September 15, 1893. About 4,000 people are intently listening to a monk on a stage in Chicago. They’re at an event called Parliament of the World’s Religions – an unprecedented gathering of leaders from many different faiths all over the world, held at the Chicago World's Fair. The monk is Hindu from Bombay India and is telling a mostly Protestant American audience a story that is not planned and certainly not what the Protestant organizers were expecting. What happened when tension among religious leaders unfolded in front of thousands of American spectators? And how did this Parliament help broaden the country’s understanding of religion?

Thank you to our guests, Scholar of Religion and Professor Eric Ziolkowski from Lafayette College and Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies Diana Eck from Harvard University. Thank you also to Richard Hughs Seager, author of "The World's Parliament of Religions; The East/West Encounter, Chicago 1892."

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Episode 1: The Bullet. The 9/11 attacks were so much more than a bolt from the blue on a crisp September morning. They were more than a decade in the making. Our story starts in a Midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom in 1990. Shots ring out and the extremist rabbi, Meir Kahane, lies mortally wounded. His assassin, El-Sayyid Nosair, is connected to members of a Brooklyn mosque who are training to fight with Islamic freedom fighters in Afghanistan. NYPD Detective Louis Napoli and FBI Special Agent John Anticev catch the case and start unraveling a conspiracy that is taking place in plain sight by blending into the tumult of the city. It is animated by an emerging ideology: violent jihad.

More about the Blindspot: Road to 9/11:

While the devastating images of the 9/11 attacks are seared into our national collective memory, most of the events that led up to that day took place out of public view. Over eight episodes, Blindspot: The Road to 9/11, brings to light the decade-long “shadow struggle” that preceded the attacks. Hosted by WNYC reporter Jim O’Grady and based on The HISTORY® Channel's television documentary Road to 9/11 (produced by Left/Right), this podcast series draws on interviews with more than 60 people — including FBI agents, high-level bureaucrats, journalists, experts, and people who knew the terrorists personally — and weaves them together with original reporting to create a gripping, serialized narrative audio experience. Blindspot: The Road to 9/11 is a co-production of The HISTORY® Channel and WNYC Studios.

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September 11, 2001. On a clear and sunny day, Captain Richard Thornton is piloting his ferry boat back and forth between New Jersey and New York City. But when he hears an airplane flying too low to the ground, he knows something is wrong. After the World Trade Center’s North Tower is struck, Thornton instinctively drives his ship down towards Lower Manhattan. He will soon be joined by countless other marine craft: ferries, fishing boats, tugboats, and more. With the roads, bridges, and trains that connect the island of Manhattan to the rest of the world shut down, this collection of civilian, commercial, and military boats manages to carry more than 500,000 survivors to safety. How did this impromptu evacuation, which was larger than Dunkirk during WWII, come together? And how does one ferry boat captain reflect on the shared sense of duty he felt on that fateful day?

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History repeats itself this week with an episode from the HISTORY This Week archives: Sept 5, 1698. Tsar Peter the Great of Russia returns home from a year-long European tour. When noblemen, religious figures and friends gather to welcome him home, Peter pulls out a straight razor, holds it to their throats, and…forcibly shaves their beards. This event will go down in history as a first step towards Russian geopolitical power. Before Peter’s reign, Russia was an isolated nation that was largely ignored by the rest of the world. How did Peter the Great almost single-handedly drag Russia onto the world stage? And how did his great beard-shaving endeavor lead to the Russia we know today?

Special thank you to our guest Lynne Hartnett, Ph.D., professor of History, Villanova University and Understanding Russia: A Cultural History.

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August 24, 1914. A train pulls up to the lumber town of White River, Ontario, carrying a regiment of Canadian troops on board. On the tracks where they disembark is a small black bear cub. An army veterinarian decides to buy the bear and name her Winnipeg—Winnie for short—after the town where he's been living. When the soldiers are deployed to the European front, Winnie is left at the London Zoo, where a child named Christopher Robin Milne will meet her. He'll later rename his own teddy bear after her: Winnie-the-Pooh. How did a real-life boy and a real-life bear inspire some of the world's most famous literary characters? And what impact did these stories ultimately have on the people who helped bring them to life?

Special thanks to Ann Thwaite, whose most recent book about Milne and Winnie-the-Pooh is titled Goodbye Christopher Robin: A.A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh.

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August 21, 1911. On a Monday morning, a department store employee on a Paris street sees a man hurrying by. He carries a white-wrapped package and, as the employee watches, he throws something small and shiny over his shoulder...it’s a doorknob. Then the man disappears into the streets of Paris. That store employee has just witnessed a small part of what will soon become the world’s most famous crime. In that white-wrapped package was...the Mona Lisa. Why has the Mona Lisa enchanted so many people since the 1500s? And how did a struggling Italian handyman manage to steal it?

Thank you to our guests, Martin Kemp, author of Mona Lisa. The People and the Painting, and Dr. Noah Charney, founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

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August 14, 1967. Off the coast of England, a group of pirate ships has been fighting to stay afloat. These are pirates of a particular kind—less sword fighting and treasure hunting, more spinning records and dancing late into the night. For the past few years, these boats have made it their mission to broadcast popular music from international waters. But at the stroke of midnight, a new law will make these pirate radio DJs criminals. Some of them, aboard Radio Caroline, are willing to risk it. How did a group of young rebels launch an offshore radio station that gave the BBC a run for its money? And how did they change the course of music history?

Special thanks to our guests, former Caroline pirates Nick Bailey, Gordon Cruse, Roger Gale, Patrick Hammerton, Keith Hampshire, Dermot Hoy, Colin Nichol, Paul Noble, Ian Ross, Chris Sandford, and Steve Young.

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August 2, 1915. The poem appears in print for the first time this week, from Kentucky to Pennsylvania to Vermont. Every reader is transported to that same leafy path: “two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost becomes an immediate hit and will go on to become one of the most popular and well-known poems in American history. For many, it's about a spirit of individualism -- forging one’s own path. And yet… Robert Frost may have had a completely different meaning in mind. What—or who—inspired Frost to write this iconic poem? And what is it really telling us about how to make a choice?

Thank you to our guests, Professor Jay Parini, author of "Robert Frost: A Life," and Professor David Orr, author of " The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong."

Thank you also to Middlebury College Special Collections, Middlebury, Vermont for their 1953 recording of Robert Frost reading "The Road Not Taken".

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August 1, 1936. The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Adolf Hitler enters the stadium to a militaristic Wagner march. Swastikas flutter everywhere on the flag of the Nazi Party. When these moments are remembered later, one athlete’s name comes up more than any other: Jesse Owens. He’s a Black American sprinter, a legendary athlete, and one of 18 Black Americans who competed in Hitler’s Olympics. How, through these 1936 Games, does this one man become mythologized? And what is the forgotten context of his storied Olympic wins?

Special thanks to Damion Thomas, curator of sports for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; Deborah Riley Draper, director and writer of Olympic Pride, American Prejudice; and Mark Dyreson, director of research and educational programs for the Penn State Center for the Study of Sports in Society.

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July 19, 64 AD. The Circus Maximus is the main arena in ancient Rome at this time, where tens of thousands watch chariot races and gladiator fights. The stadium is surrounded by shops and bars and restaurants, the whole area teeming with life. And tonight, it will all be destroyed. Nero, the emperor of Rome, will allegedly fiddle while he watches his city burn, and may have even set the fire himself. But if you look at the story a little closer, some of the details just don’t add up. So, what is really true about Nero? And how did a story that was essentially fake news last for 2,000 years?

Special thanks to Anthony Barrett, author of Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty.

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