The assassinations that redirected history

An assassination is a private act with a public target: one person deciding to end another whose life had come to stand for a movement, a government, or an idea. The files here gather killings that changed the course of the countries where they happened.

Some are among the most examined events of the twentieth century — a president in a Dallas motorcade in 1963; a civil-rights leader on a Memphis balcony in 1968; a prime minister leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv in 1995. Others were meant to silence a single voice: a journalist shot in her Moscow apartment building, an opposition politician on a bridge in the Kremlin's shadow.

The archive names the people who carried these killings out where the courts have. But it keeps its subject on the person who was killed, and on what a country lost — or feared — in the moment the shot was fired.