Horst von Wächter confronts - and rationalizes - a difficult family legacy.

On the holy city of Canudos, and other attempts at better living “by the dispossessed and marginalized the world over.”

In the days following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, more than 100 cities experienced significant civil disturbance. In New York, everyone expected riots. What happened next.

“Dan Seavey stepped ashore the docks of Grand Haven, Michigan, armed with two of the most dangerous weapons known to man: booze and bad intentions.” The story of the early 20th century’s fiercest Great Lakes pirate.

An oral history of the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot.

The history and meaning of taxidermy in American museums.

In 1913, Joe Knowles became a media sensation after fleeing into the Maine woods wearing nothing but a jockstrap. Two months and one bear-clubbing incident later, the “Nature Man” returned to civilization as a hero. But was it all hoax?

How a disgraced Civil War general became one of the best-selling novelists in American history.

How the Ovitzs, a family of Jewish dwarves from Transylvania, survived Auschwitz.

While being stripped and sold, old ships reflect on their long histories and the generations of men associated with them.

"But we were the ones they came back to, dawn after dawn, year after year. We were the ones who brought them home, hoary and frail, to Snug Harbor. The nurses tucked them into wooden wheelchairs. They spent the landlocked hours making models of us in bottles, the Nellie P. and the Golden Eagle, the Sallie Ann and the Spirit of Victory. Hunched between the wall with the clock and the wall with the crucifix, they assembled us from memory. Their fingers traced each narrow bottleneck. They slipped inside as far as they could reach."

On historian Ian Morris and his predictions for humanity’s future.

On nineteenth century invalidism and how societies have drugged themselves through tough transitions across history.

On Luddites, “bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry,” and their literary spawn.

A scholarly dispute devolves into criminal impersonation.

Learning of a plot against the life of the newly elected Lincoln, Alan Pinkerton decamps to Baltimore and infiltrates the conspiracy.

On William Cockford and his 1800s gambling hall in London, where much of the British aristocracy lost its fortune.

How Human Potential Movement workshops permeated our lives and our businesses.

Richard Gere, AIDS anxiety and the search for the “Original Gerbil.”

The revolutionary and the silver screen.

Efraim Zuroff does not want to retire.

How modernity – and an eruption of violence – changed “the most remote inhabited island on the Atlantic seaboard.”

Two nineteenth century paleontologists, once friends and colleagues, become bitter enemies.

"But years ago, there was room for friendship. They talked for hours at Haddonfield, grinning in helpless academic passion and exclaiming at their own twin hearts. They ate breakfast together on a heap of rock in the marl pits, black bread and coffee as the sun swam into the sky. Cope in shirtsleeves, a boy's face, looking more like Marsh's son than his contemporary."

How the Oglala Lakota healed from a massacre.

On Enrique of Malacca, “the closest thing there is to a hero in the story of Ferdinand Magellan’s horribly botched attempt to circumnavigate the world.”