When much of the JFK files were released on October 26th, over 50 thousand emails from the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent agency to re-examine for release the assassination-related records, were separately released and largely overlooked. These emails show a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the ARRB, the review and release process, and provide new insight into how our history came to be written.

The underwhelming nature of the so-called “final release” of records related to the JFK assassination provides an excellent opportunity to talk about our culture’s curious acceptance of “classified” history.

In the 2008 epilogue to his book Oswald and the CIA, John Newman begins with a relatively simple fact and ends with a conclusion that not only reaches far beyond the evidence - it contradicts it. While it’s reasonable to point out the Central Intelligence Agency’s determination to avoid being dragged into World War III by the suspicion Lee Harvey Oswald was working for the Russians, it’s quite unreasonable to use this as evidence of a massive cover-up premeditated weeks in advance by none other than CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton.

25 years ago, following the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK, President George H.W. Bush signed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 into law. October 26th is the final deadline for the release of almost all records related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Here’s what you should know.

Since the 1992 passing and signing of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, millions of pages of this collection have been released. This Thursday, if all goes according to plan, the rest of the documents will finally be made public - and we want your help going through them.

The Hart Report, also known as the Monster Plot Report, sought to denounce the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterintelligence Staff in general and its chief, James Angleton, in particular, and is frequently cited as evidence of Angleton’s paranoia and incompetence. While Angleton and others strongly disagreed with John Hart’s findings, they agreed him on one important point - the report was libel.

Playboy magazine was founded just a few years after Central Intelligence Agency, and together, those two institutions left their mark on the 20th century, for better and for much, much worse. To mark Hugh Hefner’s passing, we dug up those times those two overlapped in the Agency’s declassified archives.

We’ve begun putting the day-to-day diary entries of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Executive Committee in chronological order, starting with 1963: the year John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

While popular media has often portrayed Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney behind the infamous Clay Shaw trial, as having been targeted by the federal government for retribution, a look at his FBI file reveals the exact opposite - according to the documents, Garrison’s investigation was considered so toxic and aggressive that Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered no agents have any contact with him. When third parties began providing the FBI with evidence that Garrison had engaged in fraud against the government, the Bureau cautioned against investigating him, precisely because of how Garrison would inevitably frame it.

From beer brands to cafeteria names, here’s five of the most questionable redactions found in the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified database.