A documented archive
HUMANITY FILES
The evidence remains.
A documented archive of war, empire, exploitation, persecution, institutional abuse, social breakdown, and the ideas used to justify them.
How did educated societies convince themselves that injustice was justice?
- 23
- Files
- 130
- Sources cited
- 58
- Ideas examined
- 37
- People & institutions
Methodology
Idea → Interpretation → Institution → Policy → Human Consequence
Each File investigates what happened, who suffered, who participated, what ideas justified it, what institutions enabled it, what evidence exists, what remains disputed, and what changed afterward. Read the full methodology.
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Collections
War & Mass Killing
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, strategic bombing, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, nuclear testing.
Empire & Colonialism
Congo, India, Algeria, Kenya, Indigenous dispossession, forced labor.
Slavery & Racial Violence
Atlantic slavery, lynching, segregation, racial massacres, exclusion laws.
Children Betrayed
Residential schools, institutional abuse, child migration, grooming, exploitation.
Sexual Exploitation & Commodification
Trafficking, institutional abuse, pornography, sextortion, image-based abuse, monetized intimacy.
Science Without Ethics
Eugenics, forced sterilization, Tuskegee, MKULTRA, Nazi medical crimes, unethical experimentation.
Institutions That Looked Away
Churches, governments, corporations, universities, police, intelligence services, sports institutions.
Society & Family
Marriage, divorce, fertility decline, loneliness, pornography, dating apps, commodified intimacy, individualism.
Corporate Harm
Tobacco, opioids, asbestos, industrial pollution, unsafe working conditions.
State Power
Mass surveillance, covert intervention, political repression, secret prisons, emergency powers.
Ideas Behind the Files
Imperialism, colonialism, scientific racism, eugenics, fascism, nationalism, Social Darwinism, paternalism, technocracy, consumerism, individualism.
Start Here
Featured Files
Hiroshima
At 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-29, Enola Gay, released a uranium-235 atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy over Hiroshima. The weapon exploded roughly 600 metres above the city. Hiroshima was a military headquarters and logistics centre, but it was also a large city filled with civilians, mobilized students, Korean and other colonial subjects, and some prisoners of war. Hiroshima City estimates that approximately 350,000 people were in the city when the bomb exploded and that about 140,000 people had died by the end of December 1945, while emphasizing that the precise number can never be known. The bomb destroyed much of the built-up city through blast, heat and fire. Ionizing radiation added a form of injury not present in conventional bombing. The basic facts of the bombing are well documented. The central historical controversy is different: how necessary was the atomic bombing to end the Pacific War, and how should its role be weighed against the Soviet Union's entry into the war, Japan's internal political crisis, the continuing blockade and bombing campaign, and the planned Allied invasion? Serious historians disagree. Humanity Files therefore separates the established event from the contested interpretation.
Congo Free State
Between 1885 and 1908, the Congo Free State — the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium, not a Belgian state colony — extracted rubber and ivory through a system of forced labor enforced by quotas, hostage-taking, and mutilation. Population loss over the period is estimated in the millions, though the precise toll remains genuinely disputed among historians and demographers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Follow the Chain
How an idea becomes a policy
Some chains are backed by extensive documentary and scholarly evidence. Others describe an active, contemporary debate rather than an established historical causal chain — those are labeled accordingly.
- Scientific Racism
- Eugenics
- Forced Sterilization
- Racial Hygiene
- Aktion T4
- Manifest Destiny
- Territorial Expansion
- Indigenous Removal
- Reservations
- Assimilation
- Sexual Commodification
- Digital Platforms
- Monetized Intimacy
- Privacy / Exploitation / Relationship Questions
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The guiding principle
HUMANITY FILES
The evidence remains.
History deserves evidence. Victims deserve memory.