Adapting from his book The Gun, Chivers traces how the design and proliferation of small arms, originating from both the Pentagon and the Russian army, rerouted the 20th century.

Part two of the history of the Educational Testing Service.

The first article in a two-part history of the Educational Testing Service, the institution behind the SAT.

Nineteenth century Muslim-Christian hero Abd el-Kader, the “Algerian George Washington.”

Mikhail Kalashnikov’s brainchild, Avtomat Kalashnikovais aka the AK-47, is the most stockpiled firearm in the world and has altered the last century like no other product. C.J. Chivers, author of The Gun, discusses.

The life and times of female comedy LP sensation Rusty Warren, whose bawdy hits like ‘Knockers Up’ commanded the charts and the lounges of the 1960s Midwest.

A behind-the-scenes account of the tense negotiations, involving Gorbachev, Kohl, Bush, and Thatcher, that led from the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall to a reunified Germany. (Translated from German.)

In 1906, Enrico Caruso was arrested for molesting a young woman inside the Monkey House of Central Park Zoo, paving the way for the first celebrity trial of the 20th century.

The story of Charles Goodyear, who dedicated his life to inventing usable rubber yet has little to show for it, aside from his name on the side of a blimp.

Foreign policy as architecture; how embassies went from lavish social hubs to reinforced strongholds.

A Holocaust detective story: could a lampshade pulled from the ruins of Katrina really be Buchenwald artifact made of human remains?

Alex Haley interviews the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s number two - Malcolm X - in a Harlem restaurant.

Inside Rebecca West’s vast Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, an eerily timeless travelogue of the Balkans written on the eve of WWI.

In “Operation Mincemeat” a vagrant’s corpse, raided from a London morgue, washed up on a beach in Spain, setting in motion an elaborate piece of espionage that fooled Nazi intelligence. Or did it?

The forgotten life of Eva Tanguay, perhaps America’s first rock star.

Vignettes of the residents of South Elliot Place.

In January 1966–the same month In Cold Blood was first published–Truman Capote sat down with George Plimpton to discuss the new art form he liked to call “creative journalism.”

A interview with David Mitchell, author of the recent The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Cloud Atlas, on stretching a fictional universe across multiple novels and centuries of real history.

Through a series of interviews and historical inquiries, Errol Morris dissects Anosognosia, “a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability.”

An unidentified body found near the beach in Australia in 1948. An unclaimed suitcase. A coded note.

In 1916, a down-on-its-luck traveling circus hung its star elephant.

The founding fathers deserve at least some of the blame for the worst presidencies in American history—they created an office that’s vaguely defined and ripe for abuse. Plus: how to fix it.

In 1920, Harvard University officials suspected that some students were gay. So they kicked them all out.

In the chaotic days before the Berlin Wall fell, the East German secret police shredded 45 million pages. Fifteen years later, a team of computer scientists figured out how to put it all back together.

The inner workings of a surprisingly amiable Holocaust denial conference.