Did you know national parks intended for the masses are a 19th century invention and a distinctly American one?
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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One of the most horrific episodes in American history occurred on December 29, 1890. The U.S. Cavalry surrounded an encampment of Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and massacred some 300 people. The details of the carnage of the Wounded Knee Massacre are almost unbearable. As Black Elk, the Lakota medicine man who witnessed the massacre, put it, “Something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died." This tragedy is the bleak backdrop for Jonis Agee's new novel, "The Bones of Paradise." Set 10 years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, all the characters in her novel - from white cattle ranchers to the Lakota - are wrestling with the ghosts of the massacre. Agee tells Steve Paulson about the origins of her novel.
There's a great urbanization afoot in China. The government plans to move more than 100 million people into cities by 2020. But there's an old divide between rural and urban citizens. What happens when they become neighbors?
Tom Wolfe reads the opening to "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and explains why it's his favorite.
Today, the Dutch philosopher Spinoza - father of the Enlightenment - is revered, but in the mid-17th century, he was branded a heretic by his Jewish congregation in Amsterdam. Recently, philosopher Steve Nadler was asked if Spinoza should be exonerated. He explains why he said no.
In a small town in northern Wales you'll find a playground where it's normal for kids to play with rusty tools or build fires. It's called the Land, and it's an example of an adventure playground — where kids are free to take risks. The Land's manager, Claire Griffiths, gives us an insider's view of an adventure playground.
Do you believe in love at first sight?
James Bennett says he experienced... well... something like it.
The relationship between poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is discussed by Steve Paulson and Adam Sisman.
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