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Lieutenant William Calley leaving court with his attorney George Latimer.

Tracking Down Lieutenant Calley

How I learned the story of the My Lai Massacre.
by Seymour M. Hersh via seymourhersh.substack on August 1, 2024
Covers of paperbacks by white journalists who tried living as African Americans.

The Strange History of White Journalists Trying to “Become” Black

"To believe that the richness of Black identity can be understood through a temporary costume trivializes the lifelong trauma of racism. It turns the complexity of Black life into a stunt."
by Alisha Gaines via Nieman Lab on June 17, 2024
The stairs leading to the segregated section of a cinema in Belzoni, Mississippi, in 1939.

The Writers Who Went Undercover to Show America Its Ugly Side

In the 1940s, a series of books tried to use the conventions of detective fiction to expose the degree of prejudice in postwar America.
by Samuel G. Freedman via The Atlantic on July 10, 2023
Daniel Ellsberg at a press conference in New York City, 1972.

My Fifty Years with Dan Ellsberg

The man who changed America.
by Seymour M. Hersh via seymourhersh.substack on March 8, 2023
Zoe Anderson Norris.

Meet Zoe Anderson Norris, the "Nellie Bly You've Never Heard Of"

Norris, who dubbed herself the "Queen of Bohemia," exposed the injustices of post-Gilded Age New York City—by going undercover.
by Ann Lewinson via Hell Gate on February 28, 2023

Breaking News

Seymour Hersh and the ambiguities of investigative reporting.
by Michael Massing via The Nation on September 27, 2018

The 19th-Century Swill Milk Scandal That Poisoned Infants With Whiskey Runoff

Vendors hawked the swill as “Pure Country Milk.”
by Tyler Moss via Atlas Obscura on November 27, 2017

What’s Hidden Behind The Walls Of America’s Prisons

Prisons today undergo criticism but in the 19th and the 20th century prisons treated their inmates as "slaves of the state.”
by Heather Ann Thompson via The Conversation on June 4, 2017
A photograph of Horace Greeley.

Antebellum Data Journalism: Or, How Big Data Busted Abe Lincoln

An 1848 investigative news story that relied on heavy data analysis snared big fish, including two future presidents.
by Scott Klein via ProPublica on March 17, 2015
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The Myth of the Media's Role in Watergate

Journalists' role in uncovering the scandal may not have been as significant as we think.
by Mark Feldstein via HNN on August 30, 2004
Seymour Hersh, Henry Kissinger, and Hersh's newspaper article about the CIA scandal.

The CIA-in-Chile Scandal at 50

Documents show Henry Kissinger misled President Gerald Ford about clandestine U.S. efforts to undermine the elected government of Salvador Allende.
by Peter Kornbluh via National Security Archive on September 9, 2024
Ida B. Wells
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Ida B. Wells and the Long Crusade to Outlaw Lynching

Journalist, civil rights activist and suffragist, she dedicated her life to documenting injustices against Black Americans and calling for change.
via Retro Report on February 15, 2024
Nellie Bly.

How Nellie Bly and Other Trailblazing Women Wrote Creative Nonfiction Before It Was a Thing

On the early origins of a very American kind of writing.
by Lee Gutkind via Literary Hub on January 23, 2024
Photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald and of George Joannides.

What Really Happened to JFK?

One thing’s for sure: The CIA doesn’t want you to know.
by Scott Sayare via Intelligencer on November 9, 2023
Police and bystanders at night.

Do Cartels Exist?

A revisionist view of the drug wars.
by Rachel Nolan via Harper's on June 20, 2023
Whistleblower Edward Snowden addresses an audience at a conference in Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.

Ten Years Ago, Edward Snowden Blew the Whistle on the US’s Most Secretive Spy Agency

The government responded with ruthless persecution — just one egregious example in the NSA’s long, sordid history of fiercely guarding its secrecy.
by Chip Gibbons via Jacobin on June 9, 2023
CIA director William Colby, left, and President Gerald Ford, right.

How the Murder of a CIA Officer Was Used to Silence the Agency’s Greatest Critic

A new account sheds light on the Ford administration’s war against Sen. Frank Church and his landmark effort to rein in a lawless intelligence community.
by James Risen, Thomas Risen via The Intercept on May 9, 2023
A photograph of Josephine Herbst overlaid on a newspaper article she wrote titled "The Soviet in Cuba."

How Josephine Herbst, 'Leading Lady' of the Left, Chronicled the Rise of Fascism

During the interwar years, the American journalist reported on political unrest in Cuba, Germany and Spain.
by Sarah Watling via Smithsonian on May 8, 2023
Men standing around an archaeological site.

America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains

The remains of more than 100,000 Native Americans are held by prestigious U.S. institutions, despite a 1990 law meant to return them to tribal nations.
by Logan Jaffe, Mary Hudetz, Ash Ngu, Graham Lee Brewer via ProPublica on January 11, 2023
Photograph shows two white men overseeing African American men hammering boulders as others walk with wheelbarrows.

Locked Up: The Prison Labor That Built Business Empires

Companies across the South profited off the forced labor of people in prison after the Civil War – a racist system known as convict leasing.
by Margie Mason, Robin McDowell via AP News on September 19, 2022
Store window selling shirts and ties mentioning the "Nixon Squeeze"

The Burglaries Were Never the Story

The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another.
by Andrew Yamakawa Elrod via n+1 on July 13, 2022
Richard Nixon giving a speech

Why We’re Still Obsessed With Watergate

The reasons that Nixon’s scandal endures when other presidents’ disgraces have not.
by David Greenberg via Politico Magazine on June 19, 2022
Black and white side by side of Presidents Nixon and Trump

Watergate's Ironic Legacy

Amidst the January 6 hearings, the fiftieth anniversary of Nixon’s scandal reminds us that it has only gotten harder to hold presidents accountable.
by Stuart Streichler via Boston Review on June 16, 2022
1973 Time magazine article entitled "The Watergate Three" with a photo of Woodward, Bernstein, and Sussman.

All the Newsroom’s Men

How one-third of “The Watergate Three” got written out of journalism history.
by Joshua Benton via Nieman Lab on June 7, 2022
Richard Nixon, Pat Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Betty Ford walking away from White House

Regime Change, American Style

A new book about Watergate is the first to stress how much we still do not know many of the basic facts about the burglary at its center.
by Christopher Caldwell via First Things on May 20, 2022
Image of typewriter overlaid onto news articles about fascism

A Century Ago, American Reporters Foresaw the Rise of Authoritarianism in Europe

A new book tells the stories of four interwar writers who laid the groundwork for modern journalism.
by Deborah Cohen, Karin Wulf via Smithsonian on March 14, 2022
Richard Nixon giving a press briefing.
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Presidents v. Press: How the Pentagon Papers Leak Set Up First Amendment Showdowns

Efforts to clamp down on White House leaks to the press follow a pattern that was set during the Nixon era after the publication of the Pentagon Papers.
via Retro Report on February 2, 2022
Illustration of burning cannabis with helicopters overhead

The Cold War Killed Cannabis As We Knew It. Can It Rise Again?

Somewhere in Jamaica survive the original cannabis strains that were not burned by American agents or bred to be more profitable.
by Casey Taylor via Defector on January 11, 2022
Memorial for the massacre at El Mozote, a stone wall with lists of names.

The Battle over Memory at El Mozote

Four decades on, the perpetrators of the El Mozote massacre have not been held to account.
by Nelson Rauda via The Baffler on December 15, 2021
Concrete wall with painted silhouettes of people holding hands
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Lessons From the El Mozote Massacre

A conversation with two journalists who were among the first to uncover evidence of a deadly rampage.
by Clyde Haberman via Retro Report on November 11, 2021
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