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20TH 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 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 …
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…
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, …
Guest: Jon Chad
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. 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 c…
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
Jan. 1, 2024

The History of College Radio

Almost as soon as there were radio stations, there were college radio stations. In 1948, to popularize FM radio, the FCC introduced class D non commercial education licenses for low-watt college radio stations. By 1967, 326 …
Dec. 25, 2023

Love Actually & the Healing Power of Christmas Films

What makes a Christmas movie a Christmas movie? How do Christmas movies react to – and help us heal from – collective trauma? How can a British Christmas movie feel quintessentially American? We discuss all that and more thi…
Guest: G. Vaughn Joy
Dec. 18, 2023

Mollie Moon

Stories of the Civil Rights Movement don’t often center the fundraisers, often Black women, whose tireless efforts made the movement possible; today we’re featuring one of those women. Mollie Moon, born in 1907, the founder …
Dec. 11, 2023

Jewish War Brides of World War II

In the ravages of post-World War II Europe, some Jewish women survivors of the Holocaust found the beginnings of a new life when they met – and married – American (and Canadian and British) men serving with the Allied forces…
Guest: Robin Judd
Dec. 4, 2023

Merze Tate

Scholar Merze Tate, born in Michigan in 1905, overcame the odds in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world,” to earn graduate degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University on her way to becoming the firs…
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. 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…