Inward Empire

 Something strange happened in America at the turn of the 20th century: a society based on individualism began to celebrate identical, replicable people. This episode tells the sto...

 In 1968, Jerry Rubin was sure that the baby boomers were the vanguard of a second American Revolution. A leader of the countercultural Yippies, he pioneered a new kind of absurdis...

In November 1963, a faction of South Vietnamese generals overthrew and assassinated Ngo Dinh Diem with the support of the Kennedy administration. In the final part of this series, ...

After destroying his rivals in the Battle of Saigon, President Diem sets out to build a new nation in South Vietnam. On the one hand he offers land reform and a glittering new midd...

In the 1950s, most Americans viewed the Cold War as a battle between freedom and tyranny. There was just one problem: how to explain alliances with anti-communist authoritarians li...

Back in Saigon in 1954, Ngo Dinh Diem becomes premier of a country shattered by war and partition. With reunification elections looming, Diem barely controls the grounds of his own...

For nine years at the height of the Cold War, America's global crusade against communism rested on the shoulders of Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. Hailed as a "miracle man" who b...

After sending the Molly Maguires to the scaffold in 1877, Pinkerton's National Detective Agency plunged headlong into America's labor conflict. At the vanguard of its war on organi...

Pinkerton's National Detective Agency was 19th-century America's premier private police force, the leader of a flourishing industry that offered solutions to the chaos and corrupti...

In a country as big and diverse as America, stories are crucially important to our sense of common identity. But where do those stories come from, and who creates them? In this epi...

When a railroad employee walks off the job in Baltimore, it triggers a violent chain of events that engulfs the industrialized North. From Pittsburgh to San Francisco, city after c...

If you think 2016 is a turbulent year for the United States, try 1877. The country is, as one observer puts it, "on the edge of a volcano." Four years into a crippling economic cri...