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20TH Century Episodes

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…
Nov. 6, 2023

Gun Capitalism & Gun Control in the U.S. after World War II

In 1945, the population of the United States was around 140 million people, and those Americans owned an estimated 45 million guns, or about one gun for every three people. By 2023, the population of the United States stood …
Guest: Drew McKevitt
Oct. 30, 2023

The History of the Nutrition Facts Label

If you go to a grocery store in the United States and pick up a box of cereal, you expect to find a white box on the back of the package with information in Helvetica Black about the food’s macronutrients (things like fat an…
Guest: Xaq Frolich
Oct. 16, 2023

The Borinqueneers of the Korean War

In 1950, President Harry Truman ordered US troops to the Korean peninsula to help the South Koreans repel the invading North Korean People’s Army, which was supported by the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China. O…
Oct. 9, 2023

The Student Right in the late 1960s

In the late 1960s, as college campuses became hotbeds of liberal protest, conservative college groups, like the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), and College Republicans,…
Oct. 2, 2023

The History of the National Organization for Women (NOW)

At the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women, a group of women, led by writer Betty Friedan and organizer and attorney Pauli Murray, decided that to make progress they needed to form an independent …
Sept. 11, 2023

The History of Drag in New York City

RuPaul’s Drag Race first aired on TV in 2009, but the New York City drag scene that launched RuPaul started over a century earlier. From drag balls to Wigstock, New York has long been considered the capital of drag culture. …
Aug. 21, 2023

Gladys Bentley

One of the biggest stars in Prohibition Age New York was blues singer Gladys Bentley, who caused a stir in Harlem, wearing a top hat and tails, flirting with women in the audience, and singing raunchy lyrics. Despite Bentley…
Aug. 14, 2023

Anna May Wong

As a child in Los Angeles, Wong Liu Tsong knew she wanted to be an actress. Adopting the screen name Anna May Wong and dropping out of school to pursue her passion, Wong landed her first lead role at age 17. Despite Hollywoo…
Guest: Yunte Huang
Aug. 7, 2023

Anna Rosenberg

When Anna Rosenberg Hoffman died in 1983, the New York Times called her “one of the most influential women in the country's public affairs for a quarter of a century.” A skilled labor mediator and advisor to four U.S. presid…
July 31, 2023

Pullman Porters & the History of the Black Working Class

In the early 20th century, career options for Black workers were limited, and the jobs often came with low pay and poor conditions. Ironically, because they were concentrated in certain jobs, Black workers sometimes monopol…