In the spring of 1966, inside a rented office space in New York City that smelled like cigarette smoke and mimeograph ink, a cadre of people worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pronounced “snick.” SNCC was one of many organizations, such as CORE, the SCLC, the NAACP, and Read more
In 1954, the United States Supreme Court released one of its most important and revolutionary rulings: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, usually better known as Brown v. Board. The ruling overturned the infamous ruling in Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that established the ‘separate but equal’ Read more
In 1590, the king of Scotland fomented a witch hunt in North Berwick, implicating as many as 200 people, convicting 70, and executing as many as 50. He participated in the “questioning” of the accused, tearing confessions of treason and weather magic from their trembling lips. He sent those whom Read more
When we tell the story of AIDS— and we tell it more often now, in films and museums and classrooms— we tend to tell it as a story about gay men. And of course it was, overwhelmingly, a catastrophe that fell on gay men. But standing right beside those men, Read more
Today, in our last episode of our Cold War series, we are exploring the Cold War roots of the modern conservative movement. We’ll trace the arc of the grassroots movement from the 1950s up to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, getting a glimpse at how the Read more
The Allied victory in World War II meant an end to war with the fascists in Germany, Japan, and Italy, but it did not mean an end to war. In fact, the war just shifted into something more shadowy and covert, where secret weapons, sleight of hand, and leveraging information Read more
During the Lavender Scare, the US government fired hundreds (but possibly thousands) of civil servants for being gay or lesbian, ostensibly because of a Communist-panic in which Americans were convinced a homosexual could be blackmailed into giving up state secrets to those rascally Soviets. Turns out, though they weren’t particularly successful Read more
In this episode, we uncover the extraordinary story of John Scott, a twenty-year-old American idealist who abandoned the University of Wisconsin during the Great Depression, taught himself to weld, and boarded a train for the Soviet Union. He would spend nearly a decade in Magnitogorsk, Stalin’s new “City of Steel” Read more
Yule logs, dried orange slices strung across your windows, decorated trees and simmer pots – all the marks of a neopagan holiday season! Wait, that’s Christmas, you say? Well, can’t it be both? A brief history of modern witchcraft, just in time for the winter solstice celebration. Orange Slices, Simmer Read more
Over an eight-month period in 1896-1897, thousands of people across North America reported seeing mysterious ships in the air or lights in the sky. There were over 12,000 newspaper accounts published about the phenomenon in 408 different newspapers in 41 American states and six Canadian provinces. The airships were usually Read more