Crime

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The Silence that Preceded China’s Great Leap into Famine

Mao Zedong encouraged critics of his government—and then betrayed them just when their advice might have prevented a calamity

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The Copper King’s Precipitous Fall

Augustus Heinze dominated the copper fields of Montana, but his family's scheming on Wall Street set off the Panic of 1907

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The Blazing Career and Mysterious Death of “The Swedish Meteor”

Can modern science determine who shot this 18th century Swedish king?

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The Ugliest, Most Contentious Presidential Election Ever

Throughout the 1876 campaign, Tilden’s opposition had called him everything from a briber to a thief to a drunken syphilitic

David Curtis Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, 1922

“Murder Wasn’t Very Pretty”: The Rise and Fall of D.C. Stephenson

The Grand Dragon of the Klan and prominent Indiana politician had a vicious streak that had horrifying consequences

The Smoothest Con Man That Ever Lived

"Count" Victor Lustig once sold the Eiffel Tower to an unsuspecting scrap-metal dealer. Then he started thinking really big

Countess Markievicz in uniform with a gun, circa 1915

Daughters of Wealth, Sisters in Revolt

Gore-Booth sisters, Constance and Eva, forsook their places amid Ireland's Protestant gentry to fight for the rights of the disenfranchised and the poor

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The High Priestess of Fraudulent Finance

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Surgery, Security and Sales: The Future of Closed-Circuit Television

Just as people were experimenting with the uses of broadcast TV in the 1930s, so too were they envisioning ways to utilize closed-circuit TV in the 1950s

Publicity photo for The Son of the Sheik

The “Latin Lover” and His Enemies

Rudolph Valentino fought a long battle against innuendo about his masculinity right up until he died. But now he seems to have won

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The Ax Murderer Who Got Away

In 1912, a family of six was murdered by ax in the little town of Villisca, Iowa. Might these killings be linked to nine other similar crimes?

In Janos, Mexico, Mormon guide John Hatch chats with a youngster at a 17thcentury Catholic church.

The Romneys’ Mexican History

Mitt Romney’s father was born in a small Mormon enclave where family members still live, surrounded by rugged beauty and violent drug cartels

Rufus Choate

The Case of the Sleepwalking Killer

The evidence against Albert Tirrell was lurid and damning—until Rufus Choate, a protegé of the great Daniel Webster, agreed to come to the defense

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Edgar Allan Poe: Hollywood’s Favorite Mad Genius

Tracing the work of the famed writer through movies

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Theodore Roosevelt’s Life-Saving Speech

When a would-be assassin shot, the 50-page manuscript and metal eyeglasses case tucked against Roosevelt's chest absorbed the blow

Frank Costello testifying before the Kefauver Committee in March 1951

The Senator and the Gangsters

Polly Adler and a friend

The House that Polly Adler Built

She entered the brothel business without apology and set out to become the best madam in America

The Potala Palace, Lhasa: home to nine successive Dalai Lamas, a number of them suspiciously short-lived.

Murder in Tibet’s High Places

The Dalai Lama is one of the world's most revered religious leaders, but that didn't prevent four holders of the office from mysteriously dying

A German mint hard at work producing debased coinage designed to be palmed off on the nearest neighboring state, c.1620

“Kipper und Wipper”: Rogue Traders, Rogue Princes, Rogue Bishops and the German Financial Meltdown of 1621-23

It is tempting to think of the German hyperinflation of 1923 as a uniquely awful event, but it pales in comparison to what happened in the 17th century

The Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, site of the deadly race run between condemned grand viziers and their executioners.

The Ottoman Empire’s Life-or-Death Race

Custom in the Ottoman Empire mandated that a condemned grand vizier could save his neck if he won a sprint against his executioner

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