Ed Ayers

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.

John Kelly's statement about the Civil War is not surprising, but they are a reminder that we should still be worrying about the Civil War.

In his latest work of history, Edward Ayers captures daily life along with the military and political moves.

Stripping Virginia of its Lee tributes is far harder than it is in other places.

The Richmond Bread Riot broke out during the Civil War when working-class women in the South became fed up with food shortages.

We often think of the temperance movement as driven by white evangelicals set out to discipline Black Americans and immigrants. That history is wrong.

After Governor Northam announced its removal, two Richmond historians reflect on the legacy of the Lee Monument.

Ed Ayers visits the site where the transcontinental railroad was completed. He considers the project's human costs, and discovers how the environment and photography played key roles on the rails.

Ed Ayers visits public historians in Boston and Philadelphia and explores what “freedom” meant to those outside the halls of power in the Revolutionary era.

A new three-part PBS documentary explores the failure of Reconstruction and the Redemption of the South.

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.

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

How vacations went from being a purview of the rich to an expectation of a rising American middle class.

In 1936, Victor Green published a guide of restaurants, gas stations and lodgings that would accommodate African Americans travelling across the country.

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.

How the state’s past spurred a racial reckoning.

On the diet created by Sylvester Graham, designed to ward off a new kind of “health” threat in the liberal 1830s – a masturbation epidemic.

Adam Shprintzen discusses the 19th-century Americans who saw a vegetarian diet as a powerful tool of moral reform, one that could even put an end to slavery.

Charlotte Biltekoff talks about the rise of calories at the turn of the 20th century and the push to get scientific nutritional ideas into American mainstream.