All Episodes
Displaying 21 - 40 of 219 in total
Jim Crow Stole the Derby - May 17, 1875
On May 17, 1875, a 19-year-old Black jockey named Oliver Lewis won the very first Kentucky Derby, one of thirteen Black riders in a field of fifteen. For the next two ...
The Lines That Broke the World - May 16, 1916
On May 16, 1916, two diplomats drew a line across a map of the Middle East and called it a peace plan. The Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the collapsing Ottoman Empire ...
41 Died to Save 39 - May 15,1975
On May 15, 1975, U.S. Marines stormed a Cambodian island to rescue the crew of the seized merchant ship SS Mayaguez, not knowing the hostages had already been freed. M...
Let Them Burn - May 14, 1961
On Mother's Day, May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders was firebombed outside Anniston, Alabama while the FBI watched, and local police honored a deal ...
America Bombed It's Own People - May 13, 1985
On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a military bomb on a residential neighborhood, killing eleven people, including five children, and destroying sixty-one ho...
God Gave Us The Mines - May 12, 1902
On May 12, 1902, 147,000 coal miners walked off the job in the largest labor action in American history, and they were right about every grievance. But the story of wh...
Illegal Justice - May 11, 1960
On May 11, 1960, Israeli Mossad agents kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from a Buenos Aires street an act that was heroic, criminal, and diplomatically explosive all at once....
Hitler's Rogue Deputy - May 10, 1941
On May 10, 1941, Hitler's Deputy Führer flew solo to Scotland to broker a secret peace and Winston Churchill spent the next seventy-six years making sure you didn't fi...
The Emperor Nobody Saved - May 9, 1936
On May 9, 1936, Mussolini proclaimed the Italian Empire from a balcony in Rome while 400,000 jubilant Italians cheered below, unaware that their army had used poison g...
The Day Europe Celebrated While Algeria Burned - May 8, 1945
On May 8, 1945, the morning Europe was celebrating VE Day, French colonial forces massacred thousands of Algerian Muslims who had gathered in Sétif to mark the same ...
China’s Day of Shame - May 7, 1915
On May 7, 1915, the same afternoon the Lusitania was sinking in the Atlantic, Japan delivered an ultimatum to China that would ignite a century of nationalist fury and...
When Wall Street Broke - May 6, 2010
On May 6, 2010, nearly a trillion dollars vanished from Wall Street in thirty-six minutes then came back. The Flash Crash was triggered not by fraud or panic, but by a...
The King Who Lit the Fuse - May 5, 1789
On May 5th, 1789, King Louis XVI opened the Estates-General at Versailles, a well-intentioned act that ignited a revolution he never wanted, cost him his life, and rel...
How Wilson made Mao - May 4, 1919
On May 4, 1919, thousands of Chinese students marched on Tiananmen Gate, not against their own government, but against Woodrow Wilson's broken promise of national self...
Japan's Forbidden Peace - May 3, 1947
On May 3, 1947, a constitution written by American military officers in nine days came into effect in occupied Japan, including Article 9, a clause permanently renounc...
America’s Most Dangerous Man - May 2, 1972
On May 2, 1972, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI for 48 years, through eight presidents and two world wars, died in his sleep, and within hours the President of th...
America's Accidental Empire - May 1, 1898
On May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish Pacific fleet in Manila Bay in five hours and accidentally launched the American empire. This episode exam...
Left Behind in Saigon - April 30, 1975
On April 30, 1975, ten thousand South Vietnamese waited at the gates of the American Embassy in Saigon as the last helicopters lifted off the roof. Most accounts of th...
Who Dachau Left Behind - April 29, 1945
On April 29, 1945, American soldiers liberated Dachau, the first concentration camp the Nazis ever built, and freed 32,000 survivors in one of the defining moments of ...
The Man Who Stood Still - April 28, 1967
On April 28, 1967, Muhammad Ali refused military induction in Houston and was stripped of his title before the day was out. Most people know the broad arc. Fewer know ...
