Films
Omaha Beach’s First Wave Lost Half Its Men Before They Left the Sand
When the ramps dropped at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, the first assault wave faced intact German defenses, sunken tanks, and casualty rates of 50 percent or more within the opening…
William Adams Survived Execution to Become Tokugawa’s Samurai Adviser
William Adams sailed into Japan in 1600 as a starving survivor facing a Jesuit death sentence — and ended his…
Stream The Monuments Men: What the Real Unit Found in the Salt Mines
The 2014 film captures the spirit of the race to save Europe's art, but the real Monuments Men — and…
How MI6’s Botched Cold War Infiltrations Shaped Operation Fortune
Guy Ritchie's Operation Fortune borrows more from history than it admits — from MI6's catastrophic Albanian infiltrations to the real…
Kingdom of Heaven Got the Surrender of Jerusalem Shockingly Right
In 1187, Balian of Ibelin saved roughly one hundred thousand lives by surrendering Jerusalem through negotiation rather than holy sacrifice…
Caracalla Stabbed Geta in Their Mother’s Arms — Then Killed 20,000 More
Gladiator 2 depicts Caracalla and Geta as theatrical co-rulers, but the real Roman history is more brutal: a fratricide in…
Ken Burns’ Civil War Drew 40M Viewers—Then Ignited a Cultural War
Ken Burns' The Civil War became the most-watched series in PBS history when it aired in September 1990, but the…
Munich 1938: Hitler Got a Whole Country at 1 a.m. Without a Shot Fired
At 1 a.m. on September 30, 1938, four men signed away an entire country in a Munich palace — without…
Best American Civil War Movies: What Hollywood Gets Right and Wrong
Hollywood has staged the Civil War for over a century — sometimes with shattering accuracy, sometimes with pure invention. Here's…
Ken Burns: America Knew About the Holocaust and Chose to Look Away
Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein's six-hour PBS documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust argues that Americans were never…