The Cold War was a decades-long military conflict that dominated geopolitics in the latter half of the 20th century. And as Americans, we often see it framed as a binary conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union; one that ended around the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

The United States is still reckoning with its history of racism. For a century after slavery ended, US businesses, banks, schools, and neighborhoods were segregated by race. It took a series of Supreme Court cases and acts of Congress to legally ban discrimination based on race, but discrimination isn’t just a switch that can be turned from “on” to “off.” The legacy of these unfair laws still affect Black Americans today.

There is a fundamental duality in how Asian Americans are perceived in our country. They’ve at times been held up as the “model minority”, affirming this idea that the American Dream is alive and well if only immigrants could work harder. At other times they’ve been regarded as threatening and perpetually foreign. A recent example of this is the dramatic rise in anti-Asian violence in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic.

American food is unlike anything else in the world. And it goes a lot deeper than hamburgers and pizza. The thing that makes American food special is the stunning variety of options and how accessible it is to the average consumer. Also some regional American dishes that are impossible to find anywhere else on the planet

It’s no secret that society will eventually have to transition away from fossil fuels. Some governments and businesses think the answer is biofuels,like ethanol. Ethanol is a type of alcohol—the same type of alcohol that humans have been producing for millenia. And so, in much of the world, the techniques to produce ethanol are already known and exploited. All it takes is the fermentation of sugary crop, like potatoes, corn, or sugarcane. The result is a clear liquid fuel that can power engines, similar to gasoline.

For centuries, Iran had a strict social hierarchy that prevented women—particularly upper class women—from participating in public life. This started to change in the early 20th century when Iranians became disillusioned with the ruling class and had a constitutional revolution. This new constitution established a parliament, public schools, and also opened the door for women to start asserting their own rights to education and employment.

There’s a lot of evidence that America is more divided than ever. Our politics, media, and ideologies are so polarized that it puts a stress on our unity as a country. But Dr. Denis Lacorne says that, in spite of that tension, America’s strength comes from our nation’s commitment to tolerance. The trick is figuring out the balance of tolerating the intolerant.

The Founders of the United States envisioned the presidency as an office that would be minimal in reach. They didn’t want the USA to be a monarchy.

Thousands of protestors joined Indigenous activists at Standing Rock to fight for clean drinking water. At its core, this fight echoes the legacy of broken treaties and settler industrialization. Producer Lily Sones talks with Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) about how industrialization halted traditional indigenous food ways and how extractive industries cause health effects across today’s indigenous communities.

The Greek poet Archilochus said “a fox knows many things, a hedgehog knows one big thing.”

This phrase inspired a famous essay by a 20th century philosopher named Isaiah Berlin, who said that pretty much all people can be categorized as either “foxes” or “hedgehogs”. Foxes tend to be agile and perceptive, whereas hedgehogs tend to be resolute and hyper-focused on their end goal.

With a name like “The United States of America”, it can be easy to forget that this country’s borders extend well beyond the fifty states of the union. In fact, millions of American citizens live on US territory well outside those borders. It’s not just Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and the North Mariana Islands, but the many military bases we occupy across the globe too.

A hundred years ago, there were roughly 2 billion people in the world. Today, there are almost 8 billion.

This rapid quadrupling of the world’s population has people asking, is the planet overpopulated? Some say, yes. Others say that it’s not so simple.

In the spring of 2021, UnTextbooked producer Gavin Scott read a headline that made his heart sink. The remains of 215 indigenous children were discovered buried in a mass grave near the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia. Over the next few months, more mass graves were found outside of other Canadian residential schools.

One morning in 1991, Senator Jesse Helms’ house was covered with a giant fake condom in an act of protest. Helms had been a vocal opponent of funding AIDS research and he had introduced an infamous and popular bill amendment that prevented federal money from being spent on AIDS research. There were few treatments available at the time, and with no help from the government, HIV was actively spreading across the country. In 1991 alone, nearly 30,000 American died of AIDS, and the numbers would keep rising until the late nineties.

The War On Terror is the longest foreign war the United States has ever fought. So long that many of the soldiers fighting weren’t even alive when it started. But the WoT seems unusual for another reason—it’s not a war on a nation, or even an organization—it’s a war against a concept.