The Real Free State of Jones (1863)

Out conversation about the Golden Gate Bridge continues with the opening of the bridge, and a bunch of people who didn't get enough credit. Plus, what the story says about how we need big ideas even in moments when things feel especially dire.Join our America250 newsletter commun ...  Show more

For the seventeeth installment of “50 Weeks That Shaped America” we travel to California in the 1930s, where San Francisco planners have a big idea — build a massive suspension bridge across the Golden Gate strait. We discuss how the project came together despite the Great Depres ...  Show more

On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that the Civil War had ended and that the enslaved were now free. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had been issued over two years earlier, and the South had ...  Show more

Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that “the silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in wa ...  Show more

Why did George Orwell go to Spain to fight on the Republican side against General Franco? Who saved his life when he was shot in the throat? How did internal feuds on the leftist side of the war influence his writing and his paranoia? In Part 2 of this miniseries, William and Ani ...  Show more

On May 13, 1862, in Charleston, South Carolina, a man named Robert Smalls took command of a Confederate ship called The Planter and liberated himself and his family from slavery. As they passed the Confederate-held Fort Sumter, Robert Smalls was said to have saluted it with a whi ...  Show more