History

American politics changed forever in January 1973: the Watergate burglars went on trial, the administration negotiated an end to the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade, Lyndon Johnson died in Texas, and Richard Nixon began his second term. These events linked in unlikely ways to create a time of immense transformation.

"Family history begins with missing persons," Alison Light writes in Common People. We wonder about those we've lost, and those we never knew, about the long skein that led to us, and to here, and to now. So we start exploring. Most of us, however, give up a few generations back.

Hitler was one of the few politicians who understood that persuasion was everything, deployed to anchor an entire regime in the confections of imagery, rhetoric and dramaturgy. The Nazis pursued propaganda not just as a tool, an instrument of government, but also as the totality, the raison d'�tre, the medium through which power itself was exercised.

Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers--mainly young women--suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck into their flesh and of being haunted by specters.