American history

Writer Shelby Foote has created a niche for himself as a civil war historian. He is best known for his three volume history of the Civil War, called "The Civil War: A Narrative." He has just written a new book, "Stars in Their Courses," which re-creates the three-day Gettysburg Campaign. He was also the narrator of the eleven-hour PBS series "The Civil War," which aired in 1990.

Author/Attorney Stephen Goddard. His new book is "Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century" (Basic Books). Goddard's interest in trains began as a boy in the 1940s. At that time the regulated railroads were fighting back against the subsidized highways by creating luxurious trains with fancy dining cars that boasted elegant crystal on the tables.

Author Melba Beals. Forty years ago today the United States Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional in "Brown v. Board of Education." Three years later, Beals and eight other black teenagers chose to attend the all white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the process Beals suffered a school year marked by unremitting violence and hatred. Danny, the soldier assigned to protect her, warned her that she too would have to become a soldier.

History professor and author R. Laurence Moore. His new book is "Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture." (Oxford) Moore explores the relationship between spiritualism and consumerism in this country over a two-century span. He develops his theses with examples from the lives as such American personalities as P. T. Barnum, Cecil B. DeMille and Sylvester Graham, inventor of the Graham cracker.

Holding immigrants responsible for various health epidemics has been an American pastime for two centuries argues Alan Kraut, Professor of History at American University. Just as the Irish were wrongly blamed for the cholera epidemic in the 1830's so too were Haitians in Miami branded as AIDS carriers in the 1980's. His new book "Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, & the "Immigrant Menace"" (Basic Books) traces how immigration policy and health care have been affected by xenophobia and public fears of contamination. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Commentator Gayle Pemberton comments on Black History Month.

David Garrow is a Pulitzer Prize winning author for his biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., "Bearing the Cross." His newest book is a history of the struggle for birth control rights during the 1920s and 30s and how that paved the way for the abortion rights struggle. Along the way, Garrow examines how these rights are tied in with issues of privacy and sexuality. Garrow found that the arguments used in the birth control rights struggle were the same ones used in the struggle for abortion rights.

Commentator Maureen Corrigan on two new books of non-fiction: "Theirs Was The Kingdom" by John Heidenry (Norton) a history of Readers Digest, and "Land Of Desire" by William Leach (Pantheon) about rise of the department store in the nineteenth century.

Commentator Gayle Pemberton remembers the "Birmingham Bombing", which killed four young girls and galvanized support for the Civil Rights Movement.

Professor of History at Princeton, Sean Wilentz. His new article in the August 9th, 1993 issue of The New Republic compares the Ross Perot phenomenon to past populist movements in American History. He argues that Perot represents populism as "a surly mood of defeat and powerlessness;" that he perhaps signals a realignment to come of the two major parties. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)