Seriously...

Who should be prevented from having children? And who gets to decide? Across 20th century America, there was a battle to control birth - a battle which rages on to this day.

In 1907, the state of Indiana passed the first sterilisation law in the world. Government-run institutions were granted the power to sterilise those deemed degenerate - often against their will. In the same period, women are becoming more educated, empowered and sexually liberated. In the Roaring Twenties, the flappers start dancing the Charleston and women win the right to vote.

But contraception is still illegal and utterly taboo. The pioneering campaigner Margaret Sanger, begins her decades long activism to secure women access to birth control - the only way, she argues, women can be truly free. In the final part of the episode, sterilisation survivor and campaigner Elaine Riddick shares her painful but remarkable story.

Contributors: Professor Alexandra Minna Stern from the UCLA Institue of Society and Genetics, Professor Wendy Kline from Purdue Univerity, Elaine and Tony Riddick from the Rebecca Project for Justice Featuring the voice of Joanna Monro

Music and Sound Design by Jon Nicholls

Clips: Coverage of Dobbs v Jackson Supreme Court decision from June 24, 2022 including BBC News / CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford / BBC News Sarah Smith / audio of protesters from Channel 4 News. / Mike Wallace interviews Margaret Sanger, September 1957, from the archive at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

"You will not replace us" was the battle cry of white supremacists at a rally in Charlottesville in 2017. They were expressing an old fear - the idea that immigrants and people of colour will out-breed and replace the dominant white 'race'. Exactly the same idea suffused American culture in the first decades of the 1900s, as millions of immigrants arrived at Ellis island from southern and eastern Europe.

The 'old-stock' Americans - the white elite who ruled industry and government - latched on to replacement theory and the eugenic idea of 'race suicide'. It's all there in The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald's novel set in 1922 - which takes us into the world of the super-rich - their parties and their politics.

Amidst this febrile period of cultural and economic transformation, the Eugenics Record Office is established. Led by Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, it becomes a headquarters for the scientific and political advancement of eugenics.

By 1924, the eugenically informed anti-immigrant movement has triumphed - America shut its doors with the Johnson-Reed Act, and the flow of immigrants is almost completely stoppped.

Contributors: Dr Thomas Leonard, Professor Sarah Churchwell, Professor Joe Cain

Featuring the voices of David Hounslow, Joanna Monro and Hughie O'Donnell

Music and Sound Design by Jon Nicholls

Clips: BBC News, coverage of Charlottesville protests, 2017 / CNN, coverage of buffalo shooter, 2022 / MSNBC, coverage of buffalo shooter, 2022 / Edison, Orange, N.J, 1916, Don't bite the hand that's feeding you, Jimmie Morgan, Walter Van Brunt, Thomas Hoier / BBC Radio 4 Great Gatsby: Author, F Scott Fitzgerald Director: Gaynor Macfarlane, Dramatised by Robert Forrest.

In this 6-part series, we follow the story of eugenics from its origins in the middle-class salons of Victorian Britain, through the Fitter Family competitions and sterilisation laws of Gilded Age USA, to the full genocidal horrors of Nazi Germany.

Episode 1: You’ve Got Good Genes

Eugenics is born in Victorian Britain, christened by the eccentric gentleman-scientist Sir Francis Galton. It’s a movement to breed better humans, fusing new biological ideas with the politics of empire, and the inflexible snobbery of the middle-classes.

The movement swiftly gains momentum - taken up by scientists, social reformers, and even novelists as a moral and political quest to address urgent social problems. By encouraging the right people to have babies, eugenicists believed we could breed ourselves to a brighter future; a future free from disease, disability, crime, even poverty. What, its proponents wondered, could be more noble?

The story culminates in the First International Eugenics Congress of 1912, where a delegation of eminent public figures from around the world gather in South Kensington to advocate and develop the science – and ideology – of better breeding. Among them Winston Churchill, Arthur Balfour, the Dean of St Pauls, Charles Darwin's son, American professors and the ambassadors from Norway, Greece, and France: a global crusade in motion.

But amidst the sweeping utopian rhetoric, the darker implications of eugenic ideas emerge: what of those deemed 'unfit'? What should happen to them?

Contributors: Professor Joe Cain, Daniel Maier, Professor Philippa Levine, Professor Angelique Richardson

Featuring the voices of David Hounslow, Joanna Monro and Hughie O'Donnell

Music and Sound Design by Jon Nicholls

Clips: Trump addresses a rally in Bemidji, Minnesota in 2020, C-Span / Trump on his German blood, Kings of Kallstadt 2014, directed by Simone Wendel, produced by Michael Bogar, Mario Conte, Inka Dewitz, Thomas Hofmann / Julian Huxley - Heredity in Man, Eugenics Society, 1937

The Susurrations of the Sea is a collaboration between the poet Katrina Porteous, who lives right next to the North Sea in Beadnell, Northumberland; radio producer Julian May, who grew up close to the Atlantic in Cornwall; and with the sea itself. They gather the variety of its sounds, from gentle susurrations as the tide moves over mud, to the steady roar of surf and mighty waves crashing onto rocks.

They weave these with the words of people who, more than most of us, listen to these sounds. Melissa Reid is a visually impaired competitive surfer at Porthtowan in Cornwall. The writer Lara Messersmith-Glavin grew up on a salmon seiner, fishing out of Kodiak Island, Alaska. Lara recalls how the sounds of the sea brought fear as well the comfort. David Woolf, in Orkney, who works on wave energy projects, tells the life story of a wave, and considers the role of the oceans in the climate crisis. Stephen Perham, rowing his picarooner out of Clovelly harbour, shows how, when fishing for herring without an engine or any modern equipment, learning the sounds of the sea is essential.

The susurrations of the sea are culturally important, finding their way into language and music. At his piano the musician Martin Pacey illustrates how Benjamin Britten captures these in his Sea Interludes, and how these reflect mood and character. For Stephen and Katrina the words people use to describe that sea are themselves sea susurrations.

Katrina writes a new sequence of poems in response to the sounds of the sea and these run through the programme like breaking waves, a choppy sea and an ocean swell.

Producer: Julian May

A bad guy with a gun.

At 09:30am on the 14th December 2012, the staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School locked the school's doors, a security precaution they took every day. At 09:35 a gunman shot his way through a glass panel and entered the school. By 09:40am twenty children and six adults were dead.

Surely something so horrific must be an isolated incident?

It wasn’t.

Since that day there have been active shooter incidents at almost 1000 schools and colleges across the US. In 2022 alone 47 people have been killed and 118 wounded by gunmen in American schools.

We’ve all seen the aftermath of the shootings, the grieving families, the marches, the vows of ‘never again’ yet it does happen, again and again.

America has a complicated relationship with guns, less than half of households claim to own one yet there are estimated to be 393 million firearms owned by American civilians. That’s a lot of guns.

So where did it all start and why does the threat of gun violence provoke some politicians to loosen gun restrictions rather than increase them?

It all starts and ends with a bad guy with a gun.

Producer: Lizzy McNeill

Thanks to the following for the use of their archive:

The Revolutionary Institute

In the history of science, many individuals are honoured by having technical terms named after them. To modern sensibilities, this is sometimes regrettable.

Poet Dr Sam Illingworth looks at the challenges of scientific terms named after people we perhaps wouldn't celebrate today. Who gets to choose them anyway?

It's one thing to quietly change the name of a scientific prize, a research facility or a lecture theatre. But how would you rename an element or a famous equation? With a book, a record or a painting we can choose to leave them on the shelf if we so wish, but some scientific names seem as hard-wearing as concrete...

Photo: The Pillars of Creation as captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope/JWST Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Written and presented by Sam Illingworth

Growing up in Canada, her father's delusions and paranoia gave Julia Shaw a front-row seat into an alternate reality Believing "they” were out to get him – including everyone from aliens to the Bin Laden family – he would later email her, warning that she too was targeted by those monitoring him. He believed that doctors too were part of the conspiracy - so has never had a diagnosis from a psychiatrist. Witnessing her father experiencing a parallel "reality" inspired Julia to look into the mind and she had a "lightbulb moment" at university studying psychology when she first heard a description of paranoid schizophrenia. We hear from Julia and her mum as they meet up, driving through Canada.

The well-known "positive" signs of a psychotic episode like hallucinations, paranoia and deluded thoughts can feel frightening to witness but Julia learns how the some families find it hardest to live with the "negative" symptoms like a Iack of motivation and difficulty in concentrating.

Julia talks to families who understand the demands of living with someone who has serious delusions – to hear what helped them to look after themselves as well as their loved one. We hear from Philippa whose son had his first episode of psychosis when he was at university. Although he now has the right medication to control his symptoms he struggles to motivate himself and a troubling side effect is weight gain which puts him at risk of physical health problems. Kate was only 11 when her cool, older brother Sean first showed the signs of schizophrenia. After numerous spells in hospital she remembers how he struggled to look after himself back in the community and became homeless, sometimes going missing Both women found support from Rethink Mental Illness, a charity which helps people severely affected by mental illness to improve their lives.

Kirsty was 8 years old when she started going to workshops with her dad at the Our Time charity, which supports any child with a parent affected by mental illness. She says that role play and talking openly with others about mental health helped to prepare her for when her dad had a psychotic episode on her 13th birthday: although it was frightening she recognised the signs and knew that they wouldn't last.

Another concern for Julia was the increased risk for family members who might inherit a disorder like paranoid schizophrenia. Dr Rick Adams explains how the risk is higher - at around 10%, it does mean there's a much higher likelihood that she hasn't inherited it.

One voice Julia feels is missing is that of the person who hears voices and believes them: she hasn't been able to reach her father. Instead she talks to Ashley who's 25 and is living with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Ashley explains how her voices were always male and it it's not a good idea for loved ones to tell a person having hallucinations that they're not real: they have to find this out for themselves. She says that educating herself about mental illness and her faith have helped her to keep calm, along with support from her family.

Like the other families she's spoken to Julia feels guilt about her father and wonders if she could have done more to help him - but hearing about support from charities makes her hopeful. And despite all the difficulties, she also recognises how he has passed onto her a love of learning and to stand up for herself.

Presenter: Julia Shaw

You may not know who he is - but you should. Under Donald Trump Ron DeSantis rode the MAGA wave to to the governor job in Florida.

For some, he's a "smart Trump". For others, a "troll" who, with a series of eye-catching stunts and pronouncements, has dominated headlines and is now viewed as a serious contender for the Republican nomination in 2024.

From transporting migrants to the millionaires' playground of Martha's Vineyard to taking on Disney over so-called "Don't Say Gay" legislation, this is a politician who has weaponised the culture wars to enormous effect.

For liberals, he's a cruel, socially awkward bogeyman, to his supporters, a resolute strongman turning the tide against corrosive wokeism.

James Naughtie profiles the man who, if he does turn his eye to The White House, may have to take the gloves off with the man who many say made him - Donald Trump.

The programme features Fernanda Santos of Futuro Media, Mike Binder of the University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab and Rick Wilson, founder of The Lincoln Project.

Presented by James Naughtie.

Daren is haunted by his experience of the Manchester Arena bombing. So why do people taunt him with conspiracy theories which falsely claim the attack didn’t happen?

On 22 May 2017, a terrorist bomb was detonated in the foyer of the arena at the end of an Ariana Grande concert, killing 22 people and the bomber. Daren, who had been in the audience with his son, rushed to help the injured. He has lived with the trauma of that night ever since.

But to Daren’s disbelief, it wasn’t long before sinister claims began circulating online, wild allegations that the attack was faked. He and other survivors were accused of being “crisis actors” paid to play a part in a massive deception by evil forces in the government.

So who is propagating these baseless claims?

In this BBC Radio 4 podcast, the BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring, investigates how survivors of UK terror attacks and tragedies are targeted with horrific conspiracy theories, online abuse and threats. Some are even tracked down offline too. Now they want answers and justice.

Across this series - and in this episode - there are graphic descriptions of violence. This episode contains audio from Richard D Hall’s website.

Presenter: Marianna Spring