Democracy

Investigators, forensic examiners and a Pakistani government all offered different accounts of exactly how Benazir Bhutto died in December 2007, and none of the competing versions has ever satisfied every observer of the case.

Aquino paid off Marcos's inherited debt early to restore Philippine credit, then pushed land reform that spared her own family's estate the redistribution she imposed on everyone else.

The funeral oration that shaped centuries of democratic thought may not be his own words at all; even Thucydides admitted reconstructing it from memory.

Even the meaning of his own name is disputed, and scholars still cannot agree whether the Socrates in his dialogues speaks with his teacher's voice or Plato's own.

The document most Americans picture being signed on the Fourth of July was mostly signed a month later, and the vote that mattered had already happened two days earlier.

1763

1787

1994

Historians cannot agree when it started, cannot agree when it ended, and disagree over whether it was even one movement rather than several running in parallel.

The vote counters walked out before the soldiers did: thirty computer technicians quit a government election tally over what they called deliberate manipulation, three weeks before generals started defecting toward the crowd instead.

2004

Thucydides wrote the fullest surviving account of this war while much of it was still happening, and openly admits reconstructing the speeches in it rather than transcribing them.

The man who wrote that all men are created equal held more than six hundred people as property, and for two centuries historians were reluctant to say plainly what that meant for one enslaved family in particular.