Appreciate the additional sources. I share your skepticism about NPR's take on this sort of thing but have found that sometimes dodgy-but-mainstream sources can still be quite useful for kicking off productive discussions where some of the more salient facts can be explored.

Useful to start discussions, yes! Sometimes risky because they can spread common myths, and it can be very difficult to supplant them. It's so much harder to unlearn something than to learn the right thing the first time, of course.

Safe for Democracy does thorough and sourced deep-dives into the histories of a few American "interventions", disrupting or controlling or supposedly attempting to create democracy in other countries. It goes through the background of the countries, often 100+ years prior to the events in question, and sets the stage thoroughly so that you can get a sense of the cultural forces and context. It also emphasizes the humanity of those involved and what violences were done beyond rattling off death counts so that you can understand the long-term cultural impacts and often genocides involved that are easier to miss if you only hear numbers.