Nov. 11, the date on the cover of this issue, is a day to remember veterans. Almost 900 died in the 1945 wreck of the USS Indianapolis, the worst naval sea disaster in American history, but 317 survived. Here are stories based on new interviews with some of them.

Peering into the churning, oil-slicked sea far below him, Marine Cpl. Edgar Harrell clung to the port rail of the sinking ship and faced his own death. It was 12 minutes after midnight on July 30, 1945, and the Navy cruiser, USS Indianapolis, was dead center in the Philippine Sea.

“The revolution devours its children” (Jacques Mallet du Pan, 1749-1800).

“But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another” (Galatians 5:15).

Amelia Earhart may have survived her plane crash into the Pacific Ocean and instead died as a Japanese prisoner, according to new evidence revealed in advance of a History Channel documentary. The film, set to air Sunday, argues Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crash-landed in the Japanese-held Marshall Islands, where the Japanese military picked them up and held them as spies.

Hobby Lobby will pay a $3 million fine and forfeit thousands of Iraqi artifacts mislabeled and smuggled into the United States. Prosecutors who filed the civil complaint against the Christian retailer on Wednesday said Hobby Lobby in 2010 bought more than 5,500 artifacts, including clay tablets and blocks with ancient cuneiform writing, which had been packaged as “ceramic tiles.” The dealer shipped the packages to three different corporate addresses in Oklahoma City and said they arrived from Turkey.

It was a frigid night in North America, mid-1770s. Boats and floating ice bobbed on the river as ragged men shivered on the bank, waiting to board. Their resolute leader strode up and down among the troops, urging them to keep their powder dry and their passage swift and silent. With a flag bearer and a handful of eager aides, he commandeered one of the boats for himself, climbed aboard, and settled in for a cold journey.

As a forester, Bob Naeger has mapped parts of the Trail of Tears with a state archaeologist and found forgotten cemeteries in the middle of kudzu-covered timber tracts. But last year he and his wife Renee purchased an old Mississippi cabin and found on the property a forgotten trunk. When he unlatched the trunk’s rusty hinges, he set free seven decades of smells clinging to its contents. Beneath a wallpapered panel he found 25 letters.

Once again a new archaeological discovery has supported the accuracy of the Bible and proven skeptics wrong. This time the discovery came from a most unlikely source—ancient animal dung.