The American yam is not the food it says it is. How that came to be is a story of robbery, reinvention, and identity.

A Thanksgiving story about the limits of human empathy.

Pregnant and facing decades in prison, the mother of Tupac Shakur fought for her life—and triumphed—in the trial of the Panther 21.

The story of the 1977 Revolt at Cincinnati, and the men who changed the course of the NRA forever.

A hundred years ago, in the midst of an American food crisis, two spies who had once sworn to kill each other came together with a plan to feed America: hippo meat.

For nearly 200 years, San Francisco has been the last stop of petty thieves, con artists and killers. Iva Kroeger was all three.

Scandal, conspiracy, and cover-ups in the theft of the “Irish Crown Jewels” from Dublin Castle.

Learning to love music—and to hate it, too.

When a down-and-out doctor finds his rundown mansion is haunted, he pulls the quintessentially American move: opening the house to the public for a fee. Everything goes wrong from there.

American history begs the question: Can immigrants possibly inherit the mythology of the U.S.?

Archaeological discoveries are shattering scholars’ long-held beliefs about how the earliest humans organized their societies—and hint at possibilities for our own,

How morality and geography crystalize in Arkansas.

After decades of mismanaging its nuclear waste, the US Department of Energy wrestles with its toxic legacy.

Half a century ago, a legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land, creating a patchwork of utopian communes across Northern California. Here, the last of those rogue souls offer a glimpse of their otherworldly residences—and the tail end of a grand social experiment.

Can a cowboy become the greatest polo player of all time?

Meditations on the myth of the voiceless.

Terrorists boarded two planes in Boston and flew them into the World Trade Center. Massachusetts zeroed in on its top airport official, who has never quite recovered.

Did people first come to this continent by land or by sea?

On the history of modern food.

On peaches.

Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11.

Fifty years ago, a police shooting set in motion a decades-long chase across the American West.

A profile of England’s pre-eminent scholar of race, culture, and nationalism.

On the rise and demise of the Segway.