Office of Strategic Services (OSS)

A new book demonstrates that the skills taught and honed in the humanities are of vital importance to the defense of democracy.

How scholars achieved some of the most consequential intelligence victories of the twentieth century.

Adelaide Hawkins was on the forefront of an American experiment that would later be called central intelligence.

Recruits learned the arts of infiltration, sabotage, and survival at a hidden base on Santa Catalina Island.

In 1943, a Harvard librarian was quietly recruited by the OSS to save the scattered books of Europe.

College professors were vital in the fight to win WWII, lending their time and research to building bombs to creating effective wartime propaganda.

A new study of the national security apparatus finds the existing Bureau incompatible with republican government.

During World War II, the OSS sent Moe Berg to Europe, where he gathered intel on Germany's efforts to build an atomic bomb.

Before Julia Child became a chef, she worked for the forerunner of the CIA in Washington, developing shark repellent during World War II.

The executive order that forced Japanese-Americans from their homes also put immigrants from Italy under surveillance.

Espionage has always been with us, but its rapid growth over the past century may have undermined trust in government.

The life and work of Frank Wisner, one of the CIA’s founding officers, offers us a portrait of American intelligence’s excesses.

In the 1950's, Rep. Douglas Stringfellow was a promising young congressman with an incredible World War II story. Then the truth came out.

Why Barnum Brown could not stop collecting.

Laws controlling what schools teach about race and gender show an awareness that classrooms are sites of nation-building.

How not to learn about the American past.

How the CIA’s first attempt at regime change nearly failed.

Displaying the material history of the CIA.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the age of surveillance.

Purposely brutalizing psychological experiments may have confirmed Theodore Kaczynski’s still-forming belief in the evil of science while he was in college.