History

Fukushima and Chernobyl are household words. Yet the deliberate and decades-long environmental contamination at Richland and Ozersk is no less disastrous.

In “Dead Mountain,” American film and television producer Donnie Eichar provides a plausible scientific explanation for a mystery that has confounded investigators and inspired speculation for 55 years.

On December 18, 1867, the Buffalo and Erie Railroad’s New York Express derailed over Big Sister Creek in Angola, New York, killing fifty-plus passengers. John D. Rockefeller was not among them.

One hundred years ago this November, a “perfect storm” battered the Great Lakes, sinking twelve boats, grounding thirty-one others, and raising the tugboat Searchlight.

Nazi Germany had Führer Adolf Hitler. The United States had Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn, a naturalized American citizen who came to the U.S. from Munich by way of Mexico.

Meister Frantz Schmidt of Nuremberg killed 394 people during his 45-year career as an executioner. But he was not a monster. To the contrary, he was a sober, reliable family man, one who reluctantly pursued his vocation.

On March 23, 1913, a series of tornadoes struck the American Midwest. But the twisters were a mere prelude to a greater disaster, one caused by torrential rains.

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.