John Demjanjuk has had a huge year. Twenty years after being sentenced to die, he finally climbed to the pinnacle of the Wiesenthal Center's list of Nazi war criminals this April, shortly after the Germans filed the arrest warrant that allowed the OSI to put him on the jet to Munich.

Nearly 10,000,000 men were killed in the conflict, 65 million participated, and now we are left with two.

In June, 1942, a German submarine dropped four young Nazi agents off on a Florida beach. Their mission was to blow up bridges, factories, and Jewish-owned department stores. Among them was Herbert Haupt, the 22-year-old son of a German-American family in Chicago.

When they met, he was 45 and she was 17. In her 14 years as his mistress, she appeared in countless paintings, including Guernica.

The Civil War started 150 years ago today. A primer on how and why.

When Chicago’s Stevens Hotel opened in 1927, it was the biggest hotel in the world. By the time it was closed, it had bankrupted and caused the suicide of a member of the Stevens’ family (which included a seven-year-old future Justice John Paul Stevens), and changed the city forever.

The strange life of Boston Corbett, the soldier who killed John Wilkes Booth in 1865.

Like hundreds of other local slaves — [they] had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Why utopias are best understood as fiction games, and how they quickly become dystopias when realized.

In the 1880’s, a shabbily dressed man popped up in numerous America cities, calling upon local scientists, showing letters of introduction claiming he was a noted geologist or paleontologist, discussing both fields at a staggeringly accomplished level, and then making off with valuable books or cash loans.

After the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Ring Lardner, America’s first great sportswriter, walked away from the game.

The long, happy, surprising life of 77-year old Donald Gary Triplett, the first person ever diagnosed with autism.

The definitive story of a ubiquitous software. PowerPoint’s origins, its evolution, and its mind-boggling impact on corporate culture.

The challenges facing the historians of the internet.

The abridged history of a Brooklyn culture war.

From the Greeks to George Lucas, 2,200 years of failure.

On the illusion of the inevitable and the revolutions that ended the Eastern Bloc.

A quasi-oral history of the party that was JFK’s 1961 inauguration.

Arnold Weiss escaped Germany as a kid in 1938, leaving his family behind. He returned seven years later, now a U.S. intelligence officer tasked with tracking down fugitive Nazis. The ultimate revenge story.

The author of True Grit on growing up in Arkansas during World War II.

“Most cities spread like inkblots; a few, such as Manhattan, grew in linear increments. Paris expanded in concentric rings, approximately shown by the spiral numeration of its arrondissements.”

An archaeology of debt.

The history of a Japanese archipelago and its inhabitants, through rebellions and famine, a 20th century exodus for prostitution work across Asia, and finally depopulation and isolation.

The story of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, written and published the following week.

An oral history of a family in Mexico City, in transition from poverty to the lower-middle class, as they scramble to organize the burial of a slum-dwelling aunt.