July 7, 2007. In a dramatic ceremony featuring pop stars, fireworks, and smoke canons, the Colosseum is named one of the seven new wonders of the world. It’s an appropriately over-the-top blowout for an arena which, centuries before, was home to its own lavish events. How did spectacles once unfold on the floor of this ancient arena? And how did the Romans use games to entertain people, and to control them?

Special thanks to our guests, Alison Futrell, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, and Barry Strauss, author of The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium.

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June 27, 1905. It’s the last morning of Ippolit Gilyarovsky’s life. He wakes up in a battleship on the Black Sea. The Potemkin. He’s a despised Russian naval officer who doesn’t care that his sailors are refusing to eat their lunch of rotten borscht. They’ll do it because he says so. And if they don’t, he’ll hang them. Why did these sailors, many of them peasants accustomed to abuse from high-born men like him, decide on this day to rise up instead and mutiny? And how would their rebellion help take down the Czar of Russia?

Special thanks to our guests; Neal Bascomb, author of Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin and Russian Revolution; and historian Dr. Mark Steinberg of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book is Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities.

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June 23, 1972. President Richard Nixon’s men broke into the Watergate complex just six days earlier. He’s attempting some damage control, but in between meetings with his staff, Nixon signs a new bill into law – the Educational Amendments of 1972. He isn’t aware of it at the time, but Title IX of this law will change women’s sports forever. The bill’s passage comes after years of campaigning, and the most prominent face of this movement is one of the great athletes of her era: Billie Jean King. Today, Billie Jean King sits down with Sports History This Week to unpack her role in this monumental legislation. How did she use her platform to fight for gender equality in athletics? And after the passage of Title IX, how did she literally battle for women everywhere?

Special thanks to our guests: Billie Jean King, a champion of tennis and of equality, and Susan Ware, historian and author of Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports.

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June 23, 1858. A knock at the door—it’s the papal police. For the Mortaras, a Jewish family living in Bologna, this is not a good sign. And soon, the officers break the agonizing news: “You have been betrayed.” The Mortaras’ six-year-old son, Edgardo, has been secretly baptized, and the Church has ordered him to be taken away. Why did the Catholic Church order a young Jewish boy to be kidnapped? And how would that decision end up re-making the map of modern Europe?

Special thanks to our guest, David Kertzer, author of The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara and The Pope at War.

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June 17, 1972. In the early morning hours, five men are caught after breaking into the Watergate building in Washington, DC. The failed break-in that night will eventually lead to the unraveling of a major American scandal that reaches the highest levels of government. Why did President Nixon and the men around him believe that they could get away with something so obviously illegal? And how - for one of our producers - did this episode hit close to home?

Thank you to our guest expert, Michael Dobbs, author of King Richard: An American Tragedy.

Thank you also to Ken Hughes and Michael Greco from The Miller Center at UVA for speaking with us for this episode.

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June 11, 1946. Bayard Rustin walks out of the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary after serving a sentence for conscientiously objecting to WWII. A pacifist organizer, his efforts reach the ears of Mahatma Gandhi, who invites him to India. And Rustin never looks back. Soon he’s mentoring a young Alabama preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as Rustin thrust into the middle of a Civil Rights Movement. But Rustin’s enemies want him gone, and the entire movement along with him. So how does this one man become responsible for the national reach and spread of active nonviolent resistance? And why, as the chief architect of the historic 1963 March on Washington, is his name not more known?

Special thanks to Walter Naegle, Bayard Rustin's partner and the current executor of his estate, and John D'Emilio, professor emeritus of history and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin.

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June 4, 1939. Anna May Wong steps off an ocean liner to greet her fans in Australia. In many ways, she is a classic Hollywood actor. Glamorous and famous. She’s made some sixty movies that have been seen around the world. But in other ways, Anna May Wong is singular. She’s the first–and at this time only–Chinese American movie star. But behind the scenes...she is reaching the end of her rope. How did a Chinese American girl from a poor family defy expectations to become an international star? And what is now fueling her Hollywood rebirth?

Thank you to our guests: Professor Shirley Lim, author of Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern; and actor Michelle Krusiec, from Netflix's "Hollywood."

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May 26, 1965. One hundred years after the Civil War, Congress is debating a bill whose goal is to enforce the 15th amendment, which, in 1870, promised the right to vote regardless of race. But that’s not what happened. Now the Civil Rights movement is saying: It’s time to make real the promises of the Constitution for all Americans. The forces that undermined the First Reconstruction, and gutted the 15th Amendment, are resisting those demands. In the middle stands Lyndon B. Johnson, a Southern Senator with a record of opposing civil rights. Robert Caro, acclaimed journalist and Johnson biographer, tells us, what will change Johnson’s mind and turn him into a champion of the Voting Rights Act? And how will he manage the impossible task of getting it passed when so many Southern Senators are hellbent against it?

Visit History.com/Reconstruction for more.

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In 1935, famed Black sociologist and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction, a revolutionary reassessment of the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War. The book was also a critique of the flawed way others had been telling the story—including leading scholars of the day. Sally Helm sits down with professors Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates Jr. to discuss Du Bois’ insights. They hone in on his argument that a biased portrayal of Reconstruction was used for over a century to justify the oppression of Black Americans.

Visit History.com/Reconstruction for more.

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May 16, 1868. The Capitol is filled with spectators, anxiously trying to predict how each Senator will vote. It’s the first presidential impeachment trial in American history, and its outcome will have profound effects on Reconstruction, the great project of rebuilding the nation after the Civil War. What made many members of Congress declare President Andrew Johnson unfit to lead that effort? And what motivated this former ally of Abraham Lincoln to declare himself an enemy of true Reconstruction?

Visit History.com/Reconstruction for more.

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