In the early 1960s, NASA was considering three different ideas for landing a man on the lunar surface. Houbolt's plan ultimately won out despite concerns within NASA that it was too risky.
By the turn of the 20th century, America's love affair with diamondback terrapin soup — a subsistence food turned gourmet fare — had left the turtle's population teetering. Booze ban to the rescue.
The work, previously published only in Russian, was discovered by Professor Steven Hoelscher. The encounter occurred in 1927, when Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston went on a road trip through the South.
After a cancer diagnosis, author and noted mountaineer David Roberts sets out on the trail of Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, remaining dutiful to the route some 240 years later.
Yonah Elian played a key part in spiriting Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann out of Argentina to stand trial in Israel. His family couldn't understand why he never spoke about the heroic role he served.
By repeating that these immigrants are "not you" the president defined them as "the other" in stark terms. The battle lines could not be clearer, and the battle is nearly as old as America itself.
When the president told several young congresswomen of color to "go back" to where they came from, he borrowed nativist language about as old as the country itself. Here's a little history.
Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 spacesuit is about to go back on public display after a Smithsonian effort to preserve it. The effort wasn't to make it pristine. Lunar dust still covers the boots.
We talked to Angela Saini, author of the new book Superior: The Return of Race Science, about how race isn't real (but you know ... still is) and how race science crept its way into the 21st century.
An emblem of the hippie era in America, the car was marketed in the U.S. as adorably uncool. Volkswagen sold the bug with cheeky slogans like "It's ugly, but it gets you there."
Alabama officials tell NPR that if the FBI had shared its case file, they would have investigated the James Reeb murder case while one of the assailants was still alive.
A civic initiative is commemorating those who were murdered under the rule of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, whom many Russians now admire for defeating Nazi Germany and making his nation a superpower.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Jack Fairweather about his new book, The Volunteer, which chronicles a Polish man who volunteered to go to Auschwitz in order to start a resistance movement there.
Dozens of technicians and flight controllers piled into the firing room at NASA's Kennedy Space Center to count down the launch of Apollo 11. Among the sea of people, JoAnn Morgan was the only woman.
If you are born in the United States, citizenship is a birthright. But if you immigrate to this country, the work of the citizenship process culminates in the reciting of an oath.
Author Chris DeRose's examination of "sex, murder and the trial that changed America" shows that glorification of true crime and parstisan rancor is nothing new to American politics.
Cokie Roberts answers listener questions and talks with NPR's Rachel Martin about the role women played in America's fight for independence from Great Britain.
Midnight In Chernobyl author Adam Higginbotham spent years investigating the 1986 explosion and its aftermath. He says design flaws, human hubris and Soviet secrecy all contributed to the disaster.
NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with Matt Delmont, professor of history at Dartmouth College, about the history of busing and how it affects school segregation to this date.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Chizu Omori, who was forced as a child to move to an internment camp for Japanese-Americans. She's now protesting detention of immigrant children in the U.S.
NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with journalist and filmmaker David France about how Stonewall gave rise to a new kind of activism in the gay community, which helped them tackle the AIDS crisis.
