Thelonious Monk. Jazz giant. American hipster. A new biography takes us into his life and enigmatic music.

Senator Ted Kennedy, dead at the age of 77. We look at the life, the dream, and the legacy for American politics.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas Blackmon on the effective “re-enslavement” of African Americans after the Civil War.

What did they eat in the Great Depression? We’ll find out, and tuck in. Plus: video of Tom and our guests tasting authentic ’30s recipes.

We’ll dig into a new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, America’s first great tycoon.

The pirates of 1776. The little-known story of the patriot “privateers” who helped win the nation’s independence.

The true story of Bonnie and Clyde, 75 years after America’s most famous outlaw lovers went down in a hail of bullets.

It’s been 70 years since “Gone With the Wind” hit the big screen. A new book says Scarlett O’Hara is still making waves.

Abraham Lincoln at 200. We’ll look back on his presidential leadership style during crisis — with Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian James McPherson.

Novelist T.C. Boyle on his new work, “The Women,” and the tempestuous love life of Frank Lloyd Wright.

American horror master Edgar Allan Poe, at 200. We’ll look at how his stories still chill us.

On January 1st, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Historian Edna Greene Medford explains what it meant for African Americans, and how it resonates in the era of Obama.

A new look at frontier medicine, and the wildest tonics of the old Wild West.

From the “Huck Finn” to “The Feminine Mystique,” author and critic Jay Parini talks about the books that really changed America.

We talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of “Team of Rivals,” about Lincoln, FDR, LBJ, and their lessons for Barack Obama.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In the mid-1990s, writer James McBride scored a bestseller with “The Color of Water,” his memoir of growing up the black son of a white mother in America.
Now a black son of a white mother may be on his way to the White House, and James McBride is out with a hot new novel set [...]