He couldn’t find a publisher for his sensational expose of one of America’s most powerful industries. Then one young editor decided to take a chance. The rest is food-safety history.
In 1901, government chemist Harvey Wiley set out to prove that Americans were being harmed by chemicals in food. Wiley organized volunteers for human trials to test the effects of chemical food preservatives.
Theirs was a rivalry that would draw in two nations inching closer to war, and take the measure of two men — German Max Schmeling and American Joe Louis, who had been fighting all their lives.
In 1950 Joseph McCarthy declared that Owen Lattimore was a "top Russian spy.” Lattimore was exonerated five years later, but first he had to defend himself in two separate congressional hearings. Here's how they worked.
In 1953, the author Langston Hughes was called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations. We dramatized the actual hearing transcripts of Hughes’s testimony, made public 50 years later.
