Throughline

The U.S. immigration detention system is spread out across federal facilities, private prisons, state prisons, and county jails. It’s grown under both Democratic and Republican presidents. And it’s been offered up as a source of revenue for over a century, beginning with the first contracts between the federal government and sheriffs along the Canadian border. This episode originally published in September 2025. 

Guest: 

Brianna Nofil, assistant professor of history at The College of William and Mary author of The Migrant's Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration

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To this day, America continues to grapple with the legacy of slavery. On this week’s episode, we explore the creation of slave patrols, which were created to control the movement of enslaved Black people in the 1700s, and how those patrols shaped American society and modern policing. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.

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How Bad Bunny became the global voice of a generation in crisis — and what it means when resistance becomes profitable.

Guests:

Carina Del Valle Schorske, writer, translator and wannabe backup dancer. She wrote a New York Times Magazine profile about Bad Bunny you can read here.

Vanessa Díaz, professor of Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She’s been teaching a Bad Bunny college course 2023 and is the co-creator of the Bad Bunny Syllabus Project. She is also the co-author of P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, professor of Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American History at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He’s the author of Puerto Rico: A National History. He is also the author of  the history visualizers for Bad Bunny’s DTMF album.

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Freedom of the press. The right to assembly. And the right to free speech. The first amendment includes some of the most fundamental and most debated rights. In this episode, we explore how the meaning of free speech has changed throughout history and continues to evolve today.

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In 1871, Ku Klux Klan violence in South Carolina got so bad that the governor sent a telegram to President Ulysses S. Grant warning that he was facing a state of war. Grant sent him Amos Akerman: a former Confederate soldier and slaveholder who became the U.S. government’s most zealous warrior against the KKK.

Guests:

Bernard Powers, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston at the College of Charleston in South Carolina

Guy Gugliotta, author of Grant's Enforcer, Taking Down the Klan

Kidada Williams, professor of history at Wayne State University and author of I Saw Death Coming, A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction

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