20TH Century Episodes

Paris has a long history as the fashion capital of the world. In the late 19th Century, American women, like European women, wanted the latest in French fashion. The wealthiest women traveled to Paris regularly to visit their favorite couturiers, like the House of Worth and Maison Félix, to update their wardrobes. For those women who couldn’t afford to travel, Paris came to them, via international expositions, magazines, and department stores. I’m joined in this episode by art historian Dr. E...

In June 1913, a group of four men ascended to the peak of Denali, the first humans known to have reached the highest point in North America. In a time before ultra lightweight and high-tech equipment, Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens, Robert Tatum, and Walter Harper had to haul heavy loads of food and supplies and books up the mountain with them, battling fire and clearing away earthquake debris along the way. After nearly two months of expedition, they finally stood atop the world. I’m joined in...

When German troops invaded Austria in 1938, Cordelia Dodson was visiting Vienna, living with her siblings as they studied German, attended the opera, and marched with Austrian students protesting against Hitler. Even with this experience, Cordelia may have settled into academic life in the United States, but when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and the US entered the war, she felt called to serve her country. In a decades-long career in Europe, Cordelia Dodson Hood combined her linguistic skill, her...

In 1967, a Cleveland talent agent named Sid Friedman decided to capitalize on the popularity of football in the rust belt by launching a women’s football league, which he envisioned as entertainment, complete with mini-skirts and tear-away jerseys. The women he recruited had other ideas, and soon they were playing competitive tackle football, not in skirts but in football uniforms. In 1974, the owners of several teams around the country, some from Friedman’s WPFL and some independent of it, f...

Born in 1911, Mildred Ella Didrikson Zaharias, who went by the nickname “Babe,” was a phenomenal, and confident athlete. Babe won Olympic gold in track and field, was an All American player in basketball, pitched in exhibition games in Major League Baseball, and won 17 straight women’s amateur golf tournaments, before turning pro and co-founding the LPGA.In a society that didn’t welcome women like Babe, she nonetheless forged her own path and won the hearts of fans along the way. I’m joined i...

When the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee (or Creek), and Seminole Nations – known as “The Five Civilized Tribes” by white settlers – were forcibly moved from their lands in the Southeastern United States to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), they brought their possessions with them, including the people of African descent whom they had enslaved. After the Civil War, these slaves were freed and freedpeople were included in the allocation of Native lands undertaken by the Dawes Com...

Poet, essayist, and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson is perhaps best known as the widow of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, but she is a remarkable figure in her own right. Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who had only recently been freed from slavery and an unknown father, Alice graduated from Straight University (later Dillard University), became a teacher, and quickly started her own writing career. Throughout her life, Alice continued to teach and to write and to speak out on issues of women...

On February 14, 1945, after crossing the Atlantic Ocean and surviving a run-in with a Nazi U-Boat, the women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion disembarked the Île-de-France in Glasgow, Scotland. The task awaiting the only all-Black, all-female battalion overseas during World War II was daunting. There were airplane hangars filled with a backlog of millions of pieces of mail sitting in Birmingham, England, addressed from friends and family to service members stationed across Eur...

In fall 1947 the Shell Oil Company hired a Women’s Travel Director named Carol Lane, who served in the role until she retired in 1974. Lane’s job was to encourage women to travel, showing them the joys of touring the country by car. Lane herself traveled around the United States and Canada, speaking to women’s clubs and on radio and TV, giving travel tips and packing demonstrations. Eventually, she even awarded women who developed local travel safety programs with the Carol Lane Award. So who...

The rise of Nazism before World War II wasn’t limited to Germany. The German-Americna Bund (Amerikadeutscher Volksbund) formed in Buffalo, New York, in 1936, to promote a favorable view of Nazi Germany. It quickly grew to 70 local groups around the country, with 20 training camps where kids aged 8-18 practiced military drills and wore Nazi-style uniforms. By 1939, 20,000 people attended the Bund’s Pro American Rally in Madison Square Garden. When Prohibition ended in 1933, Jewish American gan...

In February, 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, a small group of unionized workers at the Electric Auto-Lite company of Toledo, Ohio, went on strike. When management failed to sign a promised contract by the April 1 deadline, more workers went on strike. And this time they had help from the Unemployed League. What started as a small walkout turned into a massive demonstration by 10,000 strikers, and a battle with the Ohio National Guard, and is now regarded as one of the most important ...

In September 1915, four suffragists set off from the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California, in a brand-new Overland 6 convertible to make the 3,000-mile drive across the country to deliver a petition for women’s suffrage to President Woodrow Wilson on the opening day of Congress in December. Along the way they faced illness, terrible driving conditions, and opposition to women’s suffrage. Joining me to help us learn more about the road trip, and especially the u...

From September 1942 to December 1944, over 1000 American women served in the war effort as Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), flying 80% of all ferrying missions and delivering 12,652 aircraft of 78 types. They also transported cargo, test flew planes, demoed aircraft that the male pilots were scared to fly, simulated missions, and towed targets for live anti-aircraft artillery practice. The WASP did not fly in combat missions, but their work was dangerous, and 38 were killed in accidents. Ev...

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was born in China in 1896 but lived most of her life in the United States, where, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, she had no path to naturalization until the law changed in 1943. Even though it would not benefit her for decades, Mabel Lee worked for women’s suffrage, leading the New York City Suffrage Parade on horseback at the age of only 16. Lee was the first Chinese woman to earn a PhD in Economics in the United States, graduating from Columbia University in 1921 with a d...

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1905, artist Loïs Mailou Jones’s career spanned much of the 20th Century as both a painter and a teacher of generations of Black artists at Howard University. Jones faced racial discrimination in the US throughout much of her long life, and found refuge and inspiration in the Harlem Renaissance Movement and in the expatriate community of Black artists in Paris. Her 1953 marriage to Haitian artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel, and later research trips to Africa...

In Autumn of 1621, a group of Pilgrims from the Mayflower voyage and Wampanoag men, led by their sachem Massasoit, ate a feast together. The existence of that meal, which held little importance to either the Pilgrims or the Wampanoag, is the basis of the Thanksgiving myth. The myth, re-told in school Thanksgiving pageants and TV shows, is not accurate and is harmful to Native people, especially to the Wampanoag. In 1970, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts planned a banquet to celebrate the 350...

Before the arrival of Europeans, the Ojibwe nation occupied much of the Lake Superior region, including what is now Ontario in Canada and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in the United States. In 1850, President Zachary Taylor’s administration, in response to demands from European Americans, planned to force the Ojibwe of Wisconsin west of the Mississippi in violation of signed treaties. They planned to bring the Ojibwe to Minnesota from Wisconsin in late fall so that they would have to sta...

Prior to World War II, most of the US military deemed the territory of Alaska as militarily unimportant, to the point where the Alaska National Guard units were stationed instead in Washington state in August of 1941. That changed when the Japanese invaded and occupied two Alaskan islands in June of 1942. The US government responded first by evacuating Unangax̂ villagers and forcibly interning them in Southeast Alaska in facilities without plumbing or electricity for two years where many died...

The late 19th Century ushered in an evolution in women’s fashion from the Victorian “True Woman” whose femininity was displayed in wide skirts and petticoats, the “New Woman” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was modern and youthful in a shirtwaist and bell-shaped skirt. Earlier fashion experimentation by feminists in the mid-19th Century had failed to catch on and had interfered with their ability to inspire change as they were labeled radical for their sartorial choices. Feminists i...

After the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, enfranchising (some) women, lots of questions remained. If women could vote, could they serve on juries? Could they hold public office? What about the array of state-laws that still privileged husbands and fathers over wives and daughters in regard to property and earnings rights? In February 1921, Alice Paul, head of the National Woman’s Party declared: “Now that political freedom has been won, we hope to wipe out sex discrimination in law, so t...

Writer, musician, and political activist Zitkála-Šá, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was born on February 22, 1876, on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where she lived until she was eight. When Zitkála-Šá was eight years old, missionaries came to the reservation to recruit children to go to White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute. Despite her mother’s pleading, Zitkála-Šá begged to go to the school with her older brother. She later wrote that she regretted the decision al...

Nearly 350,000 American women served in the US military during World War II. Although the women in the military didn’t engage in combat their presence was vital to the American effort, in clerical work as well as in driving trucks, operating radios and telephones, repairing and flying planes, and of course, in nursing. Women’s active duty was a temporary wartime measure, but when the war ended, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and General Omar Bradley, among others,...

Over a decade before Julia Child’s The French Chef appeared on TV, a Black woman chef hosted her own, very popular cooking show on WDSU-TV in New Orleans. At a time when families were just beginning to own televisions, Chef Lena Richard’s show was so popular that it aired twice a week. Richard started working as a cook as a teenager for the wealthy Vairin family who employed her mom as a domestic servant. When their cook left, Alice Vairin gave Richard a trial run as cook and was so impressed...

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), in 2018, 13% of the US population was Black and African American, but 42% of new HIV diagnoses in the US were from Black and African American people. This discrepancy is not new. On June 5, 1981, the CDC first published an article in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) titled “Pneumocystis Pneumonia” that suggested that there might be “a cellular-immune dysfunction related to a common exposure that predisposes...