Monkey Business
In 1925, John Scopes, a high school teacher from Dayton, Tennessee, was put on trial for teaching evolution. It came to be called the "monkey trial," a landmark in the history of doubt. All over the c...
29 Apr 202146min
Coming Soon: Season Two
Coming Soon: the second season of The Last Archive, a podcast about the history of truth and the shadow of doubt written and hosted by New Yorker writer and celebrated historian Jill Lepore. Learn mo...
15 Apr 20211min
Election Special
We're back with a special, election-themed episode of The Last Archive! While reporting Episode 5: Project X, Jill spoke to Bob Schieffer, famed TV newsman of CBS, about how computers and the Internet...
22 Okt 202024min
Tomorrowland
For ten episodes, we’ve been asking a big question: Who killed truth? The answer has to do with a change in the elemental unit of knowledge: the fall of the fact, and the rise of data. So, for the las...
16 Jul 202048min
For the Birds
In the spring of 1958, when the winter snow melted and the warm sun returned, the birds did not. Birdwatchers, ordinary people, everyone wondered where the birds had gone. Rachel Carson, a journalist ...
9 Jul 202046min
She Said, She Said
In 1969, radical feminists known as the Redstockings gathered in a church in Greenwich Village, and spoke about their experiences with abortion. They called this ‘consciousness-raising’ or ‘speaking b...
2 Jul 202041min
The Computermen
In 1966, just as the foundations of the Internet were being imagined, the federal government considered building a National Data Center. It would be a centralized federal facility to hold computer rec...
25 Jun 202041min
Cell Strain
In the 1950s, polio spread throughout the United States. Heartbreakingly, it affected mainly children. Thousands died. Thousands more were paralyzed. Many ended up surviving only in iron lungs, a mach...
18 Jun 202045min
