Eight of serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s victims remained a mystery, 35 years after his conviction. One man made it his mission to identify them.

How the singer became the target of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ early, racially-motivated war on drugs. </br></br>

Excerpted from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

A 58-year-old diabetic and his team of amateur rugby players attempt to qualify for the 1984 Summer Olympics in rowing.

The eccentric inhabitants of the world’s largest rock—Giant Rock, a humongous boulder deep in the Mojave Desert.

December 1944, Auschwitz.

On the fear-mongering history of sex education.

A professor of sociology at Columbia reckons with her father’s relationship with Adolf Eichmann.

Fifty years later, the men who stole priceless gems from the Museum of Natural History recall the crime.

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

How a Soviet swimming champion saved passengers from a sinking trolleybus.

The history of a color.

“They thought they were going to change the world,” he says of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project volunteers. “They didn’t expect that white folks would be so vicious.”

On the highly enjoyable, nearly fatal first experiments with laughing gas in late 18th-century London.

On a childhood fascination with the mid-18th century battle.

On the history of masturbation.

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

A life lived at 7’7”.

The salacious correspondence between the President and his mistress.

The life and times of James McClintock, the man behind the famed H.L. Hunley who also may or may not have faked his own death.

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.

One woman’s ghastly dollhouse dioramas turned crime scene investigation into a science.

Possible clues about Lincoln’s murder in the unlikeliest place.

The railroad foreman’s brain was pierced by a tamping iron. He lived to tell the tale.

The legacy of the Scopes trial on one Tennesse town.

On Erzsébet Báthory, the first—and still most prolific—female serial killer.