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.

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.

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 true story of M Company: from Fort Dix to Vietnam in 50 days.

When the U.S. Postal Service was a hotbed for innovation.

The afterlife of 486 frames of Kodachrome II 8mm film shot by Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder.

For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from itself.

Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus performs the last shows of its 146 year run.

A personal history of house moving.

In 1936, Karp Lykov whisked his family into the Siberian wilderness to escape Bolshevik persecution. They remained there, alone, until discovered by a helicopter crew in 1978.

A conversation with 97-year-old Ben Ferencz.

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.

In Arctic Siberia, Russian scientists are trying to stave off catastrophic climate change—by resurrecting an Ice Age biome complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths.

On the eve of the Civil War, a nightmare at sea turned into one of the greatest rescues in maritime history. More than a century later, a rookie treasure hunter went looking for the lost ship—and found a different kind of ruin.

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.

After oil was discovered on their Oklahoma reservation, the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world. Then they began to be murdered off mysteriously. In 1924 the nascent FBI sent a team of undercover agents, including a Native American, to the Osage reservation.

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

How Carl Foreman, while tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee, turned a throwaway Western into an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist.

Watching the most famous frames in history with Errol Morris.

Somewhere in the desert, buried under a mountain of sand and rock, is an ancient shipwreck. Maybe.

"And far from the ivory towers of music academia, mostly on his blog, Elgar’s Enigma Theme Unmasked, Bob Padgett has emerged as perhaps the most prolific and dogged of all Enigma seekers. His solution, which has caught the attention of classical music scholars, lies at the bottom of a rabbit hole of anagrams, cryptography, the poet Longfellow, the composer Mendelssohn, the Shroud of Turin, and Jesus, all of which he believes he found hiding in plain sight in the music".

The mass deportation of the Siberian Kalmyk people by Stalin still reverberates.

A Washington tribe expelled 306 of its members. They’re not going quietly.

Pirates could be found in nearly every Atlantic port city. But only particular locations became known as “pirate nests,” a pejorative term used by royalists and customs officials. Many of the most notorious pirates began their careers in these ports. Others established even deeper ties by settling in these cities and becoming respected members of the local elite. Instead of the snarling drunken fiends that parade through children’s books, these pirates spent their booty on pigs and chickens, hoping to live a more placid and financially secure life on land.