History

John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction: a true crime story that will terrify anyone who believes in the presumption of innocence....

America after the Civil War was a land of shattered promises and entrenched hatreds....

The dramatic story of the 1925 Scopes trial, which captivated the nation and exposed profound divisions in America that still resonate today—divisions over the meaning of freedom, religion, education, censorship, and civil liberties in a democracy.

How much do you know about the Constitution of the United States or even about those brave men who are considered Founding Fathers? Sure, you may have been forced to read the Declaration of Independence in elementary school but do you even remember its intent? Listen to find out more….

Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America....

The definitive account of the O. J. Simpson trial, The Run of His Life is a prodigious feat of reporting....

Jared Sullivan presents a riveting courtroom drama about the victims of one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history—and the country lawyer determined to challenge the notion that, in America, justice can be bought.

Drawing on never-before-published original source detail, the epic story of two of the most consequential, and largely forgotten, moments in Supreme Court history....

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army....

In 1954, the Supreme Court's Brown decision ended segregated schooling in the United States, but regrettably, as documented in congressional testimony and transcripts, it also ended the careers of a generation of highly qualified and credentialed Black teachers and principals....

In 1974, Pan American Flight 806 was hoping to land safely in Pago Pago, Samoa, but instead plummeted at 140 miles per hour into the jungle floor. The 101 passengers and crew members all survived this devastating crash....

Professor N. Bruce Duthu, J.D., is an internationally recognized scholar on Native American issues....

In this groundbreaking portrait of corporate seizure of political power, We the Corporations reveals how American businesses transformed the Constitution to serve the ends of capital....

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before....

A history of the landmark case of Clarence Earl Gideon's fight for the right to legal counsel....

In Imbeciles, best-selling author Adam Cohen exposes the court’s decision to allow the sterilization of a young woman it wrongly thought to be “feebleminded” and to champion the mass eugenic sterilization of undesirable citizens for the greater good of the country....

When Richard Nixon campaigned for the presidency in 1968, he promised to change the Supreme Court....

Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes....

The Nuremberg Trials were the most important criminal proceedings ever held. They established the principle that individuals will always be held responsible for their actions under international law....

In The Words That Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered....

A documentary drawn from testimony at the Coast Guard’s official inquiry looks anew at one of the most storied, and mysterious, shipwrecks in American history....

An award-winning historian recounts the history of American liberty through the stories of 13 essential documents....

An eye-opening story of America on the edge of revolution, revealing the life of young John Adams and his key role in the trial of the Boston Massacre....

At the end of the summer of 1859, 22-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison went on trial for murder in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln was hired to defend him....

No right seems more fundamental to American public life than freedom of speech. Yet well into the 20th century, that freedom was still an unfulfilled promise....