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To honor the voices stilled when the Twin Towers were destroyed Sept. 11, a team of independent radio producers set out to compile a "sonic memorial" -- an audio project commemorating the life and history of the World Trade Center. This story introduces that project.

Illegal street racing made headlines on Saturday when eight spectators were killed on a stretch of highway in Maryland. Drag racing experts — including a paramedic and a former racer — discuss the history and culture of the risky, underground pastime.

Oscar Brown Jr. travels the United States to tell stories of African-American history. His song "Bid 'Em In" — in which he plays the part of a slave auctioneer — prompted an animated short film now eligible for an Oscar. Hear Brown and NPR's Tavis Smiley.

When a brutal regime ends, those who survive are often left with feelings of guilt, anger and confusion. With the fall of Saddam Hussein, a group of Iraqi-born activists have created the Iraq Memory Foundation to help Iraqis come to terms with their past.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, millions of students in driver's education classes watched films that offered a grisly brand of highway safety education -- they used actual footage of bodies twisted by car crashes to instill the fear of reckless road behavior. A new documentary called Hell's Highway tracks the history of these shock-value films. NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with director Bret Wood.

Personal accounts and reflections of individuals affected by the Iraq war. Mandy Terc is a master's student in Middle Eastern studies at Harvard. The 25-year-old Chicago native is in Beirut taking Arabic classes and working on an oral history project about Palestinian refugees. This week, Terc attended a candlelight vigil in downtown Beirut. She was with a few of her American friends, each holding a sign with a message protesting the war in Iraq. Her sign read "Americans Say Regime Change Starts At Home."

An Israeli woman and a Palestinian man find lifelong friendship in a search for understanding. In The Lemon Tree, Sandy Tolan ties a story of two families and the house that connected them, to the history of the Mideast conflict.

In 2002, a federal judge ruled that the "under God" portion of the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional because it violated the separation of church and state. An uproar ensued. But as Richard J. Ellis, author of To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance, points out in his book, those words were not included in the pledge when it was written in 1892 — they were added in 1950. Ellis is the Mark O. Hatfield Professor of Politics at Willamette University in Salem, Ore.

Danny Perasa proposed to Annie, his future wife, on their first date 27 years ago, and she accepted. The Brooklyn couple's story is the latest from StoryCorps, a project that records oral histories at New York City's Grand Central Terminal.

Journalist Pico Iyer has a long history meeting with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet who lives in exile in India. Iyer joins Fresh Air to discuss how the Dalai Lama is responding to the current Tibetan uprising and protest against Chinese rule.