HISTORY This Week

April 3, 1851. A man who escaped slavery is grabbed off the streets of Boston and thrown into a carriage. He fights back, shouting to the crowd, but it doesn’t matter. Under a new federal law, even th...

March 29th, 1923. A new play opens in Berlin, and quietly changes the future. Onstage are workers who never tire, never complain, and never stop. They’re faster, stronger, and more efficient than huma...

HISTORY This Week will return with new episodes this Monday, February 16th, with a story about the most vital train tunnels in the United States. The North River Tunnels—their formal name—connect Ne...

Feb 13, 1920. For over thirty years, Black baseball players have been locked out of the major leagues. So on this day in Kansas City, Rube Foster, a former pitcher and now a team owner, is trying to m...

On January 5, 2026, Jirdes Winther Baxter passed away at 101 years old — the last known survivor of the 1925 diphtheria epidemic in Nome, Alaska. A few years ago, we told the story of the Serum Run: ...

Editor’s note: This episode originally aired January 9, 2023. Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr. passed away in February 2025 at the age of 100. Lt. Col. James Harvey III still resides in New Jersey, now 102 ...

December 16, 1773. Samuel Adams sits in a crowded meeting of American colonists at Boston’s Old South Meeting House. He’s watching small groups of men slip quietly out the door. Once outside, the men ...

December 1, 1564. Spanish vessels left a secret port in Mexico about two weeks ago. Their goal: to sail across the Pacific and back, charting a new route for international trade, and giving Spain an e...

November 16, 1776. George Washington rows toward Manhattan to inspect the fort that bears his name, only to meet a full-scale British assault already underway. By afternoon, Fort Washington has fallen...

October 28, 1895. It’s the first day of a murder trial in Philadelphia, and H.H. Holmes has been left to represent himself. His lawyers say they haven’t had time to prepare for his case, although they...

October 24, 1945. The Charter of the United Nations is signed, promising to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Back when the charter was drafted a few months earlier in San Francis...

July 23rd, 1892. Henry Clay Frick is one of America’s leading industrialists. To Alexander Berkman, he’s one of America’s leading villains. Berkman is an anarchist, along with his partner, Emma Goldma...

July 17, 1674. During renovations at the Tower of London, construction workers digging beneath a stone staircase make a chilling discovery—two child-sized skeletons buried ten feet underground. And Ki...

July 7, 1938. Superman has the villain in his grasp. They soar through the air, then slam into the ground. This villain wants to start a war. Our hero won’t let that happen. At this point, Superman o...

May 16, 1920. Tens of thousands of people surround St. Peter’s Basilica to honor Joan of Arc, a French peasant girl who died nearly five hundred years before. Joan’s feats in battle—and her visions of...

February 24, 1893. Most homes don't have electricity. And yet, one of the technology's pioneers, Nikola Tesla, is about to give the world a glimpse into a fully electrified future. He takes the stage ...

February 23, 2005. New York City's culinary elite gather at Gotham Hall. Tuxedoed waiters pass around champagne flutes and decadent hors d'oeuvres, as famous chefs like Eric Ripert and Anthony Bourdai...

January 8, 1964. In his State of the Union address, Lyndon Johnson unveils his War on Poverty, an effort to tackle subpar living conditions and create jobs across the United States. Johnson discovers ...

For this Thanksgiving, we're re-airing an HTW classic. This episode originally premiered November 23, 2020. November 24, 1966. Millions of spectators flood Broadway in New York City to watch the Macy’...

Oct 27, 1972. The planet Mars has many victims. Specifically, spacecraft. There have been so many failed missions to Mars, that scientists are rumbling about a "Mars Curse". But one mission is defying...

October 18, 1887. At the Crystal Palace in London, hundreds of cats are ready to be judged. This is the first show put on by the National Cat Club, an organization seeking to bring order to the compet...

October 11, 1975. In Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York City, Lorne Michaels and his cast and crew of 20-somethings scramble as the clock gets closer and closer to 11:30 PM. Wardrobes are ...

HISTORY This Week returns with new episodes starting September 16th! In the meantime, listen to a favorite classic from the archives. September 11, 2001. On a clear and sunny day, Captain Richard Tho...

HISTORY This Week returns with new episodes starting September 16th! In the meantime, listen to a favorite classic from the archives. August 21, 1911. On a Monday morning, a department store employee...

August 14, 2023. The HTW team is ready to talk. In a special episode that wraps up Season 4, Sally asks the people behind the scenes about lessons they've learned from telling hundreds of true stories...

April 20, 1963. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walks out of Alabama’s Birmingham Jail after being held for a week for peacefully protesting. He spent most of that time writing a letter that passionately d...

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...

March 10, 1949. Defendant Mildred Gillars arrives at a courthouse to hear her verdict. To trial-watchers, she’s known as Axis Sally—the American woman who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin during ...

February 11, 2005. FBI agents bust down the door of a cinder block house near the University of Kentucky campus. Amid flash grenades and screaming teens, they arrest three students – plus a fourth stu...

Here’s a special episode of Cautionary Tales, a podcast from our friends at Pushkin Industries. On Cautionary Tales, bestselling author Tim Harford shares stories of human error, natural disasters, an...

October 1, 1788. William Brodie mounts the gallows outside Edinburgh’s jail. Just a few years before, as a respected member of the town council, he’d helped redesign those gallows. Now he stands upon ...

In 1935, famed Black sociologist and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction, a revolutionary reassessment of the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War. The book was also a critiq...

May 16, 1868. The Capitol is filled with spectators, anxiously trying to predict how each Senator will vote. It’s the first presidential impeachment trial in American history, and its outcome will hav...

May 10, 1865. Jefferson Davis is awakened by gunshots. The president of the defeated and disbanded Confederate States of America is on the run, and today, federal troops finally catch him. His arrest ...

History repeats itself this week with an episode from the HISTORY This Week archives: May 7, 1824. One of the great musical icons in history, Ludwig Van Beethoven, steps onto stage at the Kärntnertor ...

March 20, 1953. A middle-aged man named John Christie packs up a suitcase and leaves his apartment in Notting Hill, London. No one knows where he’s gone. But a few days later, people realize why he le...

February 4, 1955. In a New York courtroom, the Comics Czar takes the stand. He’s in charge of enforcing a new code, meant to keep comic books from corrupting America’s youth, and he’s here to prove th...

History repeats itself this week with an episode from the HISTORY This Week archives: January 22, 1984. Apple launches the very first Macintosh computer, unveiling the machine to the public in a shows...

October 21, 1879. It’s late in the evening and a 32-year-old inventor is in his New Jersey lab, tinkering with a carbon thread. When that young inventor—Thomas Edison—lights that thread that night, it...

October 11, 1995. Professor Mario Molina is at his desk at MIT when he gets a long distance call from Sweden. It’s the Nobel Committee, telling him he’s won that year’s prize in chemistry, making this...

May 30, 1921. Dick Rowland, a Black teenager, works as a shoeshine in the predominantly white downtown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. On his break, he goes into a nearby office building to use the restroom, and ...

May 20, 2004. A lawyer named Brandon Mayfield walks out of a Portland, Oregon courtroom a free man. About two weeks earlier, Mayfield was arrested by the FBI because they thought they had his fingerpr...

March 27, 1986. Mary Beth Whitehead is in labor. She’s giving birth to a baby girl today, and her husband Richard is by her side. But the Whiteheads are not, contractually-speaking, this child’s paren...

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 ...

SEASON TWO PREMIERE – January 8, 1964. In his State of the Union address, Lyndon Johnson unveils his War on Poverty, an effort to tackle subpar living conditions and create jobs across the United Stat...

December 11, 1936. Just yesterday, King Edward VIII of England officially abdicated the throne. And tonight, some ten million people will hear the reason from the man himself. He tells the country in ...

November 7, 1876. A little before midnight on election night, the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes admits defeat and goes to bed. The Democrat Samuel J. Tilden has swept the electoral college,...

September 10, 2002. Thieves have broken into basements in two cities in Afghanistan to steal plastic containers. Those containers were holding seeds – extremely vital seeds. But the thieves didn’t wan...

July 22, 1934. John Dillinger, America's most famous outlaw, is gunned down by federal agents outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago. Dillinger's death is the final act in a crime spree that involved...

June 30th, 1858. London is a world city, a global center of trade and commerce. But there’s something less glamorous going on in this bustling metropolis: the smell. Every inch of the city smells like...