Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBenjamin Harrison, the President Afraid of His Own Light Switches
Episode 12689
Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president, was the grandson of President William Henry Harrison and great grandson of Declaration signer Benjamin Harriso…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Ben Nighthorse Campbell: Orphanage Kid, Olympic Judoka, Senate Maverick
Episode 12688
Ben Nighthorse Campbell was born Benny Campbell in 1933 in Auburn, California, to Mary, a Portuguese immigrant whose family came through Ellis Island…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Barack Obama: From a Jakarta Childhood to Two Terms in the White House
Episode 12687
Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961, making him the only U.S. president born outside the contiguous United States. His parents met in 1960 in a…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Carter Glass: Father of the Federal Reserve and Virginia's Poll Tax
Episode 12686
Carter Glass, born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1858, lost his mother at age two, was raised largely by his teenage sister and earned the nickname Pluc…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Arthur Vandenberg: From Diehard Isolationist to Architect of NATO
Episode 12685
Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican U.S. Senator from Michigan, went from one of the Senate's most entrenched isolationists to a builder of postwar Ameri…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Albert B. Fall and Teapot Dome: The Cabinet Bribe That Sent Him to Prison
Episode 12684
Albert B. Fall, Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding, became the first U.S. cabinet member sentenced to prison, over the Teapo…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Al D'Amato, Senator Pothole: Phone Book Filibusters and Local Fixes
Episode 12683
Al D'Amato served as a Republican U.S. Senator from New York from 1981 to 1999. Born in Brooklyn in 1937 of Italian ancestry and raised in Island Par…
4 days, 18 hours ago
William Beebe Beyond the Bathysphere: Pheasants, Jungle Plots, Pooh Test
Episode 12682
William Beebe (1877 to 1962) grew up in New Jersey shooting and stuffing birds, taught himself taxidermy, and left Columbia University just short of …
5 days, 14 hours ago
Ambergris: The $1.5 Million Sperm Whale Waste Behind Luxury Perfume
Episode 12681
In 2021 fishermen off Yemen hauled in a crusty 280 pound lump worth $1.5 million: ambergris. It forms when the indigestible chitin beaks of giant squ…
5 days, 14 hours ago
Coracles: Welsh Basket Boats, Vietnamese Tax Dodgers, and a Round Ark
Episode 12680
A 2014 translation of a 4,000 year old Babylonian cuneiform tablet revealed the oldest known ark instructions, in which the god Enki tells Atra-Hasis…
5 days, 14 hours ago