Madewell’s authenticity problem, written by the great-grandson of the company’s founder.

How a 22-year-old mother became the first woman to drive cross-country.

In the Southwest’s border region, historical reenactment meets today’s reality.

The roots musician is inspired by the evolving legacy of the black string band.

Ideas on labor and capital have remained fixed while the means of production grow ever more alienating.

On the curious life of Archibald Butt, confidant to President Taft and tragic victim of the sinking Titanic.

As much as the narrative of Butt’s heroism meant to the family, to the White House, to the military, it seems all too cinematic. The reality is that the experience was probably a great annoyance to him, right up until the moment it became a nightmare.

In late 1960s London, famed psychoanalyst R.D. Laing created a radical asylum—one with no doctors, no locks, and no limits.

After all these years, it’s still there, in the back of her mind, lurking. No matter how good things are going, it never quite goes away, this feeling that she should have died that day. And her brush with death is the first thing that strangers tend to notice about her, like a limp or a disfigurement. Once they find out where she went to high school, that’s all they want to talk about.

In 1942, a volley of torpedoes sent the U.S.S. Wasp to the bottom of the Pacific. Earlier this year, a team of wreck hunters set out to find it.

On the book that Hitler called his “bible” and the man who wrote it.

A new wife, a dead husband, and the arsenic panic that shook the Victorian world.

Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?

On the history of American nationalism.

The battle over police torture and reparations in Chicago’s schools.

When New Yorkers lived knee-deep in trash.

On a Presidential paper trail.

Geneticists have begun using old bones to make sweeping claims about the distant past. But their revisions to the human story are making some scholars of prehistory uneasy.

In the wings of this great drama were the unseen. Hidden in the rainforest where the violence was staged, in the eerie aftermath of the tragedy, were three people whose stories cue political contexts in both the US and Guyana crucial to understanding how and why Jonestown may have happened.

The untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in our politics and personal lives—and what we can do about it.

The making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville.

When Patricia Douglas was raped by an MGM salesman at a 1937 studio party, the 20-year-old dancer filed charges, taking on Hollywood’s most powerful institution.

The true story of the first Thanksgiving.

Why did we turn an isolated teenage girl into the world’s most famous Holocaust victim?

How words kept the author’s grandparents connected during the Second World War.

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