While the presidency so far has appeared to be a man's game, there is now the suggestion that women have shaped the job and the men from the very beginning.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Nicholas Basbanes tells Steve Paulson that people destroy books to annihilate the culture of their enemies and remembers some of the heroes who fought to save books from the Nazis and in Bosnia.
If there’s one writer who’s identified with the Mississippi River, it’s Mark Twain. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri — on the river’s edge — and as a young man, he worked as a steamboat pilot. And then he wrote the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the novel that turned the Mississippi into myth. But it also created one of the most enduring controversies in American literary history: how to depict race relations in America's past. In this interview, Andrew Levy says that "Huckleberry Finn" is actually anti-racist — and when it was first published, the big controversy was about Twain’s depiction of wild children.
Margot Peters is the author of “Design for Living” - a biography of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.
For centuries, the oddities of nature - like two-headed cats and conjoined twins - fascinated people. Science historian Lorraine Daston says a history of wonders is to some degree a history of pre-modern science.
Mark Spragg grew up at Holm Lodge, the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming. He talks about growing up on horseback in the American mountain West
Are we ever good enough, or are we doomed to self-optimization for our entire lives?
Historian Orville Vernon Burton tells Jim Fleming about the parallels between Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.
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