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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The Rise and Fall of Black ...

02.03.2023

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 revolutionary. It launched the ...

Radio Diaries episodes:

02.03.2023 The Rise and Fall of Black Swan Records 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 revolutionary. It launched the ...
01.23.2023 The Real Refugees of Casablanca It’s been 80 years since the release of the Hollywood classic, Casablanca. When the film opened in 1943—just a year after the U.S. joined World War II—audiences were thrilled by its love story. Humphrey Bogart stars as the cynical owner ...
12.16.2022 The History Of Now One of the questions we often ask ourselves is: How can we produce stories about history that can air alongside the news of today? In 2022, answering that question was easy. In this year-end episode, we’re taking a look back ...
11.23.2022 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, Pablo Casals, was a cello prodigy who had performed for the Queen of Spain. The other, ...
11.04.2022 Banging on the Door: The Election of 1872 Voting rights was just as hot an issue in 1872 as it is today. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony and 14 other women went to cast a ballot in the election - and Anthony ended up arrested and tried. But ...
10.20.2022 The Square Deal 100 years ago, George F. Johnson ran the biggest shoe factory in the world. The Endicott-Johnson Corporation in upstate New York produced 52 million pairs of shoes a year. But Johnson wasn’t only known for his shoes. He had a ...
10.06.2022 The Massacre at Tlatelolco In October 1968, Mexico City was preparing to host the Olympics - the first Latin American country to do so. It was an opportunity to showcase the new, modern Mexico. However, at the same time, student protests were erupting throughout ...
09.23.2022 Guest Spotlight: Ear Hustle This week we’re featuring an episode from our fellow Radiotopia show, Ear Hustle. Ear Hustle is produced inside San Quentin State Prison, in California. The show tells stories about what life is really like in prison, and after you get ...
09.09.2022 Working, Then And Now In the early 1970s, radio host and oral historian Studs Terkel went around the country, tape recorder in hand, interviewing people about their jobs. The interviews were compiled into a 1974 book called “Working: People Talk About What They Do ...
08.23.2022 The Longest Game In the spring of 1981, the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings met for a minor league game of little importance. But over the course of 33 innings – 8 hours and 25 minutes – the game made ...
07.14.2022 Rumble Strip: Finn and the Bell This week we’re bringing you a story from independent producer Erica Heilman, who makes the Rumble Strip podcast. The story is about a teenager named Finn Rooney who loved to fish and play baseball. It’s also about what happened in ...
06.29.2022 The Almost Astronaut In the 1960s, the U.S. was in a tense space race with the Soviet Union - and was losing. The Soviets had sent the first satellite and the first man into space. So, President Kennedy pledged to do something no ...
06.03.2022 The General Slocum On June 15, 1904, a steamship called the General Slocum left the pier on East Third Street in New York City just after 9 AM. The boat was filled with more than 1,300 residents of the Lower East Side. Many ...
05.19.2022 The End of Smallpox Only one human disease has ever been completely eradicated: Smallpox. Smallpox was around for more than 3,000 years and killed at least 300 million people in the 20th century. Then, by 1980, it was gone. Rahima Banu was the last ...
05.05.2022 The Story of Jane Before the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, abortion was illegal throughout most of the country. But that doesn't mean women didn't get them. In 1965, an underground network formed in Chicago to help pregnant women get abortions. At ...
04.19.2022 The Greatest Songwriter You've Never Heard Of You probably don’t know her name, but you definitely know her songs. Rose Marie McCoy would’ve turned 100 years old today. On this episode of the Radio Diaries Podcast, we’re remembering Rose and her music. In the 1950's and early ...
04.07.2022 Identical Strangers Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were both born in New York City and adopted as infants. When they were 35 years old, they met and found they were “identical strangers.” This story originally aired on NPR in 2007. *** Today’s ...
03.30.2022 Sofia's Choice: A Ukrainian Diary Sofia Bretl has lived in New York City for the last decade. But she was born and raised in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, about 25 miles from the Russian border. The city has received some of the worst shelling ...
03.10.2022 The Forgotten Story of Clinton Melton This week, the Senate unanimously passed legislation that would make lynching a federal hate crime. It was a historic moment. Congress has tried and failed to pass antilynching legislation more than 200 times over the course of more than a ...
02.24.2022 Claudette Colvin: Making Trouble Then and Now Nine months before Rosa Parks, a 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, AL. 66 years later, Colvin’s fighting to get her record wiped clean. This episode is ...
02.10.2022 A 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, ...
01.21.2022 Diary of a Saudi Girl: Then & Now When we first met Majd Abdulghani, she was a teenager living in Saudi Arabia, one of the most restrictive countries for women in the world. She wanted to be a scientist, her family wanted to arrange her marriage. Majd recorded ...
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 ...

Older episodes

Radio Diaries

What's Radio Diaries about?

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Radio Diaries episodes:

The Rise and Fall of Black Swan Records

The Real Refugees of Casablanca

The History Of Now

A Guitar, A Cello and the Day that Changed Music

Banging on the Door: The Election of 1872

The Square Deal

The Massacre at Tlatelolco

Guest Spotlight: Ear Hustle

Working, Then And Now

The Longest Game

Rumble Strip: Finn and the Bell

The Almost Astronaut

The General Slocum

The End of Smallpox

The Story of Jane

The Greatest Songwriter You've Never Heard Of

Identical Strangers

Sofia's Choice: A Ukrainian Diary

The Forgotten Story of Clinton Melton

Claudette Colvin: Making Trouble Then and Now

A Voicemail Valentine

Diary of a Saudi Girl: Then & Now

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

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