This Week in History

Rebecca West on a 1947 lynching trial in Greenville, South Carolina.

Part 1 of E. J. Kahn’s 1948 Profile of F.D.R.’s widow discusses her impeccable diplomacy as the first woman to represent the U.S. as a delegate to the United Nations.

“It was probably the most superb and certainly the most moving one that anybody now living has seen,” Mollie Panter-Downes reported from London, in 1953.

Was Lee Harvey Oswald innocent? From 1967, Calvin Trillin on the group of “assassination buffs” investigating the mysteries and conspiracy theories surrounding J.F.K.’s death.

Part 2 of George W. S. Trow’s 1978 Profile of the founder of Atlantic Records, “the most arresting figure in the American music business.”