American history

In The Zealot and the Emancipator, historian H.W. Brands reflects on two 19th century leaders who fought the institution of slavery in different ways: one radical and the other reformist.

Toobin spoke to Fresh Air in 2013 about his New Yorker profile of Ginsburg, written as she marked her 20th anniversary on the Supreme Court. Ginsburg died Sept. 18 at the age of 87.

In a new book, author Scott Anderson chronicles the formative years of America's spy agency by focusing on four soldiers who became intelligence agents after World War II.

Freedom Summer, now streaming on PBS, focuses on the 1964 movement to get Black people to vote in Mississippi. Director Stanley Nelson and organizer Charles Cobb discussed the film in 2014.

When the U.S military dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the American government portrayed the weapons as equivalent to large conventional bombs. Military censors restricted access to Hiroshima, but a young journalist named John Hersey managed to get there and write a devastating account of the death, destruction and radiation poisoning he encountered. Author Lesley M.M. Blume tells Hersey's story in her book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World.