From the Bowery Boys website:

"Manhattan's Chinatown is unique among New York neighborhoods as its origins and its provocative history can still be traced in many of the buildings and streets still in existence. Two hundred years ago, the sight of a Chinese person would have astonished New Yorkers, and the first to arrive in the city were either sailors or the subjects of tacky exhibition.

But with the first Chinese men setting on Mott Street, a new community was born, with thriving variety shops, cigar businesses and gambling dens alongside establishments of a more sensuous nature -- opium dens and brothels. This mini-economy produced social clubs and secret societies (the legendary ‘tongs’), and rival gangs soon spilled blood along the neighborhood's quirkiest lane.

And still today, modern Chinatown hides a few dark, startling secrets of its own.

ALSO: We give you a rundown of addresses along Mott Street and other places nearby. You can use this podcast as your official walking tour of Chinatown!"

Eric Arnesen, Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Chicago addresses the interplay between the African-American experience between Reconstruction and the Great Migration, the U.S. Constitution, and shifting democratic ideals.

Audio and video options are available.

Journalist Kirstin Downey talks about Frances Perkins, the subject of her book The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. As secretary of labor during FDR's presidency, Perkins initiated social-welfare reforms in areas including unemployment, child labor, immigration, and work-week length.

This presentation, narrated partially from the perspective of Sallie Hester, a young girl heading across the U.S. to California with her family, looks at the journey of settlers across the American West.

Dr. Peter Black, the Chief Historian of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, explores the response in the United States to the events of the Holocaust era, focusing on the issues of immigration, pre-war refugee policy, and wartime rescue policy.

According to the Library of Congress website, "As "colonists" in 19th-century Russia, Mennonites sang German diasporic choral music and borrowed Russian choral music; when war drove many to North America, Mennonites drew on this repertoire and borrowed new repertoires to forge links to a new elite: North American classical choral singing circles. In this webcast, Jonathan Duek, an ethnomusicologist and visiting assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Music, traces this story not as a linear narrative, but as genealogical fragments, beginning with the resonances of particular songs for present-day Mennonite writers, historians, and singers; and then exploring past moments of the production and reception of these songs in Russia and North America."

Author Danny Cassidy describes the origins of the word "dude," which he claims first came into use in late 19th-century New York among the Irish immigrant community.