Extraordinary Stories of Ordinary Life
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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.

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Featured story: Mandela’s Election: 30 Years Later

Mandela was a lawyer, freedom fighter, leader of the African National Congress, and finally, president.

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Featured story: Working, Then and Now

We present a special, one hour episode of our series The Working Tapes of Studs Terkel.

History
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History
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History
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Diaries We give people tape recorders and help them document their own lives in their own words

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Melissa’s Diaries: Teen Mom

Melissa never meant to get pregnant. But now, after 12 years of living in the foster care system, she’s trying to build the family she never had.

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The Last Place: Diary of a Retirement Home

A group of residents of The Presbyterian Home use tape recorders to document their lives.

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Portraits Extraordinary stories from ordinary places

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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.

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Walter Backerman, Seltzer Man

Once there were thousands of seltzer men in New York City. Today, Walter Backerman is one of the last.

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Histories Exploring the past to tell the History of Now.

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Adlai Stevenson: A Candidate in the Age of Television

The 1952 presidential campaign pitted the popular General Dwight D. Eisenhower against the intensely private Adlai Stevenson. It was an election fought on a new battleground: television.

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The Forgotten Story of Clinton Melton

Emmett Till’s murder is considered the spark that ignited a burgeoning Civil Rights movement. But there was another brazen murder of a Black man that happened just three months later, in a neighboring town in the Delta.

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