20TH Century Episodes

Today the US handbag market is estimated to be nearly $12 billion, with most of the purchasing done by women, but into the early 20th Century purses hadn’t yet become the nearly-exclusive domain of women. The integration of pockets into men’s clothing, and the marketing push of toiletry items to women in the 1920s and 1930s drove this differentiated market development. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Kathleen B. Casey , Professor of History and Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality St...

On the morning of Tuesday, October 6, 1964, the Lady Bird Special , a 19-car train carrying First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, her supporters, members of the press, and a security detail, departed Union Station in Washington, DC, for an ambitious 1,682-mile whistle-stop campaign tour of Southern States. In four days, Lady Bird gave 47 speeches to over 200,000 people, demonstrating that despite the growing resentment of white Southern Democrats to President Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rig...

In the Weimar Republic, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science and advocated for the repeal of legislation that criminalized sexual relations between men. At the Institute, pioneering gender-affirming surgeries were performed, and it was there that Dora Richter became the first known trans woman to undergo comprehensive male-to-female gender-affirming surgeries. But when the Nazis came to power, they labeled Hirschfeld an enemy of the state and destroyed the Institute’s im...

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was formed in 1927 one of the goals of the founders was to recognize achievements in the industry. That recognition quickly took the form of annual awards banquets, with the first one hosted in 1929. Over time the format shifted from banquet to the Oscars telecast we all know today, as the categories and even membership of the Academy adapted to the shifts in filmmaking. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Monica Sandler , a film and media histo...

George Washington privately condemned slavery while actively holding hundreds of people in enslavement. He championed gradual emancipation plans while scheming to keep the people he enslaved from accessing them. He ruthlessly pursued a woman who escaped his enslavement and then emancipated the slaves he owned outright in his will. Washington’s complicated and contradictory legacy around slavery has been debated by Americans since his death. Joining us to discuss is Dr. John Garrison Marks , the ...

One hundred years ago, Dr. Carter G. Woodson created and launched the inaugural Negro History Week after his professors told him that Black people didn’t have a history worth studying. Negro History Week built on the success of Douglass Day and quickly spread through Black communities in the United States. Fifty years later, at the urging of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, President Gerald Ford called for Americans to celebrate Black History Month, which was fina...

Reed Peggram, born in Boston in 1914, a gay Black man in a world that put up barriers to his success, excelled at Harvard before heading to a Europe on the brink of war. In Europe he fell in love with a Danist artist, and despite pleas from everyone in his life and from the US government to leave the war-torn continent, Reed refused to depart without Arne, leading to his imprisonment in an Italian concentration camp. Even then, Reed overcame the barriers in his way, escaping with Arne and surviv...

Charles C. Diggs, Jr., founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, spent 25 years in Congress, pushing for change, on issues from segregation in commercial aviation to home-rule for the residents of Washington, DC, to the anti-apartheid movement. His legislative accomplishments were overshadowed by his downfall, and today his story doesn’t receive the attention of other Civil Rights heroes. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Marion Orr , Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor o...

When All in the Family premiered in January 1971, CBS was nervous enough about the content that they added an advisory message at the beginning. Despite their fears, the show was a success, quickly garnering both awards and top Nielsen ratings. All in the Family not only changed television in the United States but also the practice of politics. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Oscar Winberg , Postdoctoral Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and the John Morton Center for North Am...

When It’s a Wonderful Life was first released, it wasn’t a box office hit, but it did draw the attention of the FBI and its investigation into the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry (COMPIC). The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) didn’t end up doing anything with the FBI’s allegations of subversion in the film, but the pressure of investigations like this led to a shift in Christmas films over the next 15 years away from stories of social problems to more lighthear...

In 1912, wealthy Savannahian Juliette Gordon Low supposedly called her cousin and exclaimed: “Come right over! I’ve got something for the girls of Savannah, for all of America, and for the world.” That something would become the Girl Scouts of the USA, an organization that throughout its history struggled to fulfill its initial promise of inclusion for all girls while trying to maintain an apolitical stance with deference to local councils. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Amy Farrell , the Jam...

Zoe Anderson Norris, known to her friends in the Ragged Edge Klub as the Queen of Bohemia, was born in Kentucky in 1860, moved to Wichita, Kansas, with her first husband, and then to New York City, where she forged a career for herself as a journalist and novelist, eventually launching her own magazine, The East Side. In The East Side and in her journalism, she often focused on the lives of immigrants and the poor. Joining me in this episode is Eve M. Kahn , author of Queen of Bohemia Predicts O...

Dr. Marguerite Phillips Dorsey Cartwright, born May 17, 1910, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a journalist, sociologist, educator, and actress, who served as a correspondent for the United Nations, attended and wrote about both the Bandung Conference and the All-African People's Conference, and was appointed to the Provisional Council of the University of Nigeria, where she became one of five trustees. Joining me in this episode to discuss both Marguerite Cartwright and Black women’s leadership...

The feminist anti-rape movement began in the late 1960s at the height of women’s liberation. As rape crisis centers relied on federal grants aimed at prosecution of those committing sexual violence, feminists worried about the conservatizing influence of those funds, and Black women in particular were not well-served by the developing model. Black women activists found their own methods to combat rape and to care for survivors. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner , Assistant P...

The First Amendment to the US Constitution says that Congress cannot make law abridging the freedom of speech, but by as early at 1798, Congress was restricting immigration to the country on the basis of the ideological beliefs of the people who wanted to immigrate. While the reasons for restrictions have changed over time, as has the mechanism by which they’re enforced, the basic principle continues to today. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Julia Rose Kraut, legal historian and author of Thr...

Ruth Reynolds, born in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1916 to a strict Methodist family, may have seemed an unlikely ally to the cause of Puerto Rican independence, but she devoted her life to what she saw as her “sacred and patriotic duty” as an American to convincing her country to withdraw from Puerto Rico “so that our nation may stand before the world free from any suggestion of imperialist ambition.” Facing surveillance by the FBI and insular police and even incarceration for her views,...

In March 1972, Selma James distributed a pamphlet that declared: “If we raise kids, we have a right to a living wage. . . WE DEMAND WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK. All housekeepers are entitled to wages. (Men too).” Soon it was a global movement, with Wages for Housework branches in the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States, and several other countries, and autonomous groups like Black Women for Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Emily Callaci , Professor of Hi...

My guest today is Dr. Martha S. Jones , the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University and author of The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir . In this book, Prof. Jones researches her family’s past to understand how each generation encountered and negotiated the color line, beginning with her great-great-great-grandmother who survived enslavement and raised a free family. Our theme song ...

The Universal Negro Improvement Association is often most closely associated with Marcus Garvey, but from the beginning, the work of women was essential to the development of the organization. Amy Ashwood co-founded the UNIA with Garvey, and it was her connections and capital that launched the Negro World newspaper, but after her brief marriage to and divorce from Garvey, she was removed from the UNIA and the newspaper. Other women, like Garvey’s second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, and actress Henr...

After emancipation, formerly enslaved Black Americans knew that the key to economic freedom was land ownership, but as soon as they began to acquire land, local tax assessors began to overassess their land and exact steep penalties if they couldn’t pay the resulting inflated property taxes. For the past 150 years, all over the country, the same story has played out, with African Americans paying disproportionately higher property taxes, whether due to systemic inequities or corrupt local officia...

For Ericka Huggins, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which she attended at just 15 years old, was a turning point in her life, inspiring her toward activism. She later joined the Black Panther Party, and after being incarcerated as a political prisoner, served as Director of the acclaimed Oakland Community School and became both the first Black person and the first woman appointed to the Alameda County Board of Education. She continues her activism work today in the fields of restor...

Thousands of years ago, a band of Cahuilla Indians migrated south into the Coachella Valley, calling the area Séc-he, meaning boiling water. The Mexicans translated this as agua caliente (hot water), which is the name still used today. As the United States extended its territory into California, the Agua Caliente were forced onto a reservation, and then, as the Southern Pacific Railroad was granted land in the region, the reservation was carved up into a checkerboard pattern. It took decades of ...

In 1865, when Black people in Mississippi first gained the legal right to marriage, so-called Black Codes outlawed interracial marriage, punishable by life in prison. Five years later, Republicans in the Mississippi state legislature repealed the Black Codes and legalized interracial marriage, but the law was reversed again ten years later when Democrats took control. In 1890, a new state Constitution, erasing all the racial progress of the 1868 one, enshrined a prohibition on interracial marria...

The completion of the Panama Canal in 1914 positioned the United States as a global power, but the U.S. didn’t complete the feat single-handedly. It required land from Panama, equipment and information from the failed earlier effort by the French, and, importantly, tens of thousands of laborers from around the Caribbean. Decades later the Panamanians finally gained control of the canal zone and then the canal itself, but the labor – and sacrifice – of the Afro-Caribbean workers still deserves gr...