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19TH Century 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 Na…
Guest: Diana Parsell
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 m…
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 w…
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 abou…
Guest: Amy Brady
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 Reno tailor i…
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 eff…
Guest: Julia Irwin
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 were…
Guest: Hannah Durkin
Jan. 8, 2024

The History of Mormonism

In 1830, amid the Second Great Awakening in the burned-over district of New York State, Joseph Smith, Jr., and Oliver Cowdery ordained each other as the first two elders in what they then called the Church of Christ. Within …
Guest: Benjamin Park
Nov. 27, 2023

Black Civil Rights before the Civil Rights Movement

The beginning of the Civil Rights Movement is often dated to sometime in the middle of the 1950s, but the roots of it stretch back much further. The NAACP, which calls itself “the nation's largest and most widely recognized …
Nov. 20, 2023

The Long History of the Chicago Portage

When Europeans arrived in the Great Lakes region, they learned from the Indigenous people living there of a route from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, made possible by a portage connecting the Chicago River and the Des Plaines…
Nov. 13, 2023

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy

Before Europeans landed in North America, five Indigenous nations around what would become New York State came together to form the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. When the Europeans arrived, the French called them the Iroquois C…
Oct. 23, 2023

The History & the Present of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe

During the 19th Century, the Northern Cheyenne people made a number of treaties with the United States government, but the U.S. repeatedly failed to honor its end of the treaties. In November 1876, the U.S. Army, still fumin…
Sept. 25, 2023

The Murder of Maria Cornell

When farmer John Durfee found the body of a local factory girl hanging from a fence post on his property on the morning of December 21, 1832, he and the rest of the townspeople assumed she had died by suicide. But a cryptic …
Guest: Bruce Dorsey
Sept. 4, 2023

Thomas Smallwood and the Underground Railroad

Over the course of just one year in the early 1840s, Thomas Smallwood, a recently emancipated Black man, with the assistance of the New England educated white abolitionist Charles Torrey, arranged for around 400 enslaved peo…
Guest: Scott Shane
July 24, 2023

History of Black Women & Physical Fitness in the United States

In 1894, Mary P. Evans, wrote in the Woman’s Era , a Black women’s magazine, that exercise: “enables you to keep in the best condition for work with the hands or with the brain… It prepares you to meet disappointment, sorrow…
Guest: Ava Purkiss