With Good Reason

In October 2002, filling up a gas tank or loading groceries into the car brought fear to many residents of metropolitan Washington, D.C. region.  Over the course of three weeks, two snipers killed 10 people and injured three others in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia.  Jack Censer (George Mason University) in his new book “On the [...]

The federal government unveiled a 12 billion dollar initiative last summer to add 5 million new community college graduates by 2020.   Frank Friedman (Piedmont Virginia Community College) says community college enrollment has exploded during the recession, but colleges are struggling to keep up with the demand for faculty and facilities. Also featured: Realizing that [...]

Women journalists who covered the Vietnam War are often not given their proper due when the history of the conflict is told.  Joyce Hoffman (Old Dominion University) is the author of On Their Own:  Women Journalists in Vietnam. She shares stories of women who won esteemed prizes for their reporting and several who broke [...]

Many historians say the United States government of the nineteenth century did little to improve the lives of its citizens. But Brian Balogh (University of Virginia) argues the federal government was quite active even before the era of big government, and laid the groundwork for America to become a superpower in the twentieth century.   Also: Chris [...]

Think you could pick out a serial killer in a crowd? Mike Aamodt (Radford University) says you couldn’t if your life depended on it.  Aamodt has compiled a database profiling information on more than 1,700 serial killers around the world.  The data were collected, in part, to determine whether the commonly used profile of a [...]

Women journalists who covered the Vietnam War are often not given their proper due when the history of the conflict is told.   Joyce Hoffmann (Old Dominion University) is the author of On Their Own:  Women Journalists in Vietnam. She shares stories of women who won esteemed prizes for their reporting and several who [...]

The last ten years has seen tremendous growth of Latino populations throughout the country.   Silvia Tandeciarz and Jennifer Bickham Mendez (The College of William and Mary) discuss the challenges Latinos face as they integrate into new communities, and the ways in which they are influencing our culture.
Also: Richard J. Kilroy (Virginia Military Institute) says in [...]

Before becoming president, James Madison had already co-authored the “Federalist Papers,” designed the Constitution, and framed the “Bill of Rights.” Garrett Sheldon (UVa-Wise) shares the political philosophy of the man who shaped so many of America’s founding documents. Garrett is the author of The Political Philosophy of James Madison.  Also featured: David Kiracofe (Tidewater [...]

50 years ago, Prince Edward County, Virginia became the only jurisdiction in the nation to close its entire public school system rather than comply with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling to desegregate.  For the next five years, more than 2,000 black children and a number of poor white children were denied a public school education.  [...]

Watch Video: Brain-controlled animation
Interview extra: Listen to Dennis Proffitt, friend & colleague of Randy Pausch, the deceased computer scientist who wrote The Last Lecture, talk about their shared goal of creating technologies that  know what we want BEFORE we ask.