Candida Pugh’s debut novel is about a young woman who joins the Freedom Riders in 1961, gets arrested and jailed in Mississippi, and learns that not everyone appreciates a hero in Bridge of the Single Hair.

Jack Balkin‘s Living Originalism shows why modern conceptions of civil rights and civil liberties, and the modern state’s protection of national security, health, safety, and the environment, are fully consistent with the Constitution’s original meaning.

Beginning in the mid nineteenth century in America, childhood became synonymous with innocence. As the idea took hold, it became racialized: popular culture constructed white children as innocent and vulnerable while excluding black youth from these qualities. Robin Bernstein takes up this issue in Racial Innocence.

Peter Yarrow’ of the ’60s folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary, along with Lenny Lipton, wrote the beloved song and now hit book Puff, the Magic Dragon.  Peter is active in Operation Respect, an organization that promotes anti-bullying awareness in schools across the country.

In Sister Citizen,  Melissa V. Harris-Perry explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing.

An era ended with the  repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and professor Aaron Belkin talks about what finally brought the policy down in How We Won. Then, was an innocent man executed last week in Georgia? Diann Rust-Tierney with the National Coalition Against the Death Penalty joins us.

The Secrets of the FBI, by bestselling author Ronald Kessler reveals the FBI’s most closely guarded secrets and the secrets of celebrities, politicians, and movie stars uncovered by agents during their investigations.

After World War I, black soldiers believed their participation in the fight for democracy earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War. Instead, a wave of riots and lynchings swept the country for eight months. Cameron McWhirter chronicles the mayhem in Red Summer, the first narrative history written about this epic encounter.

Columbia University Professor Dr. Manning Marable, died just days before the publication of Malcolm X which is filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond his autobiography. Zaheer Ali, one of the key researchers who worked with Dr. Marable on the biography joins Culture Shocks to talk about the book.

Bill Zimmerman recounts the radicalization via beatnikism, the civil rights movement, and antiwar protests that led him in 1969 to renounce a promising psychology professorship and become a full-time antiwar activist in Troublemaker.