HISTORY This Week

September 8, 1966. For the first time, the USS Enterprise appears on screen. It is the premiere of a strange new futuristic TV show. Star Trek will introduce the world to a cast of characters that push the boundaries of TV. Why did NBC take a chance on a writer who had already once gotten them in trouble with none other than the US military? And how did Star Trek go where no show had gone before?Special thanks to our guests, David A. Goodman and Michelle Sauer. Goodman’s latest film, Honor Society, is now streaming on Paramount Plus. Sauer is the author of Gender in Medieval Culture. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

September 2, 31 BCE. Two camps prepare for battle off the coast of Greece. On one side is Octavian, Julius Caesar’s heir apparent. On the other, Marc Antony and his lover, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. This battle won’t just determine the leader of Rome, but the fate of global civilization. How did Cleopatra wind up in the middle of a Roman game of tug of war? And how did the Battle of Actium change our world forever?Special thanks to our guest, Barry Strauss, author of The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

August 27, 1900. Dr. Jesse Lazear, a U.S. Army surgeon, walks into Las Animas Hospital Yellow Fever ward in Havana Cuba, toting a brood of mosquitos. He has the system down: remove the cotton stopper that keeps the mosquito penned in its glass vial, turn the vial over, and seal it against a consenting infected patient’s skin. Chasing the source of Yellow Fever, scientists try to understand this deadly plague by running a high-stakes medical experiment on human subjects. But today, those subjects will include themselves. Why did ordinary people—and the doctors running the experiment—willingly and knowingly consent to take part in this study? And when we look back, should we be horrified... or impressed?Special thanks to our guests: Dr. Kathryn Olivarius of Stanford University and author of, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, as well as Molly Crosby author of, The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever the Epidemic That Shaped Our History. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

August 17, 1987. On the red carpet in New York City, it’s the premier of a new movie: Dirty Dancing. The story is set in the sunburnt Shangri-La of New York’s Catskills resort region. The movie will introduce millions to the place that some call the Jewish Alps. "Disneyland with knishes." The Sour Cream Sierras. The Borscht Belt. Ironically, Dirty Dancing arrives as the heyday of the Catskills resort is ending. But how does its culture live on? And how did its signature style of Jewish humor make the leap to Hollywood, where it would fundamentally change American comedy?Special thanks to our guests: Julie Budd, John Conway, Jeremy Dauber, Elaine Grossinger Etess, Bill Persky, Larry Strickler, and Alan Zweibel. You can learn more about Jewish humor in Dauber’s book, Jewish Comedy: A Serious History. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

August 14, 1967. Off the coast of England, a group of pirate ships has been fighting to stay afloat. These are pirates of a particular kind—less sword fighting and treasure hunting, more spinning records and dancing late into the night. For the past few years, these boats have made it their mission to broadcast popular music from international waters. But at the stroke of midnight, a new law will make these pirate radio DJs criminals. Some of them, aboard Radio Caroline, are willing to risk it. How did a group of young rebels launch an offshore radio station that gave the BBC a run for its money? And how did they change the course of music history?Special thanks to our guests, former Caroline pirates Nick Bailey, Gordon Cruse, Roger Gale, Patrick Hammerton, Keith Hampshire, Dermot Hoy, Colin Nichol, Paul Noble, Ian Ross, Chris Sandford, and Steve Young. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

August 6, 1991. On an Internet news board, a memo appears, describing a new project that some scientists have been developing: “The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project.” It’s meant to help ordinary people use the Internet—which at the time is only being used by a small group of experts. How did a group of scientists and coders even conceive of something like the Web? And how did they bring it not just to coders and other specialists, but to the rest of us—for better or for worse?Special thanks to our guests: Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff, Peggie Rimmer, Ben Segal, and Marc Weber, Web historian and curator at the Computer History Museum. To learn more about the Web’s story, visit the Internet History Program page on the Museum’s website: computerhistory.org/nethistory. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

7/31/1492. In cities, towns and villages across late medieval Spain, whole districts have emptied out. Houses abandoned, stores closed, and synagogues—which until recently had been alive with singing and prayer—now sit quiet. Exactly four months earlier, the King and Queen of Spain issued an edict: by royal decree, all Jewish people in Spain must convert to Catholicism or leave the country, for good. Why were the Jews expelled from Spain? How did Spaniards, and then the world, start to think of religion as something inherited, not just by tradition, but by blood? And how does this moment help us understand the challenge of assimilation today?Thank you to our guest, Professor Jonathan Ray from Georgetown University and author of "After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry" (2013). To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

July 21, 1855. Literary lion Ralph Waldo Emerson writes a letter to an unknown Brooklyn journalist named Walt Whitman. He’s just read Whitman’s first published poems, which have both startled him and caused him to rejoice. Emerson congratulates the poet on having produced “the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed.” So why, just five years later, will Emerson be urging him to delete the “scandalous” passages from a new edition of the poems? And how did Walt Whitman’s exuberant sensuality help recast America’s relationship to the body?Special thanks to our guests, Karen Karbiener, professor of literature at NYU and president of the Walt Whitman Initiative, and Jerome Loving, author of Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse and Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Karbiener published a new edition of Whitman’s Live Oak, With Moss poems along with illustrator Brian Selznick. You can find out more about the Walt Whitman Initiative’s programming, including efforts to preserve the Whitman home at 99 Ryerson Street, on their website: WaltWhitmanInitiative.org. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

July 13, 44 BCE. Julius Caesar is dead, stabbed by a trusted friend. With Rome shaken, the Senate meets to decide next steps. They're confronting the brutal power struggle already breaking out among three men: Brutus, the deadly friend; Marc Antony, Caesar's gifted military commander; and Octavian, Caesar's teenaged heir. First, Brutus and Octavian will square off with a clash of festivals designed to sway popular opinion to their side... while the wily Antony bides his time. Today, the final day of the Ludi Apollinares, the games that Brutus arranges to sway the people of Rome. Will mounting the wildest spectacle be the key to grabbing the reins of the entire empire? And how does a bolt of lightning reshape Rome's destiny?Special thanks to Dr. Geoffrey Sumi of Mount Holyoke College, author of Ceremony and Power: Performing Politics in Rome Between Republic and Empire. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

July 7, 2007. In a dramatic ceremony featuring pop stars, fireworks, and smoke canons, the Colosseum is named one of the seven new wonders of the world. It’s an appropriately over-the-top blowout for an arena which, centuries before, was home to its own lavish events. How did spectacles once unfold on the floor of this ancient arena? And how did the Romans use games to entertain people, and to control them?Special thanks to our guests, Alison Futrell, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, and Barry Strauss, author of The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices