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Twenty-one year old Joe Cada won the World Series of Poker and $8.5 million last week in Las Vegas. A heck of a pot for the youngest winner ever.

But fully of a piece, says my guest today, with poker’s fabled place in American history. And in American culture.

Presidents, generals, gangsters, cowboys — and now millions of Americans online — have embraced the part-Puritan, part go-for-it gambler ethos of poker. A new history tells the story.

This hour, On Point: The tangled American roots of poker. And we’ll hear from the 21-year-old who won it all.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

James McManus, bestselling journalist and author who writes about poker for the New York Times and other publications. His new book is “Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker,” came out last month. He came in fifth in the World Series of Poker in 2000 and wrote a memoir about that experience, “Positively 5th Street.”

Read the first chapter of “Cowboys Full” (pdf).

Joseph Cada, winner of the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event. He was 21 when he won on November 10, the youngest champion ever. His winnings totaled $8.5 million.

Laura Lane, co-host of ESPN.com’s Inside Deal, a weekly show about online poker.

Thelonious Monk performs at the Newport Jazz Festival in Newport, R.I., on July 5, 1963. (AP Photo)

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Jazz great Thelonious Monk had a genius for unusual and daring composition, for confounding and delighting the world. He did things with rhythm, melody and chords that had never quite been heard before.

Hip America swooned for his music and for his myth: the mystical, elusive “George Washington of bebop.” From the 1940s to the 1970s and beyond, the myth of Monk nearly overshadowed the man. But his music rolls on.

A new biography from Robin Kelley tells the story of the music and the man — of Coltrane and Chopin and genius and Monk.

This hour, On Point: a deep new look at the great jazzman Thelonious Monk.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Robin Kelley joins us from Los Angeles. Professor of history and American Studies at the University of Southern California, he’s the author of the new biography “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.” You can read an excerpt here.

And from New York we’re joined by Matthew Shipp, jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader. His previous albums include “One,” “Harmony and Abyss,” and “Equilibrium.” His forthcoming album, available this January, is “4d.” You can hear him playing and talking about piano jazz at NPR.org.

Here’s a list of the Monk songs featured during the hour:

“Blue Sphere”
“Introspection”
“‘Round Midnight”
“Evidence”
“Trinkle, Tinkle”
“Brilliant Corners”
“In Walked Bud”
“This is My Story, This is My Song”
“Jackie-Ing”
“Well, You Needn’t”

More links:

In this clip from the documentary “Straight No Chaser,” you can see Monk’s famous “dance” during a performance:

And here’s Monk playing his renowned composition “‘Round Midnight” in Norway in 1966:

Sen. Edward Kennedy during a news conference in Washington on Thursday, Dec. 20, 2001. Kennedy has died after battling a brain tumor, his family announced early Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2009. (AP)

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Senator Ted Kennedy — liberal lion and liberal lightning rod — died last night at 77.

He was the last of nine children in a storied American political family. The last of a generation of Kennedy brothers who left a nearly incalculable mark on American politics and culture.

JFK. RFK. Teddy.

As senator, Ted Kennedy became, over decades, legend and workhorse. Champion of the disenfranchised. Friend to Republican peers. Key supporter of Barack Obama.

This hour, On Point: the passing of Ted Kennedy and the state of the dream he said would never die.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Gerald Seib, executive Washington editor and “Capital Journal” columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He’s co-author of “Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Backroom Power.”

Martin Nolan, former Washington bureau chief and editorial page editor for The Boston Globe. His obituary for Ted Kennedy runs in today’s paper.

Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

Ross K. Baker, professor of political science at Rutgers University and author of “House and Senate” (4th edition, 2008), “Strangers on a Hill: Congress and the Court” and “Friend and Foe in the U.S. Senate.”

Bob Shrum, longtime Democratic strategist. He was press secretary for Senator Kennedy from 1980 to 1984, and served as Kennedy’s principal speechwriter during and after the 1980 presidential campaign. He’s the author of “No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner.”

See full coverage of Ted Kennedy from WBUR, and a timeline of his life from NPR.org.

Watch a slideshow of Ted Kennedy’s life in pictures:

Prisoners at work in a rock quarry, most likely in the early 1940s. Photographer unknown. (Library of Congress; from www.slaverybyanothername.com)

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Americans think they know the sorry history of the post-Civil War South. Jim Crow laws hemming in African-Americans. Lynchings. Klansmen riding high.

In fact, the history is much sorrier even than that.

In an explosive work of investigative history that just won the Pulitzer Prize, a white son of Mississippi, Douglas Blackmon, has uncovered incredible virtual slavery that went on for decades after the Civil War. Black men chained, whipped, and bound in forced labor until almost World War II.

This hour, On Point: History denied and revealed — American slavery by another name.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Douglas Blackmon joins us from Atlanta, Georgia. He won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction for his book “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” He’s Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, and his articles on race, wealth and other issues have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize four times. Born in Arkansas in 1964, and raised in Mississippi, he was in the first racially integrated class of children in Mississippi to begin the first grade together, in 1970.

More links:

Blackmon’s book has an impressive companion website. It includes a series of stunning and disturbing photo galleries, with images like the one below (see the full gallery here):

An unnamed prisoner tied around a pickax for punishment in a Georgia labor camp. Photograph by John L. Spivak, during research for his 1932 book, "Georgia Nigger." (From "Slavery by Another Name," by Douglas Blackmon)

In this photograph by Russell Lee, the Faro Caudill family eats dinner in Pie Town, New Mexico, in October 1940 (Library of Congress). Click image for more info.

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In the last years of the 1930s, the last years before interstates and industry turned America into one big, homogenized market, Depression-era writers went out to see what Americans were eating.

They went North, South, East and West. Today, their report reads like a wildly diverse national potluck of very regional, very vivid cuisine.

Spoon bread and burgoo, oyster stew and chicken bog, hush puppies and possum, Johnny cake and hoecake and rabbit and grunion.

This hour, On Point: What we ate before we all ate the same. We’ll read the great American menu — and tuck in.

You can join the conversation — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us in our studio is Mark Kurlansky, bestselling author of many books, including “Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World” and “Salt: A World History.” His new anthology is “The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food -- from the Lost WPA files.”

Also in our studio is JJ Gonson, a personal chef with a background in short order and home cooking. Boston Magazine named her “Boston’s Best Personal Chef.” She’s founder of Cuisine En Locale, based in Cambridge, Mass., and writes an eponymous blog, where she’s just written about food shopping and economies of scale.

In this video clip, Tom and our guests sample tastes of the ’30s…

Here’s our tasting menu for this hour. These are authentic 1930s dishes taken from Mark Kurlansky’s book.

Plain Maine Chowder
from the recipe of Mabel G. Hall, a Maine historian

- Ingredients: diced salt pork, onions, potatoes, water, salt, a very little bit of milk

Kentucky Wilted Lettuce
“Throughout Kentucky, and particularly in the mountainous area, wilted lettuce is certain to appear on the table of most every household that has a garden.”

- Ingredients: fresh lettuce, fresh green onions, salt, pepper, bacon, bacon grease

Arizona Menudo
from a description of an “Arizona Menudo Party” by J. Del Castillo

- Ingredients: beef tripe, hominy, salt, pepper

Depression Cake (far western U.S.)
from an essay by Michael Kennedy and Edward B. Reynolds, a cake born out of necessity by a woman preparing for a July 4 “picnic, rodeo, and general get-together”

- No eggs, butter, or milk.
- Ingredients: raisin water, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, allspice, bacon drippings, flour, sugar, salt, baking powder.

Portrait of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Vanderbilt University, Special Collections and University Archives)

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The buccaneering capitalism of America’s first century throws an interesting light on our economic crisis today.

In the age of steamships, railroads, and gold rush, the titan of titans — up by the bootstraps to unimaginable wealth — was Cornelius Vanderbilt, America’s first tycoon. From a boyhood farming on Staten Island, he built out a country and an economy that we still live in.

A new biography takes us through steam engine, jungle, and robber baron years to the roots of our finance system today.

This hour, On Point: Cornelius Vanderbilt, America’s first tycoon.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

T. J. Stiles, an independent historian who focuses on 19th-century America. His new book is “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.” He’s also the author of “Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War.”

You can read an excerpt from “The Last Tycoon” at RandomHouse.com. Plus, Stiles’ own website offers a great deal of background on Vanderbilt and the research that went into the book.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic. He’s the author of “Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900″ (2007) and the editor of “Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America” (2001).

Daguerreotype image of Cornelius Vanderbilt from before the Civil War.

On his site, T.J. Stiles offers a long list of “misconceptions,” “falsehoods” and “myths” about Cornelius Vanderbilt that he says his biography corrects. Here’s a sampling (scroll down this page for the full list):

Vanderbilt cheated at cards.

Vanderbilt hated trains.

Vanderbilt was a boor who chewed tobacco, drank heavily, and spat on carpets.

Vanderbilt and Daniel Drew were enemies.

Vanderbilt’s only maneuver on Wall Street was the corner.

Vanderbilt was a corrupt chief executive who hurt his own stockholders to make personal profits.

Vanderbilt was an unfeeling brute who abused his family, especially his epileptic son Cornelius Jeremiah.

Vanderbilt contracted syphilis in 1839, began to suffer dementia in 1868, and was used as an uncomprehending puppet by his son William H. for the rest of his life.

Here are some more historical images from Stiles’ site.

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When Americans think of the Revolutionary War, the War for Independence, they think fife and drum, Minute Men, tri-cornered hats, George Washington on horseback.

When the British of 1776 — and ‘77 and ‘78 — thought of the American Revolution, many thought “pirates.” Cannon and cutlass and brigands on the high seas.

Washington and the Continental Congress unleashed thousands of American vessels — patriots and fortune seekers — to go after British shipping. And they did it with a vengeance.

This hour, On Point: Privateers, private booty, and the American Revolution.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from New York is Robert H. Patton, author of “Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution.”

Read an excerpt from “Patriot Pirates.”

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Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow fell in love and into a life of crime. From 1932-34, in the dark days of the Great Depression, the outlaw lovers shot their way across the country — robbing banks, stealing cars, and doing a whole lot of killing.

On the lam, Bonnie wrote poetry and missed her mother. Clyde played the sax and vowed never to be taken alive.

Now, 75 years after they were gunned down by a posse on a Louisiana back road, their flesh-and-blood story is retold in a riveting new biography.

This hour, On Point: Finding the real Bonnie and Clyde.

You can join the conversation. What is it about the story of Bonnie and Clyde that we find so seductive — so gruesomely appealing? What does their story tell us about America in the Great Depression? About our fascination now?

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guest:

Joining us from Tampla, Florida, is Paul Schneider, author of “Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend.”

You can read the first chapter here. And here’s a site that has posted the poems of Bonnie Parker.

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Everybody knows “Gone With the Wind.” Scarlett. Rhett. Mammy. Ashley. Hoop skirts and Tara and “I’ll never be hungry again!”

But film critic Molly Haskell says it’s too easy to brush off Hollywood’s portrayal of Margaret Mitchell’s sprawling classic as antebellum folderol and costume melodrama.

Yes, there’s rape fantasy and romanticized slavery here. But there’s also Scarlett O’Hara as proto-feminist. Hattie McDaniel as the first African-American to win an Oscar. And filmmaking ambition that still dazzles, 70 years on.

This hour, On Point: Molly Haskell and “Gone With the Wind.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Molly Haskell joins us from New York.  Born in North Carolina, raised in Richmond, Virginia, she’s a film critic and writer whose work has appeared in Esquire, The Nation, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. Her new book is “Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone With the Wind’ Revisited.”

Read Haskell’s introduction to “Frankly, My Dear.”

And from Los Angeles, we’re joined by Karen Grigsby Bates, Los Angeles-based correspondent for NPR. In a 2008 piece for All Things Considered, she pondered her own interest as a young woman in the complicated character of Scarlett O’Hara.

Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

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Two hundred years ago today, Abraham Lincoln was born — yes, in a log cabin, in Kentucky.

We can’t help wondering if he could have imagined an African-American president in the White House on this anniversary. Let alone an African-American president who so embraced him, Lincoln, as a model and hero.

Barack Obama has again and again held up Lincoln as an inspiration. But Lincoln was also a down-in-the-details, do-what-it-takes leader – and a canny politician — who presided over the most trying years in all of American history.

So, how might the man who fought the Civil War have faced Obama’s plate of problems? This hour, On Point: Lincoln’s leadership style in the White House.

You can join the conversation. Do you think of Lincoln as a distant marble statue, or a real and relevant leader now? What should Obama learn from Lincoln?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

From Dallas, Texas, we’re joined by James M. McPherson. One of America’s leading historians of the Civil War, he’s professor emeritus of history at Princeton University. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his Civil War history “Battle Cry of Freedom.” He’s the author of two new works on Lincoln: the short biography “Abraham Lincoln” and “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief,” which, just today, won the Lincoln Prize for outstanding Civil War scholarship.

Read an excerpt from “Tried by War.”

Joining us from Hanover, N.H., is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

T. C. Boyle. (Photo: Spencer Boyle.)

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American architect, and legend, Frank Lloyd Wright loved fame, followers and women. American novelist and short-story writer T.C. Boyle is no stranger to the limelight himself, or to the stories of larger-than-life American figures.

Now, T.C. Boyle has taken on Frank Lloyd Wright’s tempestuous love life in a novel called “The Women.” If Wright’s famed Prairie Style houses were cool and serene, his love life was anything but — up to and including axe-murder and fire.

This hour, On Point: Novelist T.C. Boyle on Frank Lloyd Wright and “The Women.”

You can join the conversation. Are you a Wright fan? A Boyle fan? What do you expect when these two showmen get together? Falling water? Taliesin? The Guggenheim? The fires behind them?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

T.C. Boyle joins us in our studio. He’s the bestselling author of 20 books of fiction, both novels and short stories. His historical fiction has looked at John Harvey Kellogg in “The Road to Wellville” and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in “The Inner Circle.” His new novel, about Frank Lloyd Wright, is “The Women.”

Read an excerpt from “The Women” at Boyle’s website.

Edgar Allan Poe, daguerreotype 1848

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Edgar Allan Poe, master of the macabre, was born two hundred years ago this week. In the youth of the new country, he scared the daylights out of 19th-century Americans with his horror wrapped in gothic romance.

In “The Raven,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and more, he keyed in lush and early on violence, madness, spiritual doubt, terror. He was father of the detective story and the gory thriller.

Poe was a tortured soul, his death a bizarre mystery. From Sherlock Holmes to Stephen King to CSI, his work still echoes — like the tell-tale heart — in our culture today.

This hour, On Point: Master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, at 200.

You can join the conversation. Did you, do you, love Poe? All that gothic romance, murder, horror? What was he tapped into? Do you see it all around us in our popular culture today?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

J. Gerald Kennedy, professor of English at Louisiana State University. He’s been thinking and writing about Edgar Allan Poe for 35 years. He’s author of many books and articles on Poe, most recently “The Portable Edgar Allan Poe” and the Oxford “Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe.”

Stephen Rachman, professor of English at Michigan State University. He’s co-editor of “The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe” and president of the Poe Studies Association.

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, professor of English at College of the Holy Cross and author of “Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism.”

More links:

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore has complete texts of Poe’s works, and much more.

The Poe Museum in Richmond, where Poe lived and worked, documents his life and career and offers a special site devoted to the Poe bicentennial celebration.

Watch Vincent Price recite “The Raven” (from YouTube):

Kaamilah Furqah, 13, views the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 2007 at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark. (AP)

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On January 1st, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — the historic document that freed America’s slaves, sort of.

In the midst of civil war and politics and military challenge, Lincoln’s act was narrowly aimed at slaves under Confederate control. Their bondage remained unbroken — and once broken, gave way to many decades of Jim Crow oppression.

But the Emancipation Proclamation stands as a national watershed. Now, with Barack Obama headed for the White House, its history speaks again. On January 20, Obama will lay his hand on Lincoln’s Bible to take his oath as President of the United States. It’s a good moment to look back on history.

This hour, On Point: The Emancipation Proclamation and its resonance today.

You can join the conversation. Barack Obama reveres “the Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln. Do you? And how do Lincoln’s acts echo this year in Washington? Tell us what you think.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Edna Greene Medford, associate professor of history at Howard University. She specializes in 19th-century African-American history and is co-author of “The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views,” with Harold Holzer and Frank Williams.

And from Hanover, N.H., is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic. He’s written about 19th-century American history himself, most recently in his book “Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900.”

More links:

The National Archives website features a digital reproduction of the original Emancipation Proclamation, as well as the text version; the “preliminary” proclamation of September 22, 1862; and a background essay by historian John Hope Franklin.

In the November 1862 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Ralph Waldo Emerson reacted to Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in an essay, and the national mythology was born before the proclamation had even been signed:

It is not a measure that admits of being taken back. Done, it cannot be undone by a new Administration…. This act makes that the lives of our heroes have not been sacrificed in vain….

With this blot removed from our national honor, this heavy load lifted off the national heart, we shall not fear henceforward to show our faces among mankind. We shall cease to be hypocrites and pretenders, but what we have styled our free institutions will be such.

In December 1866, also in The Atlantic, Frederick Douglass appealed to the United States Congress to live up to the promise of Lincoln’s proclamation:

Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results, — a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure … or whether, on the other hand, we shall, as the rightful reward of victory over treason have a solid nation, entirely delivered from all contradictions and social antagonisms, based upon loyalty, liberty, and equality, must be determined one way or the other by the present session of Congress.

As we know, it would be a century, and more, before liberty and equality began to be realized for African Americans.

From East to West, and further south than usual, the country has been blanketed in snow in recent days. Imagine if you were crossing it on foot, by canoe, on horseback, in a wagon; a settler, a pioneer, a frontiersman — and you got hurt, became ill.

The medicine of the American frontier was rough and ready — and often required for snake bite, bear slash, bullet wound, broken bone, fever. In deep woods and mountain pass. When doctors were rare – and sometimes more dangerous than the snake.

This hour, On Point: Wild stories of American medicine — native and otherwise — on the American frontier.

You can join the conversation. Does your family lore include tales of wagon-bed surgery? Medicine on the hoof? Fever and ax-wound and frontier survival? Would you have the grit to go mano-a-mano with a bear … tend your wounds … and press on?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

David Dary, professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, where he ran what is now the Gaylord College of Journalism for eleven years. He is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books on the American West. His new book is “Frontier Medicine: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941.”

Read an excerpt from “Frontier Medicine.”

In the age of video games, cell phone texting, and the instant message, the idea that books shape a nation may seem like a stretch.

But look back across American history, and at nearly every key moment of definition, of transition, there stands a book that nails the change.

Novelist, critic, and poet Jay Parini has sifted out of his list a baker’s dozen of books that shaped the nation’s very understanding of itself. “Huck Finn” is in there. So is “Walden.” Lewis and Clark’s journals. “The Souls of Black Folk.” “The Feminine Mystique.” “On the Road.”

This hour, On Point: Thirteen books that changed America.

You can join the conversation. Can the idea of this country, as it’s evolved, be found in thirteen books? What would be on your list?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Jay Parini, poet, novelist, critic, and biographer. He’s a professor of English and creative writing at Middlebury College in Vermont and has written biographies of Frost, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. His new book is “Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America.”

Read excerpts from “Promised Land,” including the chapter on William Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation,” at RandomHouse.com.

Here are the thirteen books that made Parini’s list:

- Of Plymouth Plantation (1620-47), by William Bradford
- The Federalist Papers (1787-88)
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793)
- The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1803-06)
- Walden (1854), by Henry David Thoreau
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), by Mark Twain
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), by W.E.B. DuBois
- The Promised Land (1912), by Mary Antin
- How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), by Dale Carnegie
- The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), by Benjamin Spock
- On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
- The Feminine Mystique (1963), by Betty Friedan

Doris Kearns Goodwin

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The ghosts of American presidents past are all over the national conversation as Barack Obama prepares to move into the Oval Office.

Abraham Lincoln and his “team of rivals.” FDR and his Hundred Days. Slim JFK and his “best and brightest.” Bear hug LBJ and the arms he twisted to get things done.

Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin knows them all. She wrote the book “Team of Rivals,” and watched it go back on the bestseller list as Obama tapped Hillary Clinton. She knows the history.

This hour, On Point: Doris Kearns Goodwin, and presidents past, on the eve of Obama.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Doris Kearns Goodwin joins us from New York.  She’s the author of “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelet: The Home Front in World War II,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1995, and “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.” She worked as an assistant to President Johnson during his last year in the White House and later assisted him on his memoirs.

The saga of the horse in America is a stunner and a heartbreaker.

Here, in the mists of pre-history, millions of years ago. Gone, over the Bering Strait to the rest of the world, and to extinction here in the Ice Age.

Back, terrified and terrifying, on the ships of Columbus and Cortez — then embraced by the Plains Indians and their great horsemen like it had never been away.

The free horse — the wild Mustang — is a primal symbol of American freedom. Its history is at the heart of our history.

This hour, On Point: The mustang, wild horses, and the history of the American West.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Deanne Stillman, author of “Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West.”

Karen Sussman, President of the Society For The Preservation of Wild Burros and Mustangs.

David Pettee always loved family history. But there was a lot he did not know. His old New England family talked plenty of Pilgrims and Puritans. They did not talk about slaves in the family. Or slave traders.

But when Pettee really opened the books, there they were — and more. A torched village. Rum for Africans. The ship’s manifest with “salt, cotton, tobacco — and Negroes.”

He went to Africa. He called the descendants of the slaves his family owned. On the phone. We’ll hear from him. And them.

This hour, On Point: Slaves in the family, way north of the Mason-Dixon line

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Rev. David Pettee, Director of Ministerial Credentialing at the Unitarian Universalist Association, and descendant of Rhode Island slave owner Ewdard Simmons.

Patricia Mann, CEO of Royal Reporting and descendant of the slave Cuff Simmons.

The story of American music is, in many ways, the story of discovery and rediscovery of blues and gospel and country rolling into rock and pop and Aaron Copeland.

But one American musical tradition is so old and so other-worldly that it’s hardly ever touched the modern mainstream. It’s called Sacred Harp — and the harp is the human voice, raised in something like prayer.

It started in colonial New England, and migrated south. Now its bold, haunting sound has fans all over.

This hour, On Point: the sound and story of Sacred Harp.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Matt Hinton, Sacred Harp singer and maker of the documentary “Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp.” He also teaches religion at Morehouse College.

Tim Eriksen, singer, musician, and music historian. He’s in the band Cordelia’s Dad, and a founder of the largest annual Sacred Harp convention, held in Western Massachusetts.

Raymond Hamrick, Sacred Harp singer and composer. He has contributed songs to the most recent edition of the “Sacred Harp Songbook” and recently published “The Georgian Harmony, “a book of his compositions.

There were years in the depths of the Great Depression when masses of Americans lived in desperation for a meal, a pair of shoes, and most of all, a job.

And then, in a world of hobos and shantytowns, came the New Deal and the WPA — the Works Progress Administration. The federal government directly gave jobs — shovels, wheel barrows, sometimes pen and paper — to millions.

They dug ditches. They painted. They built Camp David and LaGuardia Airport and schools and parks in every state.

This hour, On Point: a new history remembers the radical experiment of the WPA.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Nick Taylor, author of “American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA.”

Barry Bluetsone, professor of political economy, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy, and dean of the School of Social Science, Urban Affairs, and Public Policy at Northeastern University.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly.