A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois... At the city's apex in 1100, the population exploded to as many as 30 thousand people. It was the largest pre-Columbian city in North America, bigger than London or Paris at the time.
The untold story of Napoleon Hill, who practically invented the self-help scam through his 1937 book Think and Grow Rich.
Did a forgotten black gumshoe inspire the famous works of both Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett?
Reckoning with the legacy of the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster.
In 1936, a school group from south London went on a hike in the Black Forest. Despite the heroic rescue attempts of German villagers, five boys died. Eighty years later, locals are still asking how it happened.
For decades, the United States and Britain’s vision of democracy and freedom defined the postwar world. What will happen in an age of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage?
How sunken treasure and a sibling rivalry led Charles and John Deane to invent modern deep-sea diving.
An annual re-enactment drags America’s history of racist violence into the light.
A long stroll through a Staten Island cemetery leads to the story of the 19th-century free-black oystermen who settled Sandy Ground.
How an obsessive New Age hustler brought the sound of the ocean to millions of home stereos.
In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history.
The story of streetcar 393, which plunged into Fort Point Channel via an open drawbridge in 1916. Forty-six people were killed.
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.
A presidential historian interviews a president focused on history.
Firefighter Kevin Shea, one of the first responders on September 11, 2001, was “the survivor who couldn’t remember what no one else could forget.”
An oral history of Air Force One on September 11th.
A Marxist archaeologist uncovers traces of fugitive slave settlements deep in the Great Dismal Swamp.
The mysteries of the least known Brontë sister.
“Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has.”
The writer investigates her late husband Ted Streshinsky, whose photographs documented the 1960s, and J. Edgar Hoover’s attempts to label him a Soviet spy.
How the French philosopher earned the means to publish freely by winning the lottery—repeatedly.
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.
An ancient document suggests that Jesus had a wife. But an investigation into its origins leads to … Florida.
“It’s more than soup.”
Behind a Muslim community in northern Wyoming — and 20 percent of all Muslims in the state — lies one very enterprising man.
