History

At the time of da Vinci’s death in 1519 the Mona Lisa and most of his other paintings were unknown to the world at large — and Leonardo considered himself to have been a failure.

Silk industry magnate William Skinner lost everything when an inland tidal wave destroyed the company village that bore his name. In “American Phoenix,” Sarah S. Kilborne recounts the disaster, and how it propelled Skinner to his greatest success.

In the mid-1960s the United Klans of America had more members in North Carolina than all other southern states combined. But the UKA’s fall was precipitous, thanks to a coordinated policing effort that hindered its ability to organize.

More than a hundred thousand people died aboard so-called coffin ships while fleeing Ireland in the wake of the potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century. The Jeanie Johnston never lost a passenger.

Revolutionary War-era newspapers provide “extraordinary intelligence” about the founding of our country, taking the reader beyond the sanitized, oversimplified history taught in high school and college.

Journalist Melanie Kirkpatrick on what it takes to escape from the world’s most repressive state.

Kristen Iversen can tell you what it was like to live near (and work inside) the secret nuclear production facility at Rocky Flats, once described as “the most contaminated site in America.”

Economic crisis and political disorder after the Panic of 1837.

Author/Actor Charlie Schroeder embeds with war reenactors—and lives to write “Man of War: My Adventures in the World of Historical Reenactment.”

Recent research suggests AIDS has been in the human population longer than previously believed, and that in parts of Africa, homegrown initiatives have been more successful at preventing the spread of HIV than the efforts of Western donors.

In “Leningrad,” author Anna Reid recounts the siege and contends that the death toll would have been far lower under a different sort of government, one better prepared and more responsive to the challenges faced by the city’s citizens.

It has been more than four decades since the last use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, but the impact of the U.S. military’s defoliation campaign is still being felt by the Vietnamese people.

In “A Thousand Lives,” author Julia Scheeres makes it clear that Jim Jones never intended for his colony in Guyana to succeed. In fact, he explored many different means of killing his followers, including loading them onto a jet plane and crashing it.

Since 1996 more than 5.5 million people have died in a conflict involving at least a half-a-dozen African countries, yet the carnage has gone largely unnoticed in the outside world.

The interstate highway system is an economic force and a marvel of engineering & safety, but also an engine of blight and sprawl, derided for its numbing sameness.

One-of-a-kind museum and hall of fame preserves the history of an industry born of and dependent on failure.

Noah Webster Jr. wrote a hundred million selling book—“the Harry Potter of its day,” says biographer Joshua Kendall—and it wasn’t the dictionary.

Martin Davidson tells the world a dark family secret—that his German grandfather was a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, an SA Sturmführer, and a captain in Heinrich Himmler’s SS—and finds it a liberating experience.

The story surrounding Washington Territory v. Leschi, an Indian (1857), and why the decision was reviewed in 2004.

John Hinckley Jr.’s attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life set the stage for a politically successful presidency.