The question we asked this year of the members of the Society of American Historians, and several other scholars, was simple: What is the one mystery in United States history you would like to see resolved? And what do you imagine is a plausible solution?

To encourage their responses, we added that the missing minutes of the Nixon tapes was an obvious example of what we had in mind. And what Aaron Burr was up to was another. But we were sure there were many other mysteries from all eras of our past—ones that involved people, events, and social and economic patterns. Finally, to forestall any objections that considerations of this kind might be seen as trivial, we quoted the words of that wonderful seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Browne: “What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.…”

Full Story >>