Retro Report

An outbreak of measles that started at Disneyland has turned a spotlight on those who choose not to vaccinate their children. How did we get to a point where personal beliefs can triumph over science?

Weeks before Selma's Bloody Sunday in 1965, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged residents of Gee's Bend, Ala., to vote, and fed a continuing fight over a small ferry that would last for decades.

Should doctors be allowed to help suffering patients die? Twenty-five years ago, with his homemade suicide machine, Dr. Jack Kevorkian raised that question. It's an issue Americans still struggle with today.

Burmese pythons, often released into the wild by well-meaning pet owners, have infested the Florida Everglades and created a reptilian nightmare in the ecosystem.

The story of the first and only interrogator connected to the CIA to be convicted in a torture-related case.

There are over 80,000 chemicals in use today. The story of TRIS, removed from children's pajamas in the 1970s, illustrates just how hard it is to regulate chemicals, or to even know if they're safe.

A 1993 E. coli outbreak linked Jack in the Box hamburgers sickened 700 people and acted as a wake up call about the dangers of food-borne illness. More than 20 years later, how far have we come?

In the 1960s, fears of overpopulation sparked campaigns for population control. But whatever became of the population bomb?

Transgender issues today are rooted in a decades-long struggle for inclusion.

22 years ago, federal agents raided the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and generated a legacy that continues to shape antigovernment groups today.

In the 1980s, many government officials, scientists, and journalists warned that the country would be plagued by a generation of “crack babies.” They were wrong. More than 25 years later, the media is sounding a similar alarm. This is an update to the previous report on the same issue

In 1997, a young British nanny charged with murder brought shaken baby syndrome into the national spotlight, and raised a scientific debate that continues to shape child abuse cases today.

The killing of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School in 1999 continues to shape how we view and understand school shootings today.

Estela de Carlotto has spent nearly four decades searching for her grandson, one of the estimated 500 babies who disappeared after their mothers were taken by the military regime in Argentina in the 1970s.

When Tipper Gore and Susan Baker founded the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), their campaign to put warning labels on albums sparked a debate over censorship and resulted in a dramatic Capitol Hill showdown with musicians like Frank Zappa. Ultimately, the record industry agreed to put parental advisory stickers on explicit albums, and today warning labels are commonly found on everything from music to television to video games. Which leads us to explore some age-old questions when it comes to kids and pop culture: how do we define harm? And who gets to decide?

On Nov. 13, 1982, boxing fans tuned in for a championship bout on national television between Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini of Ohio and South Korean fighter Duk-Koo Kim. It was an epic, 14-round slugfest – and a fight the sport wouldn’t soon forget. Afterward, medical concerns about the brutality of boxing mounted, and the sport’s foothold in mainstream American culture began to slip. Today, stories about brain injuries in football are making headlines with increasingly regularity. Is the most popular sport in America nearing its own inflection point?

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, America’s inner cities were wracked by an epidemic of heroin addiction and the crime that went with it. New York State responded with harsh drug laws, including mandatory minimum sentences up to life in prison for selling just one ounce of heroin. Soon, other states and the federal government adopted similar laws, and the nation’s prisons filled up with non-violent drug offenders, mostly young black men.

The press said that David Vetter was born into a world he could not touch. And there was no truer statement in 1971 when, as an infant, he was placed inside the protective plastic bubble that had been specially built to seal it off. The outside world was toxic to the child, who suffered from a rare genetic defect so nefarious that it could turn even the slightest cold into a death sentence. But, despite this separation, the little boy’s fishbowl life turned him into a symbol of hope and determination for the generation of Americans who watched his story evolve.