American history

Writer Barry Lopez reads from a new essay, called the Rediscovery of North America, about contemporary views of indigenous landscapes, which developed during the era of European conquest.

Ellis Island reopens to the public soon. Commentator Maureen Corrigan shares her disappointment that she'll have to pay if she wants her grandparents' names inscribed on the new American Immigrant Wall of Honor.

Chestnut earned his law degree at Washington D.C.'s Howard University, but soon returned to his hometown of Selma, Alabama, where he opened a law office -- before legal protections like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed. His new memoir is called Black in Selma.

Architect Andrés Duany (pronounced ahn-drays due-wahn-nee). Duany's specialty is taking on the American suburb. He eloquently argues that the 'burbs stifle the quality of everyday life, and he has concrete proposals on ways to make our neighborhoods livable again. (The first of a two part interview--today what's wrong with the suburbs, tomorrow how to make them better).

Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Homeward Bound," historian Elaine Tyler May's look at family life in the 1950s.

Pulitzer prize winning biographer Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Baines Johnson. The book focused on Johnson's early years. The Boston Sunday Globe called it, "a powerful, absorbing, at times awe-inspiring, and often deeply alarming story." In the just-published second volume, "Means of Ascent," Caro examines seven years of Johnson's life, from 1941 to 1948.

Television critic David Bianculli previews a new ABC docudrama based on the Challenger disaster. It stars Karen Allen, Peter Boyle, and Barry Bostwick. Bianculli says the movie is helped by the limits it keeps.

John F. Sears, author of "Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century." Sears went back to magazines, fiction and painting of the 19th century to find out when and why tourism developed in this country. He says that natural wonders like Niagara Falls and Yellowstone were a substitute for the cathedrals of Europe, and that tourism gave Americans a way to shape their national identity. (Interview by Sedge Thomson)

Gladys Hansen is the archivist for the city of San Francisco. She's just written "Denial of Disaster," a book about the 1906 earthquake which corrects misinformation perpetuated about the quake.

Veteran arms negotiator and diplomat Paul Nitze. Nitze has spent nearly 50 years at the highest levels of this country's foreign policy, and advised every President from F. D. R. to George Bush. He helped form the Marshall Plan after World War Two, dealt with the Berlin War and Cuban Missile crises, and engaged in the famous "walk in the woods," during the U-S/Soviet INF treaty negotiations. Nitze has just written a memoir of his public life, called "From Hiroshima to Glasnost."