The water supply for millions of people across the South has serious problems. Many of these folks live in majority Black cities like Jackson, Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee. Billions in federal funds were recently allocated to help fix cities' poor water quality, but will it be enough? Join us as we tap into the water across the region and learn what it’ll take to clean it up.

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Donate: The Broadside is made possible by contributions from listeners like you. Support WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and this podcast by making a donation.

Recent litigation to hold drug makers accountable for the opioid epidemic has led to settlements totaling $50 billion that are being distributed to state governments throughout the United States. We explore some of the potential solutions in our home state of North Carolina and find out how its hyper local model for distributing funds could be a compelling test case for tackling the crisis nationwide.

Featuring:

• Jason deBruyn, Health Reporter at North Carolina Public Radio

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Donate: The Broadside is made possible by contributions from listeners like you. Support WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and this podcast by making a donation.

As we all take the week to reconnect with our loved ones, we're presenting a story about what's on our tables this Thanksgiving – and we don't just mean the food, but the plates it sits on. In this episode from the podcast Gravy, producer Wilson Sayre takes us to central North Carolina to tell the story of hand-thrown pottery and its relationship with food. In North Carolina, the history of baking clay into plates and bowls is an ancient one. Step through that past into the present day with us.

Gravy is produced by our friends at the Southern Foodways Alliance and distributed by APT Podcast Studios. Each episode shares stories of the changing American South through the foods we eat.

Find more episodes from Gravy here:

https://www.southernfoodways.org/gravy-format/gravy-podcast/

Donate: The Broadside is made possible by contributions from listeners like you. Support WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and this podcast by making a donation.

For over a hundred years, Western archeologists built vast collections of looted Native American artifacts and human remains. For many Native Americans today, those violations have left a painful legacy. A glimmer of hope appeared in 1990, with the passage of a federal law intended to facilitate the repatriation of Native American ancestors to their tribes. But 30 years later, tens of thousands of remains and funerary artifacts are still held at institutions around the country. 

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Donate: The Broadside is made possible by contributions from listeners like you. Support WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and this podcast by making a donation.

An army depot in Eastern Kentucky once housed something extraordinary and terrible: an arsenal of chemical weapons. The dangers of this stockpile hovered over the residents of the nearby city of Richmond for decades. Recently, the Army fulfilled a long-standing mandate to destroy their entire supply of these deadly weapons, but the road to get there wasn’t easy.

Special thanks to Ben Evans and Ben Sollee for providing archival audio from the documentary NERVE included in this episode.

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Donate: The Broadside is made possible by contributions from listeners like you. Support WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and this podcast by making a donation.

In 1988, two armed Native American men occupied a newspaper office in Southeastern North Carolina. In an effort to raise the alarm on corruption and racism in their mostly rural community, they took 17 hostages and demanded to negotiate with the governor. Decades later, the small town is still grappling with the events surrounding that day.

Special thanks to WRAL for providing archival audio included in this episode.

Featuring:

• Sarah Nagem, editor at Border Belt Independent and contributor at The Assembly

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Donate: The Broadside is made possible by contributions from listeners like you. Support WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and this podcast by making a donation.

Discount stores like Family Dollar and Dollar General have become ubiquitous in the American landscape — especially in the South. They can be convenient and even necessary, but some advocates warn that their rapid spread is creating food deserts. But while pushback to dollar stores grows, researchers say that we need more data to know their true impact. So how many dollar stores are too many?

Featuring:

• Stephan Bisaha, reporter at Gulf States Newsroom

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Donate: The Broadside is made possible by contributions from listeners like you. Support WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and this podcast by making a donation.

As a person incarcerated in the state of Virginia, rapper Deon Thomas doesn’t have access to a recording studio. Instead, he’s part of a small group of artists who record songs via phone calls and distribute them through a prison-only digital music service. It's a modern twist on a long and complicated tradition. Join us as we explore the influential, exploitative and ever-evolving world of music in Southern prisons.

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Donate: The Broadside is made possible by contributions from listeners like you. Support WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and this podcast by making a donation.

Asian Americans are the fastest growing demographic in the country, yet historically, they've been near-invisible in our popular culture. But that's beginning to change. We examine the long history of Asian American Studies, and why it's finally having its moment in the South.

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• You can find a transcript of the episode here.

Donate: The Broadside is made possible by contributions from listeners like you. Support WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and this podcast by making a donation.

Embedded in a warehouse within the Blue Ridge Mountains, climate scientists are collecting rows upon rows of weather data going back centuries. But these archives aren’t just collecting dust – they’re helping us anticipate weather events in the future and create tools to navigate the fallout of the climate crisis.

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• You can find a transcript of the episode here.

Donate: The Broadside is made possible by contributions from listeners like you. Support WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and this podcast by making a donation.