Professor Eliot Cohen examines the relationship between President Harry S. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur. In 1951, during the Korean War, President Truman relieved General MacArthur of his command. This class is from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

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This discussion is from a conference on "The Presidency and Civil Rights'' held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Among the topics: What was FDR's reasoning on the World War II internment of Japanese Americans? Why did President Truman desegregate the Armed Forces?And -- in addition to his role protecting the rights of Little Rock High School students -- what other civil rights actions did President Eisenhower take while in the Oval Office?  

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After his grandfather’s death, Harry Truman worked on his family’s 600 acre Missouri farm. In the 12 years he worked the farm before he left to serve during World War I, Truman proposed to his childhood friend, Bess, joined the Masons and the National Guard and honed his skills as a negotiator—all of which proved to be assets in his later political career. University of Central Missouri History Professor Jon Taylor talks about this rarely discussed period of the president’s life.

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A symposium exploring civil liberties and the Truman Administration brought scholars together in Key West, Florida – home to Harry Truman’s vacation White House.

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President Clinton, former presidents and others paid tribute to President Truman's leadership during the end of World War Two and the beginning of the Cold War. He became president on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died.

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Metropolitan State University professor Douglas Rossinow teaches a class on the Iran-Contra affair, which took place in the mid-1980s during the Reagan Administration. The Iran-Contra affair stems from Reagan administration officials funding the Contras - who were fighting against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua - with money from the sale of arms to Iran. The arms were being sold to Iran in the hope of gaining the release of American hostages held in Lebanon - hence the reason the affair is sometimes called as the “arm-for-hostages” scandal. Metropolitan State University is in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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Forty years ago, in May 1973, a U.S. Senate Select Committee began its nationally televised hearings on Watergate. James McCord was one of the five men arrested a year earlier attempting to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. McCord was security director for the 1972 Committee to Re-elect President Nixon, and was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in January 1973. In this portion, Committee Chair Sam Ervin questioned McCord about his January 1973 conversation with Jack Caulfield, a former White House aide.

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Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a former slave who became a Union spy in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. She was part of a pro-Union underground spy ring run by Elizabeth Van Lew, the daughter of a prominent Richmond citizen. In this program, authors Elizabeth Varon and Lois Leveen talk about the life and story of Ms. Bowser, as well as her relationship with Ms. Van Lew. The two authors also discuss how they wrote and researched their books. The event took place at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

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