A panel discusses the documentary television series American Experience: Eyes on the Prize, which uses contemporary interviews and historical footage to follow the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1985, following a preview screening. The discussion focuses on the creation of the series and what its creators hoped to achieve.

An mp3 of the discussion audio is available for download.

Author and professor Howard Zinn and professor James Green look at the Chicago Haymarket Riot of May 1886, in which a bomb killed several policeman at a Chicago labor rally, and the resulting trial and executions. They also discuss the history of the working class in the U.S. generally.

Historian Elizabeth Riely explores Benjamin Franklin's fascination with the wild turkey, including his desire to see the turkey made the national symbol. She touches on the history of European discovery of the turkey.

Former U.S. ambassador Michael Novak and wife and co-author Jana Novak examine the religious beliefs of George Washington and their impact on his life and roles as general and president.

Father-and-son writers Steven and Paul Kendrick discuss the legal establishment of segregation (the concept of "separate but equal"), tracing it back to 1847. In that year, an African-American man sued the city of Boston, wanting his daughter to be able to attend a school closer to her home than the nearest all-black school. He was eventually defeated.

Scholar Jeffrey Matthews explores the life of Alanson B. Houghton, American industrialist, politician, and diplomat (to Germany, 1922-1925, and to Great Britain, 1925-1929). Houghton uses this exploration to examine U.S. foreign policy between World War I and World War II, citing Houghton's criticism of policy under Presidents Harding and Coolidge.

Audio and video options are available.

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"The Cold War was more than the product of post-World War II tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, argues John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University. Rather, it was the product of events extending all the way back to the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that Russia and the United States would become the world's foremost powers. In this lecture, delivered at the Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminar 'The Cold War,' Gaddis examines U.S.-Soviet relations from the nineteenth century through the end of World War II, tracing the myriad causes of the Cold War."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"Has the idea of American exceptionalism hobbled the study of American history? NYU University Professor of the Humanities Thomas Bender argues that it has. A study of American history taking into account world events and viewpoints, he argues, would result in a more contextualized and cosmopolitan discipline, helping historians to better understand what happened in American history and why, but also what it means. Bender traces the study of history from the 'men of letters' historians of the nineteenth century to historians of the Cold War and the present day, explaining how calls for a more worldly American history curriculum have been rebuffed."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"In this lecture, Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, traces Franklin's career from his early days as an apprentice in his brother's Boston print shop to his involvement, at the age of eighty-four, with the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Franklin was an autodidact, self-taught in every field he entered, but the virtue that he most embodied, Isaacson argues, was tolerance. The ultimate self-made man, Franklin's life remains essentially American."