United States

Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people. Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up....

How did America end up with a leader who acts so crudely and despotically, and counter to our democratic principles? Why do his followers stick with him, even when he acts against their interests? To fully understand...John Dean joins with Bob Altemeyer....

Each lecture will give you a refreshing new understanding of what made the British Empire both great in its achievements and vulnerable to its eventual downfall....

Half a century ago, the United States overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, whose "crime" was nationalizing the country's oil industry....

William Strauss and Neil Howe posit the history of America as a succession of generational biographies, beginning in 1584 and encompassing every one through the children of today. Their bold theory is that each generation belongs to one of four types....

An urgent warning about the growing threat to our democracy from a twenty-year police veteran and former diehard Trump supporter who nearly lost his life during the insurrection of January 6th....

And the Band Played On is both a tribute to these heroic people and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly....

On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell, and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis - and as perilous....

The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation....

In 1532, the 54-year-old Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro led a force of 167 men, including his four brothers, to the shores of Peru....

Joe Leaphorn may have retired from the Tribal Police, but he finds himself knee-deep in a perplexing case involving a priceless artifact - a reminder of a dark time in Navajo history....

The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country's recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? Find out....

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s....

For decades, a quartet of Chinese women who have emigrated to San Francisco gather to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk—they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Over the years, their stories have informed the lives of four daughters who feel the weight of family and world history....

Based on 27 years of original archival research, this day-by-day narrative of the hysteria that swept through Salem Village in 1692 and 1693 reveals new connections behind the events and shows how rapidly a community can descend into bloodthirsty madness....

When Walt Whitman self-published "Leaves of Grass" in 1855, he rocked the literary world and forever changed the course of poetry....

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of the CIA's most valuable spy in the Soviet Union and an evocative portrait of the agency's Moscow station....

Eleven-year-old Delphine and her younger sisters Vonetta and Fern travel to Oakland to meet their mother, Cecil, who abandoned their family years earlier....

"Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire, I happened upon a path....

In this vivid and compelling narrative, the Seven Years' War - long seen as a mere backdrop to the American Revolution - takes on a whole new significance. Relating the history of the war as it developed, Anderson shows how the complex array of forces brought into conflict helped both....