5. Blog grid – background overlap

Since our second president, John Adams, inhabited the White House, it has been burned by British troops, reconstructed, expanded, and gut-renovated. Mo Rocca looks at the history of a cherished American landmark, which this past week was partly demolished …

As America approaches its 250th birthday, bestselling biographer and historian Walter Isaacson reflects on the message of the Declaration of Independence, and how it is just as vital to us today as it was in 1776.

For decades, John Monsky’s passion has been collecting American flags – from those that accompanied soldiers during the Civil War and on the beaches of France on D-Day, to ones that landed on the Moon. He tells Mo Rocca that the flags in his collection …

In December 1953, Thurgood Marshall, an attorney who headed the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that racial segregation in America was an attempt to keep the formerly enslaved in “as near that stage as is possible …

David Pogue looks at the pioneering spirit of innovation that Thomas Edison fostered at his R&D facility in Menlo Park, N.J., where his team helped create the light bulb and the phonograph. He also talks with Google’s Steven Johnson and the panel …

Over the past several decades, the checks-and-balances of our government have been increasingly tested in ways our founding fathers never anticipated. Tony Dokoupil talks with Jill Lepore, author of “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution,…