1974, never to be seen again. Today, her music is heard by tens of thousands.

In the middle of a new drought, looking back at a drowned California town.

David Hosack attends to a mortally wounded Alexander Hamilton.

Revisiting California’s grape vines more than 70 years after the publication of The Grapes of Wrath.

December 1944, Auschwitz.

On a book of photographs shot by Leni Riefenstahl in the 1950s and 1960s depicting an African tribe.

The history of a color.

On Marie-Madeline Marguerite, a 1600s French serial killer.

A utopian German settlement in Chile had already turned darkly cultish by the time it became a secret torture site for enemies of the Pinochet regime.

A narrator shares a philosophical discussion with the late orator.

"Cicero and I mounted a johnboat banked in the mud along this near finger of Mark Twain Lake. Neither of us wanted to do the shoving off. Our feet would have to get wet."