The Thread

Just before his death in 1910, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy struck up a correspondence with a young lawyer in South Africa named Mohandas Gandhi, one that would change the young Indian’s life. Today Tolstoy is best known for penning War and Peace and Anna Karenina. But the Russian writer’s biggest legacy — and gift to the world — might be his ideas on nonviolent resistance, which emerged after he had a profound spiritual crisis in midlife.

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The Indian lawyer and activist Mohandas Gandhi was the first leader to take up the age-old doctrines of love and nonviolence and transform them into tools of political and social resistance. In doing so, he would inspire Bayard Rustin and other activists across the world. Armed only with love, humility and disobedience, Gandhi brought the most powerful empire on earth to the bargaining table — and eventually to its knees.

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The seasoned activist and Quaker Bayard Rustin was King’s mentor in nonviolence and the organizing genius behind the March on Washington in 1963. Many felt that Rustin was on his way to becoming the “American Gandhi.” There was just one problem: Rustin was gay, and as a result, would be forced to the sidelines of the civil rights struggle, and to the margins of American history.

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Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated after leading the most influential protest movement in American history. King revolutionized the use of nonviolent resistance to combat racial injustice in the United States, but the Alabama preacher did not always believe in nonviolence. In fact, early on, King relied on armed guards for his protection until an older Quaker activist named Bayard Rustin walked into King’s home and changed the direction of the civil rights movement.

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Coming September 10, Season 3 of the Thread will chart how a revolutionary idea--nonviolent resistance--changed the course of history.

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The Hollywood casting couch existed long before Harvey Weinstein. In this final episode of the season, we explore some of Weinstein's antecedents in the industry, the scandals and crimes they covered up and how a new generation of Gloria Steinem-inspired women is starting to put an end to the old practices of Hollywood and other male-dominated industries.

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The film legend Clark Gable was a key figure at the heart of the glamour and excess of the Golden Age of Hollywood. But his rise and scandal-buried reign at the top of the movie world reveal a great deal about a young industry both obsessed with adhering to morality codes, and incapable of being moral.

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In 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Nevada legislature passed two bills: one to legalize gambling, the other to legalize a six-week waiting period for a divorce. Over the next few decades, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, would journey to the desert state for a quickie divorce, a chance to forget their problems and a shot at reinvention.

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Marilyn Monroe was larger than life. But beneath the soft-spoken movie star and sex goddess was another woman, one far bolder than most people realize. Monroe was an actress ahead of her time, one who was not afraid to stand up to some of the most powerful men in Hollywood - the men she called "wolves". 

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Riding the wave of the sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, Hugh Hefner created a male fantasy world in the pages of his Playboy magazine, one that would have lasting consequences for American life and culture. Behind closed doors, however, Hefner's life in the celebrated Playboy Mansion was rather different than the sophisticated one portrayed in his magazine.

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