Place
United States
8 files documenting events in United States.
Trail of Tears
Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the United States government forced the Cherokee Nation from its homeland in the Southeastern United States to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in 1838–1839. U.S. Army and state militia forces rounded some 16,000 Cherokee people into stockades before marching them roughly 1,000 miles; an estimated several thousand died of disease, starvation and exposure along the way.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study
From 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service studied roughly 600 Black men in Macon County, Alabama — 399 with latent syphilis and 201 without — without informing the infected men of their diagnosis, and without offering them effective treatment even after penicillin became the standard cure in the late 1940s, in order to observe the untreated progression of the disease until death.
Japanese-American Incarceration
Following President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 of 19 February 1942, the U.S. government forcibly removed approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — roughly two-thirds of them U.S. citizens — from the West Coast and detained them in ten inland camps administered by the War Relocation Authority. A 1983 federal commission concluded the incarceration was not justified by military necessity.
Tobacco Industry Litigation
From the 1950s onward, major U.S. cigarette manufacturers internally understood and documented the addictive and carcinogenic properties of their products while publicly funding decades of coordinated efforts to cast doubt on that same science. Litigation discovery beginning in the 1990s exposed this internal record, leading to a 2006 federal court finding of civil racketeering and a 1998 settlement between the industry and 46 state governments worth over $200 billion.
MKUltra
Between 1953 and 1973, the CIA ran MKUltra, a program of roughly 150 subprojects researching behavioral modification and interrogation techniques — including LSD and other drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and electroshock — conducted at universities, hospitals and prisons, in many cases on subjects who were not informed they were part of an experiment. CIA Director Richard Helms ordered most MKUltra records destroyed in 1973, so the program's full scope and human toll are not fully known.
Purdue Pharma and the Opioid Crisis
Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin in 1996 and marketed it aggressively as carrying a low risk of addiction, a claim later shown to have relied on misrepresented evidence. The resulting prescription-opioid boom is documented as a major contributing factor in a national overdose crisis that has evolved through several distinct phases; Purdue and three executives pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges in 2007, and the company entered bankruptcy in 2019 amid thousands of lawsuits.
Jeffrey Epstein Case
Financier Jeffrey Epstein was investigated beginning in 2005 for the sexual abuse of dozens of minors in Palm Beach, Florida, and pleaded guilty in 2008 to state prostitution-related charges under a controversial federal non-prosecution agreement later ruled by a federal judge to have violated victims' rights. Re-arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019, Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan jail before trial, following institutional failures documented by the Justice Department's own inspector general.
Ghislaine Maxwell Case
Ghislaine Maxwell, a former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, was arrested in July 2020 and convicted in December 2021 on five federal counts, including sex trafficking of a minor, for her role recruiting and grooming underage girls for abuse by Epstein between the mid-1990s and 2004. She was sentenced in June 2022 to 20 years in federal prison; her conviction was upheld on appeal.