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UNSUNG HISTORY

A podcast about people and events in American history you may not know much about. Yet.

 

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Recent Episodes

March 18, 2024

Eliza Scidmore

Journalist Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore traveled the world in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, writing books and hundreds of articles about such places as Alaska, Japan, China, India, and helping shape the journal of the Nat...

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March 11, 2024

Foreign Missionaries & American Diplomacy in the 19th Century

In 1812, when the United States was still a young nation and its State Department was tiny, American citizens began heading around the world as Christian missionaries. Early in the 19th Century, the US government often saw mi...

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March 4, 2024

Tammany Hall, FDR & the Murder of Vivian Gordon

In 1931, Judge Samuel Seabury was leading an investigation for Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt into corruption in New York’s magistrate courts when a witness in the investigation named Vivian Gordon was found murdered in the B...

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Feb. 26, 2024

The Combahee River Raid of 1863

Starting in November 1861, the Union Army held the city of Beaufort, South Carolina, using the Sea Islands as a southern base of operations in the Civil War. Harriet Tubman joined the Army there, debriefing freedom seekers wh...

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Feb. 19, 2024

The History of Ice in the United States

Today, Americans consume 400 pounds of ice a year, each. That would have been unfathomable to people in the 18th century, but a number of innovators and ice barons in the 19th and 20th centuries changed the way we think …

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Feb. 12, 2024

The History of Blue Jeans

If you’re like most Americans – or most people on earth – you have a pair of jeans, or maybe five, in your wardrobe. There’s a decent chance you’re wearing jeans right now. These humble pants were invented by a …

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Feb. 5, 2024

The History of Pinball

In January 1942, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia sent New York City police out on an important mission; their objective: to find and destroy tens of thousands of pinball machines. But some of pinball’s most important innovations, i...

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Jan. 29, 2024

The History of US Foreign Disaster Relief

In 1812, the United States Congress voted to provide $50,000 to assist victims of a horrific earthquake in the far-away country of Venezuela. It would be another nine decades before the US again provided aid for recovery effo...

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Jan. 22, 2024

LSD, the CIA & the History of Psychedelic Science

In 1938, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally developed the potent psychedelic LSD, although it would be several years before Hofmann realized what he’d created. During the Cold War, the CIA launched a top-secret mind co...

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Jan. 15, 2024

Clotilda: The Last U.S. Slave Ship

In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the last slave ship landed in the United States from Africa. The transatlantic slave trade had been illegal in the US since 1808, but Alabama enslaver Timothy Meaher and his friends …

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About the Host

Kelly Therese PollockProfile Photo

Kelly Therese Pollock

Producer & Host

Kelly has always been the kind of person who asks questions — lots of questions — to anyone who will listen and answer. With a BA in Religious Studies from Northwestern University and an MA in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara (where she wrote a thesis on feminist witches), Kelly has turned her questioning to politics and history where she digs deep into stories that aren’t getting enough attention.

By day Kelly is an administrator at the University of Chicago, where she has worked since 2004.

Kelly lives on the southside of Chicago with her husband, two kids, and two cats. When she’s not podcasting or working you can find Kelly with knitting needles in her hands. If she could knit and podcast at the same time she would.