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On January 3rd, the U.S. military apprehended Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the U.S. for trial to face federal drug trafficking and weapons charges. Today, we’re bringing you an episode from our archive: the story of two leaders in Venezuela, separated by nearly two centuries, who shaped the country into what it is today. This episode originally ran in 2019 and has been updated.

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Octavia Butler gave us a new kind of science fiction: not only as one of the first writers to use history to talk about the future, and not only as one of the first Black women to do it, but by sending, along with her warnings, a message of hope, survival, persistence, and repair.

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As a kid, Ramtin fell in love with Frank Herbert's 1965 epic sci-fi novel, Dune. Today, he joins NPR's Books We’ve Loved crew, Andrew Limbong and B.A. Parker, to make the case for why he thinks you'll love it too.

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Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But when Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 19th-century London, the holiday went viral.


Guests:

Leon Litvack, professor of Victorian Studies at Queen's University in Belfast and editor of the Charles Dickens Letters project.

Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, author and historian of Victorian England.
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What if the real story of human history is a story itself? To kick off our winter book club, we talk with bestselling author Tamim Ansary about his book, "The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History Of Human Culture, Conflict And Connection," about why the future of our species might depend on our ability to arrive at a story we all share. This episode originally ran in 2022.

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Rund takes Ramtin on a tour of the enduring world of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice... and our two hosts make a bet.

Guests:

John Mullan, professor of English Literature at University College London and author of What Matters in Jane Austen

Devoney Looser, professor of English at Arizona State University and author of Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive and Untamed Jane

Lizzie Dunford, director of Jane Austen's House

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What's better than holiday hot chocolate? If just thinking about it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, well – that’s by design. Chocolate's big history sweeps across the globe, and today we’re going on that journey: from the pre–Columbus Americas, to an early 20th century reporter’s hunch about what cocoa production really takes, to a 21st century medical student’s story about his childhood on a farm that produces those holiday treats.

Guests:

Carla Martin, lecturer in African and African American Studies at Harvard University and President of the Board of the Institute for...

On today's show, a Thanksgiving story you might never have heard -- not about Pilgrims or Native people, but instead about a woman who, as civil war loomed, pushed for a shared national holiday she thought would keep the United States together. This episode originally ran in 2024.

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Rund Abdelfatah and Cristina Kim try to unravel the mystery of a Soviet scientist who was helping to spread the word about nuclear winter theory—until he disappeared. 

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How quickly can a government fall? Chile was once one of Latin America's oldest democracies, but that all changed in a matter of hours after a military coup on September 11, 1973. Some supported the coup; many did not. But for the next 17 years, all Chileans lived in the grip of brutal authoritarian rule. Today on the show, the story of a democracy’s collapse and rebirth, told through the eyes of four people who lived through it.

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On the surface, the story of Sudan’s war is about two generals vying for power. But it’s also about a vast web of international interests involving the U.S., China, Russia, and the UAE.  Today on the show, the story of how things in Sudan got to this point, and the effects of the conflict around the world. This episode originally ran in 2024 and has been updated.

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Late last month, President Trump announced that the United States would be restarting nuclear weapons tests after a break of over 30 years. We’ve since learned that they won’t be the explosive kind of tests, but this sent us down a rabbit hole — where we found a story about dinosaurs, Carl Sagan, and nuclear war. Because there was a moment in the not-so-distant past when we learned what drove the dinosaurs extinct... and that discovery, made during the Cold War, may have helped save humans from the same fate. This episode originally published in March 2025.

Guests:

Da...

The word "genocide" can seem like it’s everywhere right now: So it can be easy to forget that, fundamentally, it's a legal term that dates to World War II — and wasn’t used in court for half a century afterwards. Today on the show, the story of what happened during the Bosnian War in the 1990s and the work that went into building the legal case to prove genocide.
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Stuck in traffic? Glued to your desk chair? Folding yet another pile of your kids’ laundry? We GOT you!! Take a break, turn up the volume, and shake it out with this special episode of Throughline, a tribute to dance music, all songs composed by our very own Ramtin Arablouei.

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What powers the global internet? The answer might surprise you: not satellites, but hundreds of thin cables that run along the ocean floor. They’re an absolutely essential technology that’s also incredibly fragile — so fragile that in the beginning, most people thought they couldn't possibly work. Today on the show: the story of a man who did think they could work… and the lengths he went to to try and connect the world.

Guests:

Bill Burns, former BBC broadcast engineer and founder of atlantic-cable.com 

Cyrus Field IV, great-great-grandson of Cyrus Field

Allison...

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a plan to end fighting in Gaza, just over two years after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023 and Israel’s subsequent bombardment and invasion of Gaza. As we wait to see what happens next, we’re revisiting our episodes looking at the history of major players on both sides of the conflict. Last week, we looked at the history of Hamas; if you missed that, go back and check it out. This week, we’re bringing you the story of the rise of right wing politics in Israel and President Benjamin Netany...

With peace talks once again underway between Israel and Hamas, and hopes again growing for a permanent ceasefire, we’re bringing you our episode on the origins of Hamas: where it came from, how its influence grew, and what it represents. Next week, our episode on Benjamin Netanyahu and the rise of Israel’s right wing. This episode first ran in November 2023.

We've done episodes on Hamas, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, and more. Find them all in our series, "The Cycle".

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Journalism is under unprecedented threat worldwide. At least 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza alone since the October 7th, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel; the Committee to Protect Journalists says it’s the deadliest conflict for journalists the group has ever documented. In conflicts around the world, it’s war reporters who write the first draft of history. But getting to the front lines, finding the truth, and reporting it is easier said than done. Today on the show: war reporters, and what’s at stake if they can’t do their jobs.

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Life can be tough. Every day brings new challenges. And in order to get through the waking hours we need rest. Good quality sleep. In this bonus episode, a companion to our episode "The Way We Dream," we offer you a 30-minute audio journey into the deep. A smooth trip into the place where our minds are free from the confines of our self awareness, our dreams. This episode originally published in January 2022.

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The alleged link between vaccines and autism is back in the news this week, being regularly speculated on by both President Trump and Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  The claim has been repeatedly disproven: there is no evidence that vaccines and autism are related. But the myth is powerful. In this episode: the roots of the modern anti-vaccine movement, and of the fears that still fuel it – from a botched polio vaccine, to the discredited autism study, to today. This episode originally published in February 2025. 

Guests:

Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Educ...

The U.S. immigration detention system is spread out across federal facilities, private prisons, state prisons, and county jails. It’s grown under both Democratic and Republican presidents. And it’s been offered up as a source of revenue for over a century, beginning with the first contracts between the federal government and sheriffs along the Canadian border.

Guests:

Brianna Nofil, assistant professor of history at The College of William and Mary author of The Migrant's Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration

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The U.S. - Mexico border, according to a video on the official White House website, is very quiet: nothing but tires crunching on gravel and the wind whistling around a high, solid-looking wall. But that's not the whole story. Today on the show, how that border went from a line in the sand, to a fence, to a wall.

Guests:

Rachel St. John, associate professor of history at U.C. Davis, and author of Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US Mexico Border

Miguel Levario, associate professor of history at...

What is ICE? What was it created to do? And what’s changed in 2025? Today on the show, the history of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and how it tracks the story of immigration, and politics, in the U.S.

Guests:

Peter Markowitz, professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York City and founder of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic.

Rodger Werner is co-author of “The History and Evolution of Homeland Security in the United States” and currently employed by the Department of Homeland Security. The views he expresses in this episode are his...

The Israeli government recently approved a new settlement project in the occupied West Bank that would effectively cut it in half. The plan is illegal under international law and has been widely condemned. To get a sense of why settlements continue to be such a big issue for both Palestinians and Israelis, we wanted to bring you this episode about their history that’s part of our series, "The Cycle." This episode originally published in October 2024.

Guests:
Khaled El-Gindy, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C.

Sara Yael Hirschhorn, author of Ci...

President Donald Trump has been loudly critical of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for years now. Since January, the President has accused him of playing politics by keeping interest rates high. Trump has also threatened to oust Powell — which would mark an extraordinary shift away from the independence of the central bank.Today from our friends at The Indicator from Planet Money: a short history of the Federal Reserve and why it’s insulated from day-to-day politics; how the Fed amassed a ton of power in recent years; and a Trump executive order that took some of that power away.
...

Who ushered housewives into the workforce and plastic storage containers into America’s kitchens? Today on the show, the rise and fall of Brownie Wise, the woman behind Tupperware's plastic empire — and a revolution in women’s work.

Guests:
Alison Clarke, author of Tupperware, the Promise of Plastic in 1950s America
Bob Kealing, author of Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Party Empire

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Duration: 00:49:09

The 25th amendment. A few years before JFK was shot, an idealistic young lawyer set out on a mission to convince people something essential was missing from the Constitution: clear instructions for what should happen if a U.S. president was no longer able to serve. On this episode of our ongoing series We the People, the story behind one of the last amendments to the Constitution, and the man who got it done. This story originally published in March 2025.

Guest:
John Feerick, Norris Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and author of The Twenty-Fifth Amendment...

The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? Today on Throughline's We the People: the Eighth Amendment, the death penalty, and what cruel and unusual really means. This episode was originally published in January 2025.

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The Fifth Amendment. You have the right to remain silent when you're being questioned in police custody, thanks to the Fifth's protection against self-incrimination. But most people end up talking to police anyway. Why? Today on Throughline's We the People: the Fifth Amendment, the right to remain silent, and how hard it can be to use it. This episode originally ran in March 2025.

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In the mid-1980s, an OBGYN in Brazil noticed that far fewer pregnant women at his hospital were dying from abortion complications. It wasn't a coincidence. Brazilian women had made a discovery that allowed them to safely have abortions at home, despite the country's abortion restrictions. That discovery eventually spread across the globe.

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The Third Amendment.

Maybe you've heard it as part of a punchline. It's the one about quartering troops — two words you probably haven't heard side by side since about the late 1700s.

At first glance, it might not seem super relevant to modern life. But in fact, the U.S. government has gotten away with violating the Third Amendment several times since its ratification — and every time it's gone largely unnoticed.

In a time of escalating political violence, police forces armed with military equipment, and more frequent and devastating natural disasters, why the Third Amen...

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Edward Said brought the question of Palestine into the American mainstream. He taught at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, and today, more than two decades after his death, pro-Palestine student protesters on that campus and others have invoked his name. Meanwhile, his interviews circulate on social media and his books are taught at universities around the world. On this episode: the story of the man who pushed for recognition of the Palestinian perspective, the pushback he faced, and the dangers he foresaw.

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What's the role of government in society? What do we mean when we talk about individual responsibility? What makes us free? 'Neoliberalism' might feel like a squishy term that's hard to define and understand. But this ideology, founded by a group of men in the Swiss Alps, is a political project that has dominated our economic system for decades. In the name of free market fundamentals, the forces behind neoliberalism act like an invisible hand, shaping almost every aspect of our lives. This episode originally ran as "Capitalism: What Makes Us Free?"

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Captain America: an all-American superhero. Clad in red, white, and blue, he carries only a shield. And he fights only when he must. When it's right.

But what happens when what's right isn't so clear? And how does a comic book hero designed to represent America's values survive in a changing world?

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The Iran-Iraq war, 9/11, and the story of Iranian Revolutionary Guard general Qassem Soleimani, from his rise to power, to his assassination, by the U.S., to the power his legacy wields now.

This episode originally ran as Soleimani's Iran. You can find more of Throughline's coverage into the origins of the conflict in the Middle East here.

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Military confrontations, early-morning attacks, and digital warfare: the story of Iran and the U.S. from the 1979 Iranian revolution to the fraught moment we're in today.

This episode originally ran as Rules of Engagement. You can find more of Throughline's coverage into the origins of the conflict in the Middle East here.

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The Supreme Court is issuing its final decisions of the term this month. But it's been extraordinarily active since January, in part because the Trump administration has submitted over a dozen emergency applications asking the court to rule quickly on controversial issues. Those cases are part of what's known as the court's "shadow docket." And increasingly, it's affecting all of our lives. This episode originally published in 2023 and has been updated.

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The U.S. and Iran have had a tense relationship for decades — but when did that begin? This week, we feature our very first episode about an event from August 1953 — when the CIA helped to overthrow Iran's prime minister.

This episode originally ran as Four Days in August.

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Abortion wasn't always controversial. In fact, in colonial America it would have been considered a fairly common practice: a private decision made by women, and aided mostly by midwives. But in the mid-1800s, a small group of physicians set out to change that. Obstetrics was a new field, and they wanted it to be their domain—meaning, the domain of men and medicine. Led by a zealous young doctor named Horatio Storer, they launched a campaign to make abortion illegal in every state, spreading a potent cloud of moral righteousness and racial panic that one historian later called "the ph...

Whose job is it to educate Americans? Congress created the first Department of Education just after the Civil War as a way to help reunify a broken country. A year later, it was basically shut down. But the story of that first department's birth – and death – set the stage for everything that's come since.

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From Social Security and the minimum wage to exit signs and fire escapes, Frances Perkins transformed how people in the U.S. lived and worked. Today on the show: how a middle class do-gooder became one of the savviest and most powerful people in American politics — and built the social safety net we have today.

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The Fourth Amendment is the part of the Bill of Rights that prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures." But — what's unreasonable? That question has fueled a century's worth of court rulings that have dramatically expanded the power of individual police officers in the U.S. Today on the show, how an amendment that was supposed to limit government power has ended up enabling it. This episode originally published in 2024.

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On today's episode, we travel from the battlefields of the U.S. Civil War, through the rubble of two world wars, to the hallways of the Hague, to see how the modern world has tried to define — and prosecute — war crimes. This episode originally aired at "The Rules of War" in 2024.

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Gangsters, banksters, and politicians. Today on the show, how the hunt for Al Capone helped turn the IRS into one of the U.S. government's most powerful tools — and most effective weapons.

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The story of the Los Angeles police chief who, faced with one of the largest internal migrations in American history, tried to close California's borders to stop it.

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Baby bonuses, childless cat ladies: the rhetoric around motherhood is politically charged right now. And the fantasy of an ideal mother remains powerful, even as real-life parents struggle to reconcile its demands. Today on the show, three myths of motherhood, and the people who have fought to break them down. This episode originally ran in 2023 as The Labor of Love.

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When James Garfield won the Presidency in 1880, Charles Guiteau got ready to accept his new government job. No one had actually offered him a job – but he'd campaigned for Garfield, so he assumed he'd be rewarded. That was the spoils system, and it was how the government worked.

But President Garfield didn't hire him. Guiteau was furious. And on July 2, 1881, he followed Garfield to a Washington D.C. train station and shot him.

Today on the show: how an assassination meant to restore the spoils system instead led to its end, and birthed the modern federal wo...

In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order invoking a centuries-old law: the Alien Enemies Act. The Act allows a president to detain or deport citizens of foreign adversaries to the United States, but only in the case of a "declared war" or "invasion." Now, the Trump administration and the courts are locked in a battle over whether the president's use of the Act, under which people have already been deported, is legal. Today on the show: where the Alien Enemies Act came from, how presidents have used it before, and what that tells us about what's to come.
<...

Climate disaster, political unrest, random violence: Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls "a thin layer of ice on top of an ocean of chaos and darkness." But is that actually true — or the way it has to be? Today on the show, what really happens when things fall apart. This episode originally published in 2023.

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Want to get rich quick? You're not alone. Right now, Americans spend over $100 billion, yes billion, every year on lottery tickets. Today on the show, in collaboration with Scratch and Win from WGBH, how the mafia, Sputnik, medical equipment, and the electoral college led to American's obsession with playing the numbers.

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The Fifth Amendment. You have the right to remain silent when you're being questioned in police custody, thanks to the Fifth's protection against self-incrimination. But most people end up talking to police anyway. Why? Today on Throughline's We the People: the Fifth Amendment, the right to remain silent, and how hard it can be to use it.

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Big Bird, politics, and the ABCs: how a television show made to represent New York City neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx became beloved by families around a divided country. This episode originally ran in 2022 as "Getting to Sesame Street."

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Dinosaurs, Carl Sagan, and nuclear war. There was a moment in the not-so-distant past when we learned what drove the dinosaurs extinct — and that discovery, made during the Cold War, may have helped save humans from the same fate. In this episode, we'll take a journey from prehistoric times to the nuclear age and explore how humans contend with fears of the end.

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The 25th amendment. A few years before JFK was shot, an idealistic young lawyer set out on a mission to convince people something essential was missing from the Constitution: clear instructions for what should happen if a U.S. president was no longer able to serve. On this episode of our ongoing series We the People, the story behind one of the last amendments to the Constitution, and the man who got it done.

Correction: In a previous version of this episode we incorrectly said that John F. Kennedy was the youngest president in US history. Kennedy at 43...

Millions of Americans depend on their jobs for health insurance. But that's not the case in many other wealthy countries. How did the U.S. end up with a system that's so expensive, yet leaves so many people vulnerable? On this episode, how a temporary solution created an everlasting problem. This episode originally ran in 2020 as The Everlasting Problem.

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What can and can't the president do — and how do we know? The framers of the U.S. Constitution left the powers of the executive branch powers deliberately vague, and in doing so opened the door for every president to decide how much power they could claim. Over time, that's become quite a lot. This episode originally ran in 2020 and has been updated with new material.

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Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices Duration: 00:51:40

The alleged link between vaccines and autism was first published in 1998, in a since-retracted study in medical journal The Lancet. The claim has been repeatedly disproven: there is no evidence that vaccines and autism are related. But by the mid-2000s, the myth was out there, and its power was growing, fueled by distrust of government, misinformation, and high-profile boosters like Jim Carrey and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In this episode: the roots of the modern anti-vaccine movement, and of the fears that still fuel it – from a botched polio vaccine, to the discredited autism study, to today.

Le...

Wong Kim Ark was born in the U.S. and lived his whole life here. But when he returned from a trip to China in August of 1895, officials wouldn't let him leave his ship. Citing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants, they told him he was not, in fact, a citizen of the United States.

Today, the story of Wong Kim Ark, whose epic fight to be recognized as a citizen in his own country led to a Supreme Court decision affirming birthright citizenship for all.

This episode originally ran as By...

Who owns stolen art? Today on the show, the bloody journey of a Benin Bronze from West Africa to the halls of one of England's most elite universities — a tale of imperialism, betrayal, and the making of the modern world.

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The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? Today on Throughline's We the People: the Eighth Amendment, the death penalty, and what cruel and unusual really means.

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Whether it's pesticides in your cereal or the door plug flying off your airplane, consumers today have plenty of reasons to feel like corporations might not have their best interests at heart. At a moment when the number of product recalls is high and trust in the government is low, we're going to revisit a time when a generation of people felt empowered to demand accountability from both companies and elected leaders — and got results. Today on the show, the story of the U.S. consumer movement and its controversial leader: the once famous, now infamous Ralph Nader.

To...

Our dreams can haunt us. But what are we to make of them? From omens and art to modern science, we tell the story of dreams and the surprising role they may play in our lives. (Originally ran as The Way We Dream)

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Defeating old age? In 1899, Elie Metchnikoff woke up in Paris to learn he had done just that. At least, that's what the newspaper headlines said. Before long he was inundated with mail from people begging him to help them live forever. The only problem? He didn't know how to do it.

At the time, Metchnikoff was one of the world's most famous scientists. And he believed aging was a disease he could cure. He dedicated his life to that quest, spending his days interviewing centenarians, pulling gray hair out of colleagues and old dogs, and boiling strawberries — all in...

How did love – this thing that's supposed to be beautiful, magical, transformative – turn into a neverending slog? We went searching for answers, and we found them in surprising places. On today's show: a time-hopping, philosophical journey into the origins of modern love. (This episode first ran as Love, Throughline)

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In the Xinjiang region of western China, the government has rounded up and detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups. Many haven't been heard from in years, and more still are desperately searching for their families. Western governments have called this crackdown a cultural genocide and a possible crime against humanity.

In this episode, the first of a three-part series from Embedded, NPR correspondent Emily Feng tells the story of one of those people. For years, a Uyghur man named Abdullatif Kucar had no idea what has happened to his wife and young children...

"History" can seem big and imposing. But it's always intensely personal – it's all of our individual experiences that add up to historical events. Over the next few episodes, we're exploring the personal and how it's changed history: from the story of romantic love, to the man who tried to cure aging, to the contents of our dreams...

First up, memory and our sense of smell. What if we told you that the key to time travel has been right in front of our eyes this whole time? Well, it has: it's in our noses. Today on the show, th...

Throughline associate producer Anya Steinberg talks to supervising senior editor Julie Caine about her reporting trip to Owens Valley in northeastern California for the episode, "Water in the West," about the creation of—and controversy over—the Los Angeles aqueduct.

This normally would be a bonus episode just for Throughline+ listeners. With this being the season of giving, we're sharing this one with everyone! To access all of Throughline's bonus episodes, listen to every episode sponsor-free, and support public radio, sign up for Throughline+ at plus.npr.org/throughline

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Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But in 19th-century London, it went viral. When Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the book's tale of miserly Scrooge and the ghosts that transformed him transformed the holiday too, especially in the U.S.

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The U.S. has long professed to be a country where people can seek refuge. That's the promise etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty. But it's never been that clear-cut.

Today on the show, the story of how the U.S. asylum system was forged in response to moments of crisis, and where it left gaps: from Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, to Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers during the Cold War, to the precarious system of today.

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By the time his book went to press in London, on November 18, 1633, Thomas Morton had been exiled from the Puritan colonies in Massachusetts. His crimes: drinking, carousing, and — crucially — building social and economic ties with Native people. His book outlined a vision for what America could become. A very different vision than that of the Puritans.

But the book wouldn't be published that day. It wouldn't be published for years. Because agents for the Puritan colonists stormed the press and destroyed every copy.

Today on the show, the story of what's widely considered America's first banned book...

The Thanksgiving story most of us hear is about friendship and unity. And that's what Sarah Josepha Hale had on her mind when she sat down to write a letter to President Lincoln in 1863, deep into the Civil War. Hale had already spent years campaigning for a national day of thanksgiving, using her platform as editor of one the country's most widely-read magazines and writing elected officials to argue that Americans urgently needed a national story. But she'd gotten nowhere – until now.

Five days after reading her letter, Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. At the time, no on...

Today on the show, we're taking you behind the scenes. We'll tell you how Throughline was born, some of what goes into making our episodes, and a little bit about how we make our special sauce — the Throughline rizz, as the kids say.

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What is it, why do we have it, and why hasn't it changed? Born from a rushed, fraught, imperfect process, the origins and evolution of the Electoral College might surprise you and make you think differently about not only this upcoming presidential election, but our democracy as a whole.

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The question of settlements has loomed over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, and has only intensified in the past year. According to a UN report, since October 7, 2023, there has been a record surge in settlement activities and increased settler violence against Palestinians. Today on the show: how the settlement movement grew from a small religious mission to one of the central tenets of the current Israeli government. It's a story that intersects with other topics we've covered in our series relating to this conflict – the history of Hamas, the rise of the Israeli right wing, Hezbollah, and Zionism.

To...

Today on the show, two stories of building power in swing states: from the top down, and the bottom up.

First, how a future Supreme Court justice helped launch a program to challenge voters at the Arizona polls in the early 1960s, in a county that's become a hotbed for election conspiracies in the decades since. Then, how a 1973 labor strike led by Arab Americans in a Michigan factory town sparked a political movement that could play a major role in the 2024 election.

This story is part of "We, The Voters," NPR's election series reported from...

Drunken brawls, coercion, and lace curtains: believe it or not, how regular people vote was not something the Founding Fathers thought much about. Americans went from casting votes at wild parties in the town square to doing so in private booths, behind a drawn curtain. In this episode, the process of voting: how it was designed, who it was meant for, and the moments when we reimagined it altogether.

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References to God and Christianity are sprinkled throughout American life. Our money has "In God We Trust" printed on it. Most presidents have chosen to swear their oath of office on the Bible.Christian nationalists want more.Christian nationalist beliefs are rooted in the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and that its laws should reflect certain Christian values. And versions of these beliefs are widely held by Americans of different ages, races, and backgrounds. In 2022, a Pew Research poll reported that 45 percent of Americans believe the country should be a Christian nation. More than...

Today, the city of Jerusalem is seen as so important that people are willing to kill and die to control it. And that struggle goes back centuries. Nearly a thousand years ago, European Christians embarked on what became known as the First Crusade: an unprecedented, massive military campaign to take Jerusalem from Muslims and claim the holy city for themselves. They won a shocking victory – but it didn't last. A Muslim leader named Saladin raised an army to take the city back. What happened next was one of the most consequential battles of the Middle Ages: A battle that would fo...

Hezbollah is a Lebanese paramilitary organization and political party that's directly supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, and Israel's invasion of Gaza, there have been escalating attacks between Hezbollah and Israel across the border they share.

Today on the show: a history of Hezbollah.

This episode was published on 9/24/24. On 9/26/24, Israeli airstrikes killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader. For breaking news, head to npr.org.

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Climate change, political unrest, random violence - Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls, "a thin layer of ice on top of an ocean of chaos and darkness." In the United States, polls indicate that many people believe that law and order is the only thing protecting us from the savagery of our neighbors, that the fundamental nature of humanity is competition and struggle. This idea is often called "veneer theory." But is this idea rooted in historical reality? Is this actually what happens when societies face disasters? Are we always on the cusp of...

9/11 was an inside job. Aliens have already made contact. COVID-19 was created in a lab.

Maybe you rolled your eyes at some point while reading that list. Or maybe you paused on one and thought... well... it could be true.

Since the first Americans started chatting online, conspiracy theories have become mainstream — and profitable. It's gotten harder to separate fact and fiction. But if we don't know who we can trust, how does a democracy survive?

On today's episode, we travel the internet from UFOs, through 9/11, to COVID, to trace how we ended up in...

Airline workers — pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, baggage handlers, and more — represent a huge cross-section of the country. And for decades, they've used their unions to fight not just for better working conditions, but for civil rights, charting a course that leads right up to today. In this episode, we turn an eye to the sky to see how American unions took flight.

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What does it mean to do the greatest good for the greatest number? When the Los Angeles Aqueduct opened in 1913, it rerouted the Owens River from its natural path through an Eastern California valley hundreds of miles south to LA, enabling a dusty town to grow into a global city. But of course, there was a price.

Today on the show: Greed, glory, and obsession; what the water made possible, and at what cost.

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The Third Amendment. Maybe you've heard it as part of a punchline. It's the one about quartering troops — two words you probably haven't heard side by side since about the late 1700s.

At first glance, it might not seem super relevant to modern life. But in fact, the U.S. government has gotten away with violating the Third Amendment several times since its ratification — and every time it's gone largely unnoticed.

Today on Throughline's We the People: In a time of escalating political violence, police forces armed with military equipment, and more frequent and devastating natural disa...

The Fourteenth Amendment. Of all the amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 14th is a big one. It's shaped all of our lives, whether we realize it or not: Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education, Bush v. Gore, plus other Supreme Court cases that legalized same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, access to birth control — they've all been built on the back of the 14th. The amendment was ratified after the Civil War, and it's packed full of lofty phrases like due process, equal protection, and liberty. But what do those words really guarantee us? Today on Throughline's We th...

The Sixth Amendment. Most of us take it for granted that if we're ever in court and we can't afford a lawyer, the court will provide one for us. And in fact, the right to an attorney is written into the Constitution's sixth amendment. But for most of U.S. history, it was more of a nice-to-have — something you got if you could, but that many people went without.

Today, though, public defenders represent up to 80% of people charged with crimes. So what changed? Today on Throughline's We the People: How public defenders became the backbone of our cr...

In 1966, the governing body of the Olympic track and field event started mandatory examinations of all women athletes. These inspections would come to be known as "nude parades," and if you were a woman who refused the test, you couldn't compete.

We're going back almost a century to the first time women were allowed to compete in Olympic track and field games, and to a time when a committee of entirely men decided who was a female and who wasn't.

Today on the show, we bring you an episode from a new podcast from CBC and...

The Second Amendment. In April 1938, an Oklahoma bank robber was arrested for carrying an unregistered sawed-off shotgun across state lines. The robber, Jack Miller, put forward a novel defense: that a law banning him from carrying that gun violated his Second Amendment rights. For most of U.S. history, the Second Amendment was one of the sleepier ones. It rarely showed up in court, and was almost never used to challenge laws. Jack Miller's case changed that. And it set off a chain of events that would fundamentally change how U.S. law deals with guns. Today on Throughline's We...

The First Amendment. Book bans, disinformation, the wild world of the internet. Free speech debates are all around us. What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they created the First Amendment, and how have the words they wrote in the 18th century been stretched and shaped to fit a world they never could have imagined? It's a story that travels through world wars and culture wars. Through the highest courts and the Ku Klux Klan. Today on Throughline's We the People: What exactly is free speech, and how has the answer to that question changed in the history of the...

Sudan has been at the center of a deadly and brutal war for over a year. It's the site of the world's largest hunger crisis, and the world's largest displacement crisis.

On the surface, it's a story about two warring generals vying for power – the latest in a long cycle of power struggles that have plagued Sudan for decades. But it's also a story about the U.S. war on terror, Russia's war in Ukraine, and China's global rise.

Today on the show, we turn back the clock more than a century to untangle the complex we...

The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, yet over 10 percent of people – nearly 40 million – live in poverty. It's something we see, say, if we live near a tent encampment. And it's also something we feel. More than a third of people in the U.S. say they're worried about being able to pay their rent or mortgage. Medical bills and layoffs can change a family's economic status almost overnight.

These issues are on the minds of Democrats and Republicans, city-dwellers and rural households. And in an election year, they're likely to be a majo...

Birmingham, Alabama was one of the fiercest battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement. And in order to understand the struggle, you don't have to look any further than Rickwood Field, the oldest baseball stadium in the country. Over more than a century it's hosted Negro League baseball, a women's suffrage event, a Klan rally — and eventually, the first integrated sports team in Alabama.

Today on the show, we're joined by host Roy Wood, Jr., to bring you the first episode of Road to Rickwood, an original series from WWNO, WRKF, and NPR telling the story of America's oldest ba...

Today, the U.S. popular music industry is worth billions of dollars. And some of its deepest roots are in blackface minstrelsy and other racist genres. You may not have heard their names, but Black musicians like George Johnson, Ernest Hogan, and Mamie Smith were some of the country's first viral sensations, working within and pushing back against racist systems and tropes. Their work made a lasting imprint on American music — including some of the songs you might have on repeat right now.

Corrections: A previous version of this episode incorrectly stated that Jim Crow was a real-life en...

One day in late April 1958, a young economist named Madeleine Tress was approached by two men in suits at her office at the U.S. Department of Commerce. They took her to a private room, turned on a tape recorder, and demanded she respond to allegations that she was an "admitted homosexual." Two weeks later, she resigned.

Madeleine was one of thousands of victims of a purge of gay and lesbian people ordered at the highest levels of the U.S. government: a program spurred by a panic that destroyed careers and lives and lasted more than forty...

Since October 7th, the term Zionism has been everywhere in the news. It's been used to support Israel in what it calls its war against Hamas: a refrain to remind everyone why Israel exists and why it must be protected. Others have used Zionism to describe what they view as Israel's collective punishment of civilians in Gaza, and its appropriation of Palestinian territories — what they often call "settler colonialism."Zionism has been defined and redefined again and again, and the definitions are often built on competing historical interpretations. So unsurprisingly, we've received many requests from you, our audience, to explore th...

In 1923, an Indian American man named Bhagat Singh Thind told the U.S. Supreme Court that he was white, and therefore eligible to become a naturalized citizen. He based his claim on the fact that he was a member of India's highest caste and identified as an Aryan. His claims were supported by the so-called Indo-European language theory, a controversial idea at the time that says nearly half the world's population speak a language that originated in one place. Theories about who lived in that place inspired a racist ideology that contended that the original speakers of the language were...

International courts investigating alleged war crimes have made headlines often in recent months. An arrest warrant has been issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin; arrest warrants have also been requested for senior Hamas and Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

What are these courts, where did they come from, and how did they come to decide the rules of war?

On today's episode, we travel from the battlefields of the U.S. Civil War, through the rubble of two world wars, to the hallways of the Hague, to trace...

Welcome to the "Epic of Marcos." In this tale of a family that's larger than life, Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator of the Philippines, is at the center. But the figures that surround him are just as important: Imelda, his wife and muse; Bongbong, his heir; and the United States, his faithful sidekick. The story of the Marcos family is a blueprint for authoritarianism, laying out clearly how melodrama, paranoia, love, betrayal and a hunger for power collide to create a myth capable of propelling a nation. Today on the show, the rise, fall, and resurrection of a dynasty — and wh...

For nearly thirty years, the South African government held a man it initially labeled prisoner number 46664, the anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela. But in 1994, Mandela transformed from the country's 'number one terrorist' into its first Black president, ushering in a new era of democracy. Today, though, many in South Africa see Mandela's party, the ANC, as corrupt and responsible for the country's problems. It's an ongoing political saga, with all sides attempting to weaponize parts of the past – especially Nelson Mandela's legacy. On today's episode, we tell Mandela's story: the man, the myth, and the cost of freedom.

To ac...