09/13/00: Two brave great-grandmothers
Dispatch introduces Stephanie Elizondo Griest, the 26-year-old Trekker from Corpus Christi, Texas. Stephanie tells the stories of how her great-grandmothers migrated to America from Mexico. Also, she discusses what it was like to grow up in a bicultural family in the Southwest.

09/20/00: The hunt is on!
Stephanie explores remnants of the culture believed to be the oldest in the New World -- the Clovis of Blackwater Draw, New Mexico

09/27/00: So what exactly goes on at a powwow anyway?
Stephanie visits a Powwow in Killeen, Texas, and discusses the dancing, art and fry-bread that she encounters there.

09/30/00: How do you voodoo? The truth beyond the Hollywood myth
Stephanie debunks some of the myths surrounding the ancient African religion of Voodoo by talking to some of its practitioners.

10/07/00: You go, colonial girl wonder!
Stephanie explores the struggles and triumphs of colonial women, highlighting the life and times of esteemed South Carolinian Eliza Lucas Pinckney.

10/11/00: How would you like to speak French instead of English?
Stephanie examines how the United States escaped being a French-speaking nation by exploring the Natchez Rebellion of 1729.

Stage Two: The Birth of the U.S.

10/21/00: War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Huh!
Stephanie examines the battle at Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina - the last major skirmish of the American Revolution prior to the British surrender at Yorktown - as experienced by a common soldier.

Stage Three: Expansion & Reaction

11/04/00: Three wars, thousands of troops and 100 utterly unconquerable Seminoles
Covers the US government's efforts to remove Seminoles from St. Augustine and Lake Okeechobee, Florida to the West.

11/04/00: Sequoyah's talking leaves, or how the Cherokees took back their voices
Kids version of Stephanie's Cherokee dispatch, where a student imagines he or she is an American Indian child suddenly placed into a boarding school run by white men and women.

11/08/00: The Alamo's top tall tales
Stephanie debunks the many myths of the Alamo and ponders why our culture creates such tall-tales in the first place.

Stage Four: Civil War & Reconstruction

12/09/00: Dred Scott: "a simple man who wanted to be free"
Stephanie examines the life and times of African- American slave Dred Scott and how his quest for freedom led to a Supreme Court ruling that spurred the start of the Civil War.

12/20/00: Taking freedom back
Stephanie examines Reconstruction from the African American perspective. Topics covered include the Black Codes passed in the South and the subsequent race riots, with a focus on the Memphis Massacre of 1866.

Stage Five: Transformation of the United States

01/03/01: Segregation and how the South kept its evil ways
Stephanie examines Jim Crow laws and explores current manifestations of racial segregation at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss).

01/13/01: Sweet sugar's evil, mean streak
After examining the events leading to the sugarcane strikes of Thibodaux, Louisiana, Stephanie explores labor unions such as the Knights of Labor and the Colored Farmer's Alliance to discover how their policies affected the plight of African Americans and ultimately led to the founding of the Populist Party.