When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, his eldest child, 17-year-old Alice, rose quickly to celebrity status. The public loved hearing about the exploits of the poker-playing, gum-chewing “Princess Alice,” who kept a small green snake in her purse. By the time she died at age 96, Alice, whose Dupont…
In August 1943, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt set off in secrecy from San Francisco on a military transport plane, flying across the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t until she showed up in New Zealand 10 days later that the public learned about her trip, a mission to the frontlines of the…
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 National Geographic Society into the photograph-heavy magazine it is today. Scidmore is perhaps best…
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 missionaries as experts on the politics, culture, and language of regions like China…
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 Bronx. Because of the public demand for answers in this high-profile murder case, FDR could…
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 who fled enslavement in nearby regions and ran to seek the Union Army’s…
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 about the slippery substance. Joining me in this episode is…
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 in the 1870s in response to a frustrated…
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, including the development of flippers, happened in the decades that it was banned in…
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 efforts after a foreign rapid-onset natural disaster, but over time it became much…
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 control project, code-named MKUltra, experimenting with LSD and other psychedelic substances, drugging military personnel, CIA employees,…
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 so sure they could get away with it that…
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 eight years, the Governor of Missouri issued an executive order that…
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 FM radio signals in the United States operated as “educational radio,” 220 of which…
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 this week at the 20th Anniversary of Love Actually, with G. Vaughn…
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 and first chairperson of the National Council of Urban League Guilds, raised millions of dollars…
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. These women were part of a much larger group of…
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 first Black woman to teach in the History Department at Howard University. During…
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 civil rights organization,” was founded near the beginning of the 20th…
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 River. That portage, sometimes called Mud Lake, provided both opportunity and…
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 Confederacy, and the English called them the League of Five Nations. Those Five Nations were the Mohawks,…
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 at just over 330 million people, and according to historical data…
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 and protein) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals).…
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 fuming over their crushing defeat by the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne at the…
