HISTORY This Week

April 3, 1974. Across America, many people wake up this morning thinking it will be a normal day. But in the next 24 hours, almost 150 tornadoes will hit the United States. It will be then the largest tornado outbreak in the nation's history. Why did so many deadly tornadoes hit on this one day? And how did it spur life-saving changes that are still with us decades later?

Thank you to our guests Greg Forbes, former severe weather expert with the Weather Channel, and Atmospheric Sciences professor, Jeff Trapp, from the University of Illinois.

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March 20, 1703. Today, almost fifty men, scattered around the city of Edo, Japan, are waiting to die. They’re all former samurai who had served the same lord – and they all carried out a deadly revenge attack in his name. Their story will go down in history as the legend of the 47 Ronin. Why did these men decide that to be loyal samurai, they had to die? And how did this moment live on for centuries and become part of the national story of Japan?

Thank you to our guest, Professor John Tucker, author of "The Forty-Seven Ronin: The Vendetta in History" and "Kumazawa Banzan: Governing the Realm and Bringing Peace to All below Heaven."

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March 9, 1901. From a jail cell in Topeka, Kansas, temperance vigilante Carry Nation is hard at work. After her latest arrest for smashing up a bar with her infamous hatchet, Nation decides to spread her message with paper and ink. The first issue of The Smasher’s Mail would be published on this day, with Nation arranging the entire endeavor from behind bars. The newsletter was only a small part of her crusade against “hell-broth,” which included everything from destroying saloons to starring in her own burlesque shows. But when considering how alcohol altered her life’s journey, were her methods really all that extreme?

Special thanks to Fran Grace, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Redlands and author of Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life.

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March 2, 1923. In Wichita, Kansas, Mary Irby and Euna Hollowell are being held at the county jail. The two women are charged with “lewdly abiding.” Translation: officials suspect them of carrying a sexually transmitted infection. Hollowell, Irby, and many women like them will go on to be forcibly examined and incarcerated under a public health program known as “The American Plan.” This initiative resulted in decades of mass incarceration of tens of thousands of American women. How was it possible for the U.S. government to publicly wage war on women? And how did those women fight back?

Special thank you to our guest Scott W. Stern, author of The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women.

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February 26, 1917. At the Victor Talking Machine Company’s studio in Manhattan, five white men gathered to record the first jazz record in history. The Original Dixieland Jass Band’s release was a hit, introducing many listeners across America to this genre for the first time. These musicians even claimed that they invented jazz, but that was far from the truth. Why was jazz, an artform pioneered by black musicians, introduced to the world by an all-white band? And who were the true pioneers who could have made the first jazz record?

Special thanks to Damon J. Phillips, Columbia Business School professor and author of Shaping Jazz: Cities, Labels, and the Global Emergence of an Art Form, and Kevin Whitehead, jazz critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and author of Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film.

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February 15, 1965. Walgett, Australia. A group of about 30 Sydney students has traveled here on a fact-finding mission – a mission they’ll call a Freedom Ride, inspired by the efforts of Civil Rights activists in America. They’re here to document the unequal treatment of Aboriginal members in Walgett. But after being kicked out of town, their bus is run off the road, and the students brace themselves to face their attackers waiting in the night. How did the U.S. Civil Rights movement spark a wave of student activism on the other side of the world? And how did this dramatic confrontation help catapult this student protest to national importance, changing Australian society forever?

Thank you to our guests: Ann Curthoys, student Freedom Rider and Professor Emeritus at ANU; and ANU School of History Professor, Peter Read, author of “Charles Perkins: A Biography."

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February 13, 1861. The city of Washington DC is waiting. Bracing itself. For weeks, there have been threats that this day is going to get violent because pro-slavery voters feel the recently elected president, Abraham Lincoln, is a threat to their way of life. Today, Lincoln is supposed to be affirmed when the electoral votes are counted in the US Capitol building, but on the morning of the count, hundreds of anti-Lincoln rioters storm the building. Their goal: to stop the electoral count. What happened when a mob of anti-Lincoln rioters tried to take over the US Capitol? And how did American democracy handle the test?

Thank you to our guest, Ted Widmer, distinguished lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY and author of "Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington."

Correction: The Emancipation Proclamation only freed enslaved people in the Confederacy, not throughout the country.

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February 1, 1960. Four young Black men, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan and Joseph McNeil gather outside the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina. All four are college freshman, and they have come downtown with a single purpose: to desegregate the department store, one of the most visible embodiments of racism and segregation in America. These teenagers stage a sit in that sparks a youth movement across the nation and reignites the sputtering Civil Rights Movement. How exactly did the Greensboro sit-ins come together? And why did this particular protest spread like wildfire?

Special thank you to our guest, Dr. Traci Parker Associate Professor at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement.

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