History

In 1961, the Freedom Riders set out for the Deep South to defy Jim Crow laws and call for change. Their efforts transformed the civil rights movement. Raymond Arsenault is the author of 'Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice'.

In October 2003, Mark Etherington became governor of the Shiite-majority Wasit Province in Iraq. Six months later, Etherington, isolated from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, was forced to flee his headquarters in al-Kut, the province's capital.

Two big surprises awaited Paul Bremer when he arrived in Iraq: that the country's chaos made it ripe for insurgency; and that the U.S. government would withhold additional troops. Bremer became the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in May of 2003.

In the period after the Civil War, former slaves were made promises of equality and citizenship by the federal government. Historian Eric Foner analyzes the fate of those promises in Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.

The newsroom Jim Amoss leads was widely praised for its unflinching coverage of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. In a piece one month ago, Amoss said "New Orleans has become two cities -- an enclave of survivors clustered along the Mississippi River's crescent and a vast and sprawling shadow city where the water stood, devoid of power and people."

Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner co-wrote the screenplay for the new Stephen Spielberg film Munich. Kushner won a Pulitzer for his 1993-1994 play Angels in America, which was performed in two parts and set in New York in the mid-1980s in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.

New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins has been covering the recent elections in Iraq. In April, he received the George Polk Award for War Reporting for "his riveting, first-hand account of an eight-day attack on Iraqi insurgents in Falluja."

Two documentaries about nature's pristine complexity are out now on DVD The March of the Penguins and Grizzly Man.

In a cover article for the December issue of Atlantic Monthly, reporter James Fallows argues there is no easy way out of Iraq for American forces. Pressure is mounting to withdraw U.S. troops, but the move would almost certainly leave Iraq in chaos. It will take years to train an Iraqi security force.

In November, Columbia Records released the Born to Run 30th Anniversary Edition boxed set. The three-CD set includes a remastering of Springsteen's Born to Run album, released in 1975. The box set also includes a concert DVD of a never-before seen 1975 concert from London and a documentary about the making of Born to Run. This interview originally aired on Nov. 15, 2005.

Jarhead tells the story of a Marine sniper whose unit is sent to the Middle East for the Iraq conflict of 1991. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal, who narrates the film; Jamie Foxx; and Peter Sarsgaard. It was directed by Sam Mendes, who won an Oscar for American Beauty.

Stuart Bowen is the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. His office has just released its seventh Quarterly Report to Congress. The report documents how $30 billion set aside for Iraqi reconstruction was spent — and how to prevent waste and fraud. Bowen has served in the post since October 2004. Formerly, he served in the White House and was a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Patton Boggs LLP. Bowen's ties to Bush go back to the early 1990s, when he worked in the Texas governor's office. Bowen was also an intelligence officer in the U.S.

Writers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon are the co-authors of The Next Attack: The Failure Of The War On Terror and a Strategy For Getting it Right. The book criticizes the Bush administration's responses to the terror attacks of Sept 11, 2001.

A need for foreign workers in Iraq -- and the flood of American dollars into the country -- have created a labor network that critics call misleading, illegal and even dangerous. Chicago Tribune correspondent Cam Simpson retraced the fatal journey of 12 men from Nepal.

Musicians Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis, two New Orleans natives, have been friends for years — back to the days when Connick took piano lessons from Marsalis' father, Ellis

Army National Guardsman Jason Christopher Hartley. While serving in Iraq, Hartley kept a blog of his experiences until his commanders forced him to shut it down. He’s now back from Iraq, and has a new memoir, “Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq” (HarperCollins).

It has been nearly 30 years since Jean-Luc Godard's film Masculin/Feminin debuted. Starring Jean-Pierre Leaud and Chantal Goya, the film captured the spirit of Paris in the late-1960s.

Faced with a need for massive rebuilding in the Gulf Coast, President Bush has refused to estimate how much the effort might cost -- or to raise taxes to pay for it. To discuss the president's economic policy, we speak with columnist Paul Krugman and Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation.

New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins has been covering Iraq... thoroughly. In April he received the George Polk Award for War Reporting for his riveting, first-hand account of an eight-day attack on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah.

In The March, novelist E.L. Doctorow applies his distinctive approach to historical fiction to events of the Civil War -- especially Gen. William T. Sherman's decisive, destructive assault on Georgia and the Carolinas.