Brian Balogh

Reparations for African-Americans has been a hot topic on the presidential campaign trail, but the debate goes back centuries.

A conversation with the lead designer of the 1985 version of the Oregon Trail video game.

A look back at the so-called “Spanish Flu," how it affected the U.S., and why it’s often overlooked today.

The extremes to which Puerto Rican national Pedro Albizu Campos and his followers fought for independence.

The founder of the Olympic Project for Human Rights talks about the iconic protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the winners’ podium in 1968.

On this episode of BackStory, Brian sits down with Ed to talk about a project of his that’s been twenty-five years in the making.

Why Pilgrims would be stunned by our "traditional" Thanksgiving table, and other surprising truths about the invention of our national holiday.

On the Oneida Community, a radical religious organization practicing “Bible communism,” and eventually, manufacturing silverware.

In the 1960s, civil rights activist Floyd McKissick successfully sold President Nixon on an idea of a black built, black-owned community in North Carolina.

In the 1820s, Sarah Hale, a New England widow and the editor of Godey’s Ladies Book made it her mission to get Thanksgiving recognized as a national holiday.

In the 1930s, 16 African-American families from the South rejected the American experiment and looked to Communist Uzbekistan for a chance to build a new world.

On the Loyalists who fled during the Revolutionary War – like Jacob Bailey, who saw freedom from tyranny with the British in Nova Scotia.

The story of America's oldest counterfeiters and why the Civil War spurred the Secret Service into hunting them down.

Looking for an easy buck, con artists in the early 1900s infamously "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge to immigrants fresh off the boat.

Senator Fred Harris describes his experience on the Kerner Commission, tasked with explaining the causes of urban riots in 1967.

The story of the thousands of free-range pigs who managed New York’s waste in the 1800s.

How big business lies behind early efforts to encourage Americans to recycle.

A discussion of the booming 19th-century trade in scrap metal.

The story of an unofficial, integrated delegation from Mississippi that attempted to claim seats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and was denied.

How feminists transformed Valium from a wonder drug to a symbol of medical sexism.