HISTORY This Week

November 11, 1926. The country’s state highway officials meet to give America’s roads numbers, and a patchwork of dirt, gravel and wooden planks running from Chicago to Los Angeles becomes Route 66. Two years later, promoter C.C. Pyle sends 199 runners down it on a 3,422-mile race to New York, with a traveling carnival behind them. Among them are Andy Payne, a Cherokee farm kid trying to save his family’s land, and Eddie Gardner, a Black runner from Seattle heading into the Jim Crow South.

How did a footrace nicknamed the “Bunion Derby” turn a road on a map into an American icon?

Special thanks to our guests: Keith Austin, Historic Consultant for Cherokee Nation Business, and Chuck Kastner, author of Race Across America: Eddie Gardner and the Great Bunion Derbies.

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November 8, 1864. Election Day. Abraham Lincoln watches from a White House window, convinced he might lose. Three thousand miles away in Los Angeles, a Confederate hotbed in a so-called free state, Biddy Mason has more riding on the result than almost anyone in the country.

Sixteen years earlier, she walked from Mississippi to Utah at the back of a Mormon wagon train, enslaved, with three young daughters in tow. Her owner then carried her into California, where slavery was illegal and where, for years, nobody enforced the law. In 1856, a sheriff’s posse rode into the owner’s camp in the Santa Monica Mountains with a court order. What followed was a trial before a former slaveholder, a verdict that freed fourteen people, and a second act in which a formerly enslaved midwife became one of the wealthiest Black women in America.

How did a slave ranch operate in plain sight in a free state? And how did Biddy Mason win, not once, but twice?

With Kevin Waite, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of The Boundless Biddy Mason; and Jackie Broxton, President and Founder of the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation.

This episode includes a mention of sexual violence. Please listen with care.

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Happy Halloween! Today, we're bringing back a particularly spooky episode from the archives...

June 10, 1692. Bridget Bishop is loaded into a two-wheeled cart and brought from her Salem jail cell to a pasture on a hill, where a rope is hanging from freshly-installed gallows. A crowd forms around her: law officers to read the death warrant, ministers to offer last rites, and onlookers, curious to see a witch in the flesh. Bishop’s execution raises doubts that could have stopped the Salem witch trials in their tracks. But instead, it became the first in a deluge of convictions, trials, and hangings that made the summer of 1692 go down in infamy. What happened that summer to cause a witch hunt? And what can we learn from the story of 19 supposed witches condemned to death?

Special thanks to our guest, Marilynne Roach, author of The Salem Witch Trials: a Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege.

** This episode originally aired June 7, 2021.

October 28, 1065. The king’s council meets in Oxford and throws a man out of England. His name is Tostig Godwinson, and the north of England already hates him. His own brother Harold, the most powerful earl in the realm and the likely next king, refuses to save him.

Tostig does not take it well. Over the next year, he sails from royal court to royal court, pitching anyone with ships on an invasion of England. He finds takers. And the year that follows, 1066, becomes the most pivotal in English history: three men claiming one crown, two invasions in a single month, a Viking king sunbathing at the wrong moment, and a duke from Normandy who trips face-first into the mud and gets up a conqueror.

Sally is joined by historian Greg Jenner, host of the BBC podcast You’re Dead to Me, as the Bayeux Tapestry goes on display in Britain for the first time in nearly a thousand years. Together they ask: how did a scorned little brother help push England over the edge?

Special thanks to our guest Greg Jenner. His series, You’re Dead to Me, is available wherever you get your podcasts.

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From world events to everyday decisions, economics explains it all. Platypus Economics makes it clear, useful, and actually fun. Available now: link.pscrb.fm/f0281/PE_HTW

October 22, 1975. After traveling millions of miles through space, a Soviet spacecraft plunges through thick clouds of sulfuric acid to land on Venus. Its goal: take a photograph of another planet’s surface and send it back home—history’s first up-close glimpse at a world other than our own. Venus, our closest neighbor, is similar in size to Earth and may even share some planetary material. It’s why scientists sometimes call it our twin planet. Yet its rock-melting temperatures and poisonous atmosphere make it profoundly different. If anything, it is our evil twin. What’s behind humanity's long fascination with Venus? And what can the differences between these cosmic twins teach us about our home planet…its present, and its possible future?

**This episode originally aired October 17, 2022.

Special thanks to our guests, David Grinspoon, author of Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet; and Sally's twin sister, Eliza Helm.

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October 12, 1820. John James Audubon—a failed shopkeeper, grist miller, and steamboat investor—sets off from Cincinnati on a flatboat down the Ohio River. He is bankrupt. The bank has taken everything except his clothes, his gun, and a portfolio of 62 bird drawings. His plan is to float south, paint every bird in America at life size, and sell the results. Somehow, it works. The Birds of America becomes one of the most valuable books ever printed, and Audubon’s name becomes shorthand for loving nature.

But the man behind the myth is harder to pin down. He hid where he was born. He invented a species to impress European investors, took credit for scientific firsts he never did, and publicly argued against the abolition of slavery. Decades after his death, a former student of his widow’s founded a conservation society in his name, and the legend of the gentle naturalist grew. Today, the Audubon Society is fighting over whether to keep that name.

How did John James Audubon build his own legend? And what happens when it comes home to roost?

Special thanks to our guests: Robert Francis, author of the upcoming book Republic of Feathers (find him at birdhistory.substack.com), and 12-year-old bird-call prodigy Samuel Henderson (on Instagram with his mom Lori at @lorisamuelsmom).

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October 7, 1827. A body washes up on the shore of Lake Ontario. A Rochester newspaperman named Thurlow Weed believes he knows whose it is: William Morgan, a down-on-his-luck ex-Freemason who threatened to publish the order's secrets. He was pulled from a jail in Canandaigua a year earlier, and never seen again.

How does one man's disappearance set off a panic about secret societies, gut Freemasonry in America, and build the country's first third party? And why do the Anti-Masons, who vanish almost as fast as they rose, leave behind a playbook that shapes American politics for a century?

Special thanks to our guests: Mark Schmeller, Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University and author of the forthcoming A Man Cried Murder: The Masonic Conspiracy That Transformed American Politics; and Joshua Kastenberg, Professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law.

To stay updated on all things HISTORY This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast.com. Have thoughts or questions? Email us at [email protected].

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A 5-min sample of our full interview about who Blackbeard really was, and the truth behind his pirate friends. Subscribe to HTW+ at htwpod.com or in your Apple Podcasts app to unlock full behind-the-scenes episodes.

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates.

September 26, 1960. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon meet in a CBS studio in Chicago for the first televised debate between presidential nominees. Kennedy arrives tan, relaxed, and fully prepped. Nixon arrives with a fever and a bad knee, turns down the studio makeup, and goes on live TV covered in a drugstore powder called "Lazy Shave."

It took CBS president Frank Stanton years of lobbying, and a change in federal law, to get the two men on stage. Seventy million Americans watched, and the night has been remembered ever since as the moment image beat substance. But is that really what happened? And did the TV audience and the radio audience really see two different winners?

Special thanks to our guest David Greenberg, professor of history, journalism, and media studies at Rutgers University and author of Republic of Spin: An Inside Look at the American Presidency.

To stay updated on all things HISTORY This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast.com. Have thoughts or questions? Email us at [email protected].

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