In 2020, doctors, nurses, and aides in hospitals like Long Island Jewish Medical Center treated a brand-new disease with no rulebook to follow, building up emergency care as they went — but the record shows the cost of that work fell hard on the workers…
When a gunman attacked shoppers at an El Paso Walmart in August 2019, an off-duty Border Patrol agent and regular shoppers helped move people to safety and gave first aid — brave acts that happened during a massacre meant to terrorize an entire Hispanic community.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, the federal government gained new tools to remove barriers that had kept many Black Americans from voting. Yet organizers still faced deadly violence.
Four connected scenes show the 1620 agreement, the government it helped organize, the people left outside political power, and the taking of Nauset corn five days later.
A U.S. government program called Operation Warp Speed helped produce working COVID-19 vaccines in under a year — an achievement that also came with real costs: lower public trust tied to the speed itself, and a rare, sometimes fatal, safety problem in one vaccine.
In 2020, informal neighbor-run groups delivered food, medicine, and check-ins to people the official system couldn't reach — but researchers found the volunteers who did this work paid a real personal price.