Investigations are the magazine’s long form: a single question pursued through documents, data, and earlier accounts until the record gives up what it can. They show their sources, preserve the contradictions they find, and stop where the evidence stops. Some vindicate the familiar story. Most do not — which is rather the point of asking.
Abraham Lincoln, a tarnished hero
Abraham Lincoln is remembered as the Great Emancipator and the savior of the Union. The fuller record — on race, on civil liberties, on the Dakota 38 — is more complicated than the monument, and considerably more interesting.
NOVEMBER 16, 2019
Lincoln, Dakota 38, and the Gray
In December 1862, Abraham Lincoln personally reviewed 303 death sentences and approved 38 — the largest mass execution in American history. The evidence resists both condemnation and absolution.
NOVEMBER 22, 2019
Were there really other presidents before George Washington? Kind of.
Men held the title ‘President of the United States’ before George Washington did. Whether they count depends entirely on which job you mean.
JANUARY 22, 2021
Misquoting Seneca: Gibbon and his Anti-Christian Rhetoric
A famous quotation about religion and government gets attributed to the wrong man, in the wrong century, making the wrong point. Checking the source is the whole story.
APRIL 24, 2021
No Death Bed Confession for Darwin
The story that Charles Darwin renounced evolution on his deathbed surfaced years after his death, from a source who was not there. The record of his final days says otherwise.
APRIL 24, 2021
Hitler wasn’t a Christian, nor was he an Atheist.
He has been claimed as a Christian by some and as an atheist by others, usually to score a point. His own words and actions support neither simple label.
APRIL 24, 2021