American history

Timothy Egan is the author of the book The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Now out in paperback, the book was awarded the National Book Award for nonfiction. Egan is a national enterprise reporter for the New York Times, and was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for a series on race in America.

A new book details the scandalous, sensational, partisan press — of the 1700s. Fox News journalist Eric Burns' Infamous Scribblers: the Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism tells the stories.

Terry Gross talks with author Taylor Branch, who has written the third in a trilogy of biographies on Martin Luther King Jr. The book is called At Canaan's Edge.

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 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.

Civil War historian and novelist Shelby Foote died Monday night at age 88. He is best known for his three-volume, 3,000-page history entitled The Civil War: A Narrative, and for narrating Ken Burns' 11-hour PBS series The Civil War. We rebroadcast an interview with Foote from July 27, 1994.

In 2002, a federal judge ruled that the "under God" portion of the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional because it violated the separation of church and state. An uproar ensued. But as Richard J. Ellis, author of To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance, points out in his book, those words were not included in the pledge when it was written in 1892 — they were added in 1950. Ellis is the Mark O. Hatfield Professor of Politics at Willamette University in Salem, Ore.

John M. Coski is author of The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem. The book looks at the flag's history and the various meanings attached to it. Some people view it as a symbol of white supremacy and racial injustice; others think it represents a rich Southern heritage. Coski is historian and library director at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va.

Surgeon and medical historian Ira Rutkow's new book is Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine. Rutkow is also the author of Surgery: An Illustrated History, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Writer David Reynolds is the author of the new biography John Brown: Abolitionist: The Man who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. Reynold's book is considered to be a sympathetic look at the man who he says framed the issue of slavery in stark, uncompromising terms.