Listen
Featured story: Meet Miss Subways
Beauty pageants promote the fantasy of the ideal woman. But for 35 years, the Miss Subways contest in New York City celebrated the everyday working girl.
Listen
Featured story: The Gospel Ranger
Outside the Appalachian mountains, his name was barely known. But Claude Ely influenced some of the pioneers of rock & roll.
Listen
Featured story: Mandela’s Election: 30 Years Later
Mandela was a lawyer, freedom fighter, leader of the African National Congress, and finally, president.
History
History
History
Diaries We give people tape recorders and help them document their own lives in their own words
Going Home: Cristel’s Diary
At 15, Cristel attacked a classmate with a razor blade. After 3 years of incarceration, she’s being released.
Listen
Melissa: 16 Years Later
As an 18 year old raised in the foster care system, Melissa took NPR listeners along when she gave birth to her son Issaiah. Sixteen years later she chronicles her life as a working single mother.
ListenPortraits Extraordinary stories from ordinary places
Lockdown in Lockup
Moe Monsuri shares his experience of the pandemic from behind bars at Sing Sing prison. Part of our new series Hunker Down Diaries.
Listen
The Last Man on the Mountain
In the 1990s, Arch Coal began mining Pigeonroost Hollow. Now Jimmy Weekley is the last person left there.
ListenHistories Exploring the past to tell the History of Now.
Soweto 1976
On June 16th, 1976, in South Africa, a group of school children in the black township of Soweto held a protest and changed the course of a nation.
Listen
Prisoners Of War
During the war in Vietnam, there was a notorious American prison on the outskirts of Saigon…a prison for American soldiers.
Listen
