During the Civil War and Reconstruction, North Carolina was deeply divided, not only between Union and Confederacy but within its own communities. Secret Unionist organizations such as the Red Strings operated throughout the Piedmont, especially in Quaker and German-influenced regions, resisting Confederate authority, aiding deserters, and sometimes cooperating with the Underground Railroad. These internal conflicts exposed the myth of a unified Confederacy and revealed widespread dissent rooted in class, religion, and geography.

After the war, white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan and later the Red Shirts used organized terror, sexual violence, and political intimidation to overturn Reconstruction governments and suppress Black citizenship and white Unionist influence. Federal intervention through Klan trials briefly challenged this violence, but “Redemption” ultimately restored white Democratic control. The legacy of this era—often minimized or erased—continues to shape historical memory, local identities, and debates over who is remembered as an American “hero.”

Paul Robeson was a quintessential 20th-century Renaissance man whose unparalleled talents as a scholar, athlete, artist, and activist were inextricably linked to his unyielding fight against global white supremacy. His career trajectory, particularly his expatriate success in England and his controversial embrace of the Soviet Union, was a direct response to the systemic racism that defined and ultimately sought to destroy him in his native United States. His confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was not merely a defense of his political beliefs but the culmination of a life spent challenging the legitimacy of a nation that celebrated his gifts while denying his humanity. A figure of immense talent and profound conviction, Robeson rose to global prominence as a two-time All-American football player, a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, a Columbia-educated lawyer, a pioneering actor on stage and screen, and a concert singer with a bass-baritone voice of legendary power and beauty. Yet, these extraordinary accomplishments were perpetually shadowed by the reality of Jim Crow America.

This episode examines millenarianism, a 16th–17th century belief in the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom on Earth. While many Christians expected a divine thousand-year reign, a radical fringe argued that human violence was required to bring it about. Puritan leaders in the Massachusetts Bay Colony rejected this militant approach, drawing a firm line between religious expectation and revolutionary extremism.

Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg on New York’s Lower East Side, was one of the most influential creators in the history of American comics. His experiences as a working-class Jewish kid and as a frontline infantry scout in World War II—where he witnessed fascism firsthand—deeply shaped the moral urgency, brutality, and mythic scale of his art. From Captain America’s punch against Hitler to the cosmic struggles of The Fourth World, Kirby consistently framed power as something to be confronted, not worshipped.

Beyond superheroes, Kirby helped invent entire genres, including romance comics, and fought long, often bitter battles over creative credit and labor rights within the comics industry. His legacy spans Marvel and DC, pop culture and politics, realism and cosmic allegory. Today, Kirby is widely recognized not just as a prolific artist, but as a visionary storyteller whose work fused history, trauma, imagination, and resistance into modern American myth.

The trajectory of American Protestantism in the twentieth century is often narrated through the lens of theological schisms—the Great Reversal, the Scopes Monkey Trial, and the retreat of conservative evangelicals into a subculture of separation. Yet, this narrative is incomplete without accounting for the volatile, gun-toting phenomenon of J. Frank Norris. Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, for over four decades, Norris was not merely a participant in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy; he was its most aggressive combatant, a man who fused the populist rage of the radio age with the frontier justice of the Texas range.

The history of Father Charles Edward Coughlin serves as a singular, harrowing chapter in the narrative of American democracy, religion, and mass media. Rising from the obscurity of a small suburban parish in Michigan to command a weekly radio audience of thirty million listeners, Coughlin became the first true mass-media messiah of the 20th century. His trajectory—from a progressive supporter of the New Deal to a virulent anti-Semite, fascist sympathizer, and seditionist—mirrors the turbulent anxieties of the Great Depression itself. This report offers an exhaustive analysis of Coughlin’s life, his theological and economic radicalization, the paramilitary "Christian Front" he inspired, and the complex geopolitical and ecclesiastical maneuvering required to silence him in 1942.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident stands as the definitive watershed moment in the American involvement in the Vietnam War. Ostensibly comprised of two separate naval engagements in early August 1964 between the United States Navy and the naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), the event catalyzed the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This legislative act granted President Lyndon B. Johnson sweeping executive powers to wage war without a formal declaration, fundamentally altering the constitutional balance of war powers in the United States and setting the nation on a trajectory toward a decade-long conflict that would claim over 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the most damaging antisemitic hoaxes in modern history—a fabricated document created by the Russian secret police and repeatedly used to justify hatred, discrimination, and violence against Jews. Despite being conclusively debunked for over a century, its themes became central to Nazi propaganda, influenced American antisemites such as Henry Ford, and continue to resurface in modern conspiracy movements.

n the 1930s, Detroit and the industrial Midwest became a battleground where corporate power, far-right vigilantism, and labor rebellion collided. The Black Legion, a fascist, Klan-linked terror group, recruited from auto plants and police forces while figures like Harry Bennett used Ford’s security apparatus to violently suppress unions and political dissent.

The Black Legion was a clandestine, violent, far-right vigilante organization active primarily in the Midwest—especially Detroit—during the 1920s and 1930s. Emerging as an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, the group embraced a darker, more openly paramilitary structure. Members wore black robes, took blood-oath initiation rituals, and organized themselves around fantasies of authoritarian rule, racial purity, and “Americanism.”