Throughline

By NPR

Society & Culture History

What's Throughline about?

The past is never past. Every headline has a history. Join us every week as we go back in time to understand the present. These are stories you can feel and sounds you can see from the moments that shaped our world.Subscribe to Throughline+. You'll be supporting the history-reframing, perspective-shifting, time-warping stories you can't get enough of - and you'll unlock access to our sponsor-free feed of the show. Learn more at plus.npr.org/throughline

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Everyone Everywhere All At ...

03.23.2023

This year's Oscars were one of the most diverse in history, in all kinds of ways. Everything Everywhere All At Once swept some of the biggest categories, notching incredible victories for Asian and Asian American actors, directors, and writers. At ...

Throughline episodes:

03.23.2023 Everyone Everywhere All At Once This year's Oscars were one of the most diverse in history, in all kinds of ways. Everything Everywhere All At Once swept some of the biggest categories, notching incredible victories for Asian and Asian American actors, directors, and writers. At ...
03.16.2023 Meltdown (2020) What happens when an accident puts the public at risk? In the early hours of March 28, 1979, a system malfunction set off what would become the worst nuclear accident in American history. What ensued punctured the public's belief in ...
03.09.2023 A More Perfect Human The dream of AI — artificial intelligence — has been around for centuries: the idea of an intelligent machine without free will popped up in ancient Taoist scrolls, Buddhist fables, and the tales of medieval European courts. But it wasn't ...
03.02.2023 Dance Yourself Free Ever since Beyonce's Renaissance dropped last summer, house music has found its way back to mainstream audiences, prompting some to ask "Is house back?" But the truth is, it never went away. Born out of the ashes of disco in ...
02.23.2023 Of Rats and Men (2022) Rats. Love 'em or hate 'em, (though you probably hate 'em), they're part of our world. And they've been out in full force: In New York City, health data show rat sightings doubled in the past year. It turns out ...
02.16.2023 Throughline Presents: White Lies It all started with a photograph. A photograph from 1991 of a prison takeover in rural Alabama. A photograph of a group of men on the roof of that prison holding a bedsheet scrawled with a message: "Pray for us." ...
02.09.2023 The Whiteness Myth In 1923, an Indian American man named Bhagat Singh Thind argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that he was a white man and was therefore eligible to become a naturalized citizen. He based his claim on the fact that he ...
02.02.2023 The Real Black Panthers (2021) In 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said the Black Panther Party "without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." And with that declaration he used United States federal law enforcement to wage war on ...
01.26.2023 When Things Fall Apart Climate change, political unrest, random violence - Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls, "a thin layer of ice on top of an ocean of chaos and darkness." In the United States, polls indicate that ...
01.19.2023 Extremist Futures It's 2074 and a suicide bomber has killed the President of the United States. Months later Marines open fire on protesters killing dozens. The Second American Civil War has just begun and once again the North and South are pitted ...
01.12.2023 Do Not Pass Go (2022) There's more to Monopoly than you might think. It's one of the best-selling board games in history — despite huge economic instability, sales actually went up during the pandemic — and it's been an iconic part of American life at ...
01.09.2023 Nancy Pelosi (2019) Nancy Pelosi is the highest-ranking woman in American politics. She made her first run for public office at 47 years old and went on to become Speaker of the House twice. How has she had such an enduring career, and ...
01.05.2023 The Monster of We (2021) Are most modern problems caused by selfishness or a lack of it? Ayn Rand, a Russian American philosopher and writer, would say it's the latter — that selfishness is not a vice but a virtue — and that capitalism is ...
12.29.2022 The New Gilded Age (2022) Philanthropic foundations are a fundamental part of our society: they support media, the arts, education, medical research, and more. NPR, and even this show, is supported by many personal and family foundations. But it wasn't always that way. In this ...
12.22.2022 God Wants You To Be Rich (2021) In the New Testament, Jesus says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. In the United States today, many Christians believe in ...
12.15.2022 Road to Partition What happens when a nation splits apart? It's a question many of us are asking ourselves today. It happened 75 years ago with Partition, when India and Pakistan became independent nations, divided by a somewhat arbitrary line that separated neighbors, ...
12.08.2022 400 Years of Sweetness In the 1970s, a savvy CEO named Dwayne Andreas hit on an idea: take surplus corn from America's heartland, process it into a sweetener, and start selling it to anyone who would buy, all in the name of patriotism. Within ...
12.01.2022 The Nostalgia Bone (2021) The global pandemic spawned a different type of epidemic, one of an entirely different nature: a nostalgia outbreak. Longing for 'simpler times' and 'better days', many of us turned to 90s dance playlists, TV sitcoms, and sports highlights. We looked ...
11.26.2022 La Última Copa: El sueño del pibe Ésta semana te presentamos un episodio muy especial de nuestros amigos en NPR y Futuro Media — su primer episodio del podcast La Última Copa, en Español. Todo comenzó con una gambeta extraordinaria en una ciudad Argentina. A eso le ...
11.24.2022 The Last Cup: The Kid's Dream This week we're bringing you something special from our friends at NPR and Futuro Media: the first episode of the podcast, The Last Cup. From his earliest goals on the soccer fields of his hometown in Argentina to his arrival ...
11.17.2022 Qatar's World Cup This is the story of Qatar's decades-long pursuit of the World Cup bid, and its role in the nation's transformation into a global power.
11.10.2022 Dreams, Creatures, and Visions We are in the season of chaos. It can feel like everything is happening at once: You might be sprinting across an airport; or around your kitchen, with a few too many dishes cooking at once. Your phone keeps pinging ...
11.03.2022 The Most Sacred Right (2020) Born into slavery in the early 1800s, Frederick Douglass would live to see the Civil War, Emancipation, Black men getting the right to vote, and the beginning of the terrors and humiliations of Jim Crow. And through all of that, ...
10.27.2022 The State of Disunion Is the U.S. on the brink of civil war? It's a question that has been in the air for a while now, as divisions continue to worsen. Beyond the political speeches and debates in the halls of Congress, it's something ...
10.20.2022 The Woman Question What's happening in Iran right now is unprecedented. But the Iranian people's struggle for gender equality began generations before the death of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, also known by her Kurdish name, Jina Amini. The successes of this ...
10.13.2022 The Dance of the Dead (2021) Halloween — the night of ghost stories and trick-or-treating — has religious origins that span over two thousand years. Over time, the Catholic Church, pagan groups, and even the brewing company Coors have played a role in shape-shifting the holiday. ...
10.06.2022 Silicon Island In a world where computer chips run everything from laptops to cars to the Nintendo Switch, Taiwan is the undisputed leader. It's one of the most powerful tech centers in the world — so powerful that both China and the ...
09.29.2022 Editing Reality We live in divided times, when the answer to the question 'what is reality?' depends on who you ask. Almost all the information we take in is to some extent edited and curated, and the line between entertainment and reality ...
09.22.2022 Five Fingers Crush the Land (2021) Over one million Uyghur people have been detained in camps in China, according to estimates, subjected to torture, forced labor, religious restrictions, and even forced sterilization. Last month, the United Nations released a report saying that China's treatment of Uyghurs ...
09.15.2022 Getting to Sesame Street In American history, schools have not just been places to learn the ABCs – they're places where socialization happens and cultural norms are developed. Arguments over how and what those norms are and how they're communicated tend to flare up ...
09.08.2022 How Korean Culture Went Global From BTS to Squid Game to high-end beauty standards, South Korea reigns as a global exporter of pop culture and entertainment. How does a country go from a war-decimated state just 70 years ago, to a major driver of global ...
09.01.2022 American Socialist (2020) It's been over a century since a self-described socialist was a viable candidate for president of the United States. And that first socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, didn't just capture significant votes, he created a new and enduring populist politics ...
08.25.2022 Drone Wars (2021) Unseen, they stalk their targets from thousands of feet in the air. Operators are piloting them from military bases halfway across the world. At any moment, they could launch a strike that comes without warning. The attack drone was supposed ...
08.18.2022 Afghanistan: The Rise of the Taliban (2021) How did a small group of Islamic students go from local vigilantes to one of the most infamous and enigmatic forces in the world? The Taliban is a name that has haunted the American imagination since 2001. The scenes of ...
08.11.2022 Afghanistan: The Center of the World (2021) Afghanistan has, for centuries, been at the center of the world. Long before the U.S. invasion — before the U.S. was even a nation — countless civilizations intersected there, weaving together a colorful tapestry of foods, languages, ethnicities and visions ...
08.04.2022 The Mystery of Inflation Gas. Meat. Flights. Houses. The price of things have gone up by as much as nine percent since last year. The same amount of money gets you less stuff. It's inflation: a concept that's easy to feel but hard to ...
07.28.2022 Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Country We Have (2021) Is history always political? Who gets to decide? What happens when you challenge common narratives? In this episode, Throughline's Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei explore these questions with Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist at the New York Times and the ...
07.21.2022 Student Loans: The Fund-Eating Dragon At the start of the 20th century, only the most privileged could afford to go to college. Today, millions of students pursue higher ed — and owe $1.7 trillion in debt.
07.14.2022 The Long Hot Summer (2020) Things in the U.S. feel tense right now. Two years after a police officer killed George Floyd outside a Minneapolis corner store, videos of police violence still appear regularly – and protests follow. Maybe the closest parallel to what's happening ...
07.07.2022 Throughline Presents: School Colors School District 28 is located in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places in the U.S.: Queens, N.Y. But the neighborhood served by this school district has two sides – a Northside and a Southside. To put it ...
06.30.2022 Do Not Pass Go Monopoly has been one of the best-selling board games in the United States for nearly a century now. Author Mary Pilon says Monopoly is much more than that.
06.23.2022 The Evangelical Vote (2019) White evangelical Christians represent a powerful voting bloc in the Republican Party. This week, we explore their rise.
06.16.2022 After Roe: A New Battlefield The Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade transformed the landscape of abortion rights overnight. For the doctors, lawyers, feminists, and others who had fought for nationwide legalization, Roe was the end of a long battle. But for the growing ...
06.09.2022 By Accident of Birth In August of 1895, a ship called the SS Coptic approached the coast of Northern California. On that boat was a passenger from San Francisco, a young man named Wong Kim Ark who was returning home after visiting his wife ...
06.02.2022 The Modern White Power Movement (2020) The recent shooting in Buffalo, New York, which authorities are investigating as a hate crime, has yet again highlighted the threat posed by domestic terrorism in the U.S. At the center are violent extremists – the most lethal and persistent ...
05.26.2022 The Characters That Built China Today, China is a global superpower. But less than two hundred years ago, the nation was in a state of decline. After what became known as the 'century of humiliation' at the hands of Western imperialist powers, its very survival ...
05.19.2022 Before Roe: The Physicians' Crusade Abortion wasn't always controversial. In fact, in colonial America it would have been considered a fairly common practice: a private decision made by women, and aided mostly by midwives. But in the mid-1800s, a small group of physicians set out ...
05.17.2022 Bonus: The Forgotten Mothers of Civil Rights History MLK Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin are household names, but what about their mothers? This hour, author Anna Malaika Tubbs explores how these three women shaped American history.
05.12.2022 The Shadows of the Constitution (2020) The Constitution is like America's secular Bible, our sacred founding document. As the Supreme Court debates the future of Roe v. Wade, many of us are looking more closely at the Constitution, trying to discern how it protects us. In ...
05.05.2022 Cinco de Mayo and the Rise of Modern Mexico Does history have a border? That is the question at the heart of Cinco de Mayo, May 5th, a holiday that symbolizes Mexico's fight for autonomy, even as it's come to be associated with sales and cervezas and margaritas in ...

Older episodes

Throughline

What's Throughline about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Throughline episodes:

Everyone Everywhere All At Once

Meltdown (2020)

A More Perfect Human

Dance Yourself Free

Of Rats and Men (2022)

Throughline Presents: White Lies

The Whiteness Myth

The Real Black Panthers (2021)

When Things Fall Apart

Extremist Futures

Do Not Pass Go (2022)

Nancy Pelosi (2019)

The Monster of We (2021)

The New Gilded Age (2022)

God Wants You To Be Rich (2021)

Road to Partition

400 Years of Sweetness

The Nostalgia Bone (2021)

La Última Copa: El sueño del pibe

The Last Cup: The Kid's Dream

Qatar's World Cup

Dreams, Creatures, and Visions

The Most Sacred Right (2020)

The State of Disunion

The Woman Question

The Dance of the Dead (2021)

Silicon Island

Editing Reality

Five Fingers Crush the Land (2021)

Getting to Sesame Street

How Korean Culture Went Global

American Socialist (2020)

Drone Wars (2021)

Afghanistan: The Rise of the Taliban (2021)

Afghanistan: The Center of the World (2021)

The Mystery of Inflation

Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Country We Have (2021)

Student Loans: The Fund-Eating Dragon

The Long Hot Summer (2020)

Throughline Presents: School Colors

Do Not Pass Go

The Evangelical Vote (2019)

After Roe: A New Battlefield

By Accident of Birth

The Modern White Power Movement (2020)

The Characters That Built China

Before Roe: The Physicians' Crusade

Bonus: The Forgotten Mothers of Civil Rights History

The Shadows of the Constitution (2020)

Cinco de Mayo and the Rise of Modern Mexico

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