How a Founding Father and His Family Went From Slave Owners to Radical Abolitionists
John Jay was a giant in the Founding Fathers generation. He was a diplomat, Supreme Court justice, coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and key negotiator at the Treaty of Paris, which ended the America...
22 Nov 20221h 8min
Growing Up as the Daughter of WW2 Spies
As a child, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, along with her five brothers, was raised to revere the tribal legends of the Alsop and Roosevelt families. Her parents’ marriage, lived in the spotlight of 1950s ...
17 Nov 202242min
Entrepreneurs in the Ancient World: From Neolithic Fashion Tycoons to Babylon’s 'Silicon Valley' Startup Founders
Entrepreneurship didn’t begin with Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, or Adam Smith. Depending on how one interprets the archeological record, it goes back at least 9,000 years, when Neolithic trib...
15 Nov 202249min
The Abolitionist Who Was Chaplain to Black Civil War Soldiers and Started a College Burned Down by the KKK
George Richardson (1824-1911) was a traveling Methodist preacher who rode on a circuit across the antebellum Midwestern frontier and became increasingly caught up in the abolitionist movement. He beca...
10 Nov 202240min
The Russian-Jewish Woman Who Voluntarily Interred Herself in a WW2 Japanese Internment Camp
During World War II, Elaine Black Yoneda [1906-1988], the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, spent eight months in a concentration camp—not in Europe, but in California. She was an activist who vo...
8 Nov 202250min
In 1963, A Stuttering, Nebbish Magazine Editor Negotiated a Secret Deal Between JFK and Khrushchev, Averting Nuclear War
As the editor of the Saturday Review for more than thirty years, Norman Cousins had a powerful platform to shape American public debate during the height of the Cold War. Although he was a low-key, ne...
3 Nov 202247min
A Traumatized Civil War Vet -- Suffering Crippling Alcoholism and PTSD -- Spent 40 Years Wandering America as a Hobo
William Aspinwal was many things. A child soldier. A ladies’ man. A mechanic. A tramp. A drunkard. A husband married five times. Each of these descriptions capture an aspect of his life, yet none do h...
1 Nov 202241min
The Secret Role of Japanese Americans Who Fought in the WW2 Pacific Theatre
Several thousand Japanese Americans were trained by the US Military Intelligence Service and sent to the Pacific to serve as interpreters, translators, and interrogators, even as their own families we...
27 Okt 202234min
