Radio Diaries

By Radio Diaries & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

What's Radio Diaries about?

First-person diaries, sound portraits, and hidden chapters of history from Peabody Award-winning producer Joe Richman and the Radio Diaries team. From teenagers to octogenarians, prisoners to prison guards, bra saleswomen to lighthouse keepers. The extraordinary stories of ordinary life. Radio Diaries is a proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm

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LAST EPISODE

A Museum of Sound

12.22.2021

A journey back to the very beginning of recorded sound and the strange, random, beautiful things people captured more than a century ago. We recommend listening with headphones. On January 1st, 2022 all audio recorded before 1923 is entering the ...

Radio Diaries episodes:

12.22.2021 A Museum of Sound A journey back to the very beginning of recorded sound and the strange, random, beautiful things people captured more than a century ago. We recommend listening with headphones. On January 1st, 2022 all audio recorded before 1923 is entering the ...
12.08.2021 A Real Life West Side Story A new movie version of West Side Story is hitting theaters this week. The musical, which tells a story of romance and rivalry between white and Puerto Rican gangs in New York City, first opened on Broadway in 1957. The ...
11.18.2021 A Guitar, A Cello, and the Day that Changed Music November 23, 1936 was a good day for recorded music. Two men, an ocean apart, sat before a microphone and began to play. One was a cello prodigy who had performed for the Queen of Spain. The other played guitar ...
11.04.2021 A Wrench in the Works Every day, we go about our lives doing thousands of routine, mundane tasks. And sometimes, we make mistakes. Human error. It happens all the time. It just doesn’t always happen in a nuclear missile silo. This story was produced in ...
10.22.2021 My Iron Lung In the first half of the 20th century, the disease known as poliomyelitis panicked Americans. Just like COVID today, polio stopped ordinary life in its tracks. Tens of thousands were paralyzed when the virus attacked their nervous systems. Many were ...
10.07.2021 When Borders Move Ever since Texas became a state, the Rio Grande has been the border between the U.S. and Mexico. But rivers can move — and that’s exactly what happened in 1864, when torrential rains caused it to jump its banks and ...
09.23.2021 The Two Lives of Asa Carter Asa Carter and Forrest Carter couldn’t have been more different. But they shared a secret. The Education of Little Tree, by Forrest Carter, is an iconic best-selling book, with a message about living in harmony with nature, and compassion for ...
09.10.2021 When Ground Zero was Radio Row On the 20th anniversary of September 11th, 2001, we’re bringing you a story about the World Trade Center. But it isn’t about the attacks, or about everything that came after. Instead, it’s about what came before 9/11. A century ago, ...
08.26.2021 Last Witness: The Kerner Commission Decades before our current debate over critical race theory, the 1968 Kerner Report pointed the finger at structural racism for creating the conditions that had triggered a series of protests in Black communities across the United States in the summer ...
08.12.2021 Prisoners of War During the war in Vietnam, there was a notorious American military prison on the outskirts of Saigon, called Long Binh Jail. But LBJ wasn’t for captured enemy fighters. It was for American soldiers. These were men who had broken military ...
07.15.2021 The Gospel Ranger This is the story of a song, “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.” It was written by a 12-year-old boy on what was supposed to be his deathbed. But the boy didn’t die. Instead, he went on to ...
06.25.2021 The Rise and Fall of Black Swan Records One hundred years ago, in 1921, a man named Harry Pace started the first major Black-owned record company in the United States. He called it Black Swan Records. In an era when few Black musicians were recorded, the company was ...
06.10.2021 From the Archive: Josh's Diary Twenty-five years ago, Josh Cutler was a 16-year old living with Tourette’s Syndrome, a brain disorder that often causes physical and verbal tics. For several months, he recorded cassette tapes of everything from conversations with his parents and classmates, to ...
05.27.2021 The Tulsa Race Massacre, 100 Years Later On May 31, 1921, white mobs attacked a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as “Black Wall Street.” As many as three hundred people were killed, and more than a thousand homes and businesses were destroyed. Olivia Hooker was ...
05.13.2021 Juan, 25 Years Later This week we continue celebrating Radio Diaries’ 25th anniversary by catching up with Juan from the Teenage Diaries series, which first aired on NPR in 1996. Juan was 17 when we first gave him a tape recorder and asked him ...
04.30.2021 25 Years of Radio Diaries This week marks a very special anniversary for Radio Diaries. It’s been 25 years since we first started giving people tape recorders to report on their own lives. To celebrate, we recently checked in with our very first diarist, Amanda. ...
04.15.2021 Busman's Holiday One day in 1947, NYC bus driver William Cimillo showed up to his daily bus route, but instead of turning left, he turned right. Over the next week, he traveled 1,300 miles in his municipal bus, ending up in Hollywood, ...
04.01.2021 The Last Place: Diary of a Retirement Home For the past year, most nursing homes and assisted living facilities have been in lockdown. Residents have been kept apart—not just from their families, but from each other. They ate meals alone in their rooms, met new grandchildren on Zoom, ...
03.18.2021 Fly Girls Soon after he entered office, President Biden issued an executive order allowing transgender people to serve in the military. It was the latest in a long series of shifts in who can serve and who can't. Women only recently were ...
03.04.2021 Burma '88: Buried History On August 8, 1988 — a date chosen for its numerological power — university students in Burma sparked an uprising against the military dictatorship. They’d been living under military rule their entires lives. And they had had enough. The uprising ...
02.14.2021 Living with Dying One year ago, on Valentine’s Day 2020, Peter Fodera’s heart broke. It stopped working. He collapsed in the middle of teaching a dance class. Someone performed CPR, someone called an ambulance. EMT’s showed up and he lay motionless. He technically ...
02.05.2021 Teen Contender: Then & Now In 2012, Claressa Shields was a 16-year-old boxer in Flint, Michigan. She had an audacious dream: to be the Muhammad Ali of womens boxing. We gave her tape recorder to keep an audio diary as she fought to make it ...
01.16.2021 America Vs. America After the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, we've all been trying to grapple with an event that feels so different from anything we’ve experienced before in this country. But this attack wasn’t the first time the Capitol ...
12.17.2020 Love from Six Feet Apart (Revisited) Robert and Wendy Jackson have been socially distancing under the same roof for 8 months. Robert is 71 and had a kidney transplant four years ago. His immune system is severely compromised. His wife, Wendy, is a pediatric emergency room ...
12.04.2020 Love at First Quarantine, The Sequel When the pandemic hit back in March, Gali Beeri and Joshua Boliver decided to quarantine together, after their very first date. Today on the show, we check back in with them — eight months later — to see how a ...
11.20.2020 Centenarians (Still) in Lockdown It’s been 9 months since Joe Newman (107) and Anita Sampson (100) recorded their story about surviving the 1918 pandemic, getting older, and staying in love during lockdown. We’re thrilled to announce they just won a Third Coast Award! We ...
11.02.2020 How to Lose an Election: A History Presidential campaigns are essentially dramas, and we’re in the final act of this one. The curtain is about to come down.For the past century, the moment of closure has come in the form of one simple act: the public concession. ...
10.01.2020 When Nazis Took Manhattan In an election season when the words "Will you condemn white supremacy" are considered a gotcha question at a presidential debate, it seems like a good time to look back at another moment in American history when race and ethnic ...
09.10.2020 March of the Bonus Army In the summer of 1932, a group of World War I veterans in Portland, Oregon hopped a freight train and started riding the rails to Washington DC. They were demanding immediate payment of a cash bonus the government had promised ...
08.27.2020 The Forgotten Story of Clinton Melton This summer, videos of Black people killed by police officers have sparked outrage and protests across the country. 65 years ago, it was a photograph that shocked the nation. The image of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Till had traveled from Chicago ...
08.06.2020 The Infamous Words of George Wallace A law and order politician who rails against anarchists protesting in the streets and the lying mainstream media? It may sound familiar, but we’re actually going back more than five decades on the show today, when Alabama Governor and four ...
07.13.2020 The Final Frontline The Kearns family funeral business was founded in New York City in the year 1900. Over 120 years, the family has seen a lot of history. Patrick Kearns and Paul Kearns-Stanley are the owners. After 4 months, they finally had ...
07.03.2020 Quarantined in the Pizzeria COVID-19 has forced many families to improvise childcare. For some, it's been like a four month long 'bring your child to work' day. Paul Montanaro runs a pizza shop in the Bronx. That's where his 11-year-old daughter Francesca has been ...
06.25.2020 Lockdown in Lockup Coronavirus cases are on the rise across the country and the five largest clusters of the virus are in correctional institutions. This isn’t a surprise. Prisons are often overcrowded, social distancing is difficult, bathrooms and public spaces are shared by ...
06.16.2020 Home is Where You Park Your Mini Van Back in March, as the pandemic hit, many people across the country found themselves without a safety net. Naida Lavon was one of them. Naida is 67 and a former school bus driver. She was recently furloughed from her part ...
06.04.2020 The Words of Renault Robinson, Then and Now Renault Robinson was one of Chicago's few black police officers in the 1970s. He was a founder of the Afro-American Patrolmen's League. We first learned about Robinson from Studs Terkel's book Working. Studs went around the country in the 1970s ...
05.15.2020 Love at First Quarantine Gali Beeri and Joshua Boliver both live in New York City and they were both single back in March when the city was preparing to lock down. Then they decided to quarantine together, after their very first date. Their story ...
04.24.2020 Love from Six Feet Apart Most of the country is social distancing in public, but some people are doing it under the same roof. Robert Jackson is 71 and had a kidney transplant four years ago. His immune system is severely compromised. His wife, Wendy ...
04.10.2020 Centenarians in Lockdown Joe Newman is 107 years old. He was 5 during the flu pandemic of 1918. Today, he lives in a senior apartment complex in Sarasota, Florida with his fiancé, Anita Sampson. The complex is on lockdown, so we sent them ...
03.11.2020 Soul Sister There’s a long history in America of white people imagining black people’s lives - in novels, in movies, and sometimes in journalism. In 1969, Grace Halsell, a white journalist, published a book called Soul Sister. It was her account of ...
03.05.2020 The Long Haul: Busman's Holiday Busman’s Holiday: When William Cimillo, a NYC bus driver went on a 1,300 mile detour to Florida. This story originally aired on This American Life. Our episode is part of a network-wide project to welcome Over the Road, Radiotopia’s newest ...
02.20.2020 History Had Me Glued to the Seat You know the story of Rosa Parks. But have you heard of Claudette Colvin? Claudette grew up in the segregated city of Montgomery, Alabama. On March 2, 1955, when she was 15 years old, she refused to give up her ...
02.06.2020 Voicemail Valentine Nowadays we’re very accustomed to recording and hearing the sound of our own voices. But in the 1930s many people were doing it for the first time. And a surprising trend began. People started sending their voices to each other, ...
01.16.2020 My So-Called Lungs Laura Rothenberg spent most of her life knowing she was going to die young. She had cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that affects the lungs. When she was born, the life expectancy for people with CF was around 18 years. ...
12.19.2019 The Teenage Diaries Revisited Hour Special Back in the 1990s, Joe Richman gave tape recorders to a bunch of teenagers and asked them to report on their own lives. These stories became the series “Teenage Diaries.” 16 years later, in “Teenage Diaries Revisited,” we check back ...
12.05.2019 Thembi's Diary, Revisited We first met Thembi when she was 19 and living in one of the largest townships in South Africa. We were struck by her candor, sense of humor and her courage. She was willing to speak out about having AIDS ...
11.29.2019 The Last Witness For this episode, Radiotopia gave all of us in the network a prompt: if we were to create another show, any show, what would it be? Well, we’d make an obituary show. Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate ...
11.13.2019 The Press is the Enemy Fifty years ago, on November 13, 1969, Spiro Agnew delivered the most famous speech ever given by a vice president. His message: the media is biased. President Nixon was getting beaten up by the press, and in response, his administration ...
10.17.2019 The View from the 79th Floor On July 28, 1945 an Army bomber pilot on a routine ferry mission found himself lost in the fog over Manhattan. A dictation machine in a nearby office happened to capture the sound of the plane as it hit the ...
10.03.2019 The Dropped Wrench Every day, we go about our lives doing thousands of routine, mundane tasks. And sometimes, we make mistakes. Human error. It happens all the time. It just doesn’t always happen in a nuclear missile silo. This story was produced in ...

Older episodes

Radio Diaries

What's Radio Diaries about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Radio Diaries episodes:

A Museum of Sound

A Real Life West Side Story

A Guitar, A Cello, and the Day that Changed Music

A Wrench in the Works

My Iron Lung

When Borders Move

The Two Lives of Asa Carter

When Ground Zero was Radio Row

Last Witness: The Kerner Commission

Prisoners of War

The Gospel Ranger

The Rise and Fall of Black Swan Records

From the Archive: Josh's Diary

The Tulsa Race Massacre, 100 Years Later

Juan, 25 Years Later

25 Years of Radio Diaries

Busman's Holiday

The Last Place: Diary of a Retirement Home

Fly Girls

Burma '88: Buried History

Living with Dying

Teen Contender: Then & Now

America Vs. America

Love from Six Feet Apart (Revisited)

Love at First Quarantine, The Sequel

Centenarians (Still) in Lockdown

How to Lose an Election: A History

When Nazis Took Manhattan

March of the Bonus Army

The Forgotten Story of Clinton Melton

The Infamous Words of George Wallace

The Final Frontline

Quarantined in the Pizzeria

Lockdown in Lockup

Home is Where You Park Your Mini Van

The Words of Renault Robinson, Then and Now

Love at First Quarantine

Love from Six Feet Apart

Centenarians in Lockdown

Soul Sister

The Long Haul: Busman's Holiday

History Had Me Glued to the Seat

Voicemail Valentine

My So-Called Lungs

The Teenage Diaries Revisited Hour Special

Thembi's Diary, Revisited

The Last Witness

The Press is the Enemy

The View from the 79th Floor

The Dropped Wrench

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