Throughout millennia, people have fostered some pretty irrational ideas about how infectious diseases such as plague and cholera were spread. Some of those notions—like the idea that the ancient Cyprian plague could be caught simply by staring into the face of someone ...read more

Let me tell you the “rest of the story,” as the long-gone radio legend Paul Harvey would say. In the Kansas winter of 1971, when I was 15, we’d walk our farm driveway, four-tenths of a mile, with the north wind beating against our backs. By the time Pug Wilson wheeled up our ...read more

When the ’60s TV show “Star Trek” was canceled in 1969, and the Starship Enterprise ceased going boldly into the final frontier, the program was nowhere near the blockbuster money machine of syndication and sequels that it later became. Ratings were low. Only the sci-fi geeks ...read more

The Flatwoods Monster has not hissed at boys in the little village of Flatwoods, West Virginia, since Sept. 12, 1952. People grin about it now—and take Monster souvenir money, from hundreds of Monster tourists every week. But it scared people plenty back then, including the ...read more

The D-Day military invasion that helped to end World War II was one the most ambitious and consequential military campaigns in human history. In its strategy and scope—and its enormous stakes for the future of the free world—historians regard it among the greatest military ...read more

When two home-grown terrorists detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, it was, at the time, the biggest terror attack in U.S. history. The event set off the nation’s most massive F.B.I. ...read more