Family Plot

TW:  Suicide and Drug Use - What an episode!  This episode we flashback to the 20's to attend the birth of Timothy Leary, a man who would get a doctorate in psychology and go on to become a respected psychologist before a trip to Mexico introduced him to psilocybin mushromms.  We cover how psilocybin shaped and changed who he became, how he went on to be a central figure of the counterculture, his...

Another fun episode filled with learning and family banter.  Today we examine the life of Charity Adams Earley.  One of four children, she was raised by parents who loved her and insisted on education, so much so that when school started, she was jumped to the second grade.  She eventually graduated college at 19 with a triple major and a minor in history.  We dig deep into this lady who became fa...

So, as June 2026 draws to a close, we present the life and times of Barbara Gittings, a woman who refused to let the world define her as insane or a degenerate just because she was a lesbian.  She set out to change things, curating museum collections so not everything about the LGBT+ was written by doctors, moralists or police.  She made libraries a safe space for queer people trying to discover w...

There is a lot in this show.  Arthur discusses some of Dad's health problems in his corner leading to discussions about movies he's been watching with Dad, including most recently Big Fish.  (It's arguably Tim Burton's best movie) then we get into talking about the celebration that is Jineteenth which leads us to discussing how Abraham Lincoln wound up in the Wrestling Hall of Fame as the inventor...

In this episode, we celebrate the diversity and inclusion of pride month with an examination of the world of the paranormal, the world of spiritualism and even the world of the Horror space, and how these dark, liminal spaces are not only super inclusive, but also are currently being used to expore and reveal more LGBTQ+ history.  This week we go deep into the cultural phenomenon of gay Ghost Hunt...

Have you heard of 'Tail-Gunner Joe' McCarthy and the Red Scare?  What about Roy Cohn?  These two not only kicked off the Red Scare where they pursued supposed communists in Government and later the military, but also went aafter gays under the theory that they were 'moral perverts susceptible to blackmail.'.  Despite no evidence appearing that even one of these people were blackmailed outside the...

We have a heck of an episode for you.  Arthur is turning 17 and our episode is inspired by the right wing pushback against Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey'.  We dig into the origin of the work, what we know of it's 'author' Homer, the real, the mythical, the things that are somewhere in between.  We say goodbye to a family friend and gget downright hostile about people judging movies based on tra...

Such An Episode!  On Deck we have Jane Stanford, born Jane Lathrop out of Albany New York, she married her lawyer husband who lost everything in a fire, went west to seek his fortune in the Gold Rush and found it selling supplies to miners and settlers.  When his wife joined him in San Francisco, he had become a railroad baron.  Eventually they had a child and Jane doted on the boy.  We won't tell...

This episode, we go deep into the life, heroism and spectacle that was Audie Murphy.  Audie Murphy was a sharecropper's son from Hunt County Texas, small, skinny, barely fed and full of work.  When his dad would disappear, he worked, when his mom died, he worked.  When his family came apart, he tried military service.  He was rejected by the marines, the paratroopers, only the Army would eventuall...

Well, in this episode we dig into our Kansas City Roots.  We go to Kansas City in the 1920's where under 'Boss' Pendergast the city was a machine that kept clubs open all night and the liquor flowing.  It was a town famous for being a little naive, jazz, good barbecue and something called the Kansas City Stomp.  Kansas City had heard rumors of Prohibition and wanted no truck with it.  It was into...

This episode has so much.  We cover the Jewel Box Revue, the drag show that originated in the thirties and toured through the seventies creating a space for drag, female impersonators and gender bent comics in a show that advertised itself as 25 men and 1 girl.  We also cover anti-crossdressing laws, the police's informal three article rule and how newspapers at the time published the names  of th...

Here we go!  Another little bit of history that really matters.  In 1942, following Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 which allowed  the military designated Military zones and control who lived in them in the United States.  The order did not mention Japanese American citizens or concentration camps by name, but effectively that'w who was targeted and what was created in...

We do a deep dive into the Brazilian Lead Masks Case, a Case that takes us back to 1966 where two dead men are found laying down wearing suits on a hill in Niteroi, they appear to have laid down, put on homemade masks made of lead and simply...died.  We look into Brazil at that time, a nation only recently taken over by a brutal military regime,and where burgeoning scientific beliefs intersected w...

We have  quite the episode for you here.  This time we head back to 1942 to meet a small Jewish family, the Frank family.  They are a mom a dad and two daughters living in Germany watching the country become a nightmare for Jews like themselves.  Otto, the father, led them over to the Netherlands where he had business contacts.  However, soon the Nazis  occupied and controlled the Netherlands and...

In this episode we set the Elevator of History back to 1835 where we witness the ;'penny paperss' papers sold for one cent instead of six that featured stories people WANTED to read, rather than news by and for a political party.  These papers brought us separate sections on news, finance, sports and featured on the scene reporting and lurid true crime details.  But it was the New York Sun that la...

This episode is so full of weird tasty historical goodness you'll want a second course.  Arthur talks an afternoon with Dean and a vist from his girlfriend and we discuss Toronto and Canada in the 20's and 30's and the introduction of a millionaire with no heirs and a wicked sense of humor who died on October 31st 1936 and for the next ten years set off a fertility contest that became talked about...

What a show!  WWe dive deep into the life of Shirley Temple Black, from her young life as a precocious little girl with a smile, to her mother's enrolling her in the Meglin Kiddies Dance School at the age of three, to her subsequent discovery a few months later, hiding behind the piano when Educational Pictures director Charles Lamont came to the school looking for talent.  She at first joined the...

In this episode , we look into the life of Emma aka Grandma Gatewood.  Born in rural Ohio at the tail end of the 19th Century, she was the 7th of 15 children raised in a one room cabin, sleeping four to a bed, her only moments of peace were walks from her family home.  At 19, she met PC  Gatewood, an Elementary school teacher who also treated her with unkindness and violence.  Her only escape was...

In this episode, we set the Elevator of History to the Kentucky portion of the Appalachians where we check out the Packhorse Librarians.  Women, funded by the WPA, who brought books into the hoots and hollers of Kentucky, providing reading and kinship in rural communities who otherwise would have no access to books.  They traveled on mules and horses carrying books in saddlebags and pillowcases to...

Jump on the Elevator of History with us and ride it back to America's involvement in World War I.  When the US brought over a segregated unit of Black Men that were mostly a labor batallion, then they were loaned to the French Infantry who gave them French helmets, equipment, weapons and rations and put them on the front lines.  For 191 days, the longest of any unit in the war they stayed on the f...

TW - This episode we drop a few 'f' bombs, and a few other words we would not normally use.  But we are dealing with an act of domestic terrorism that has been concealed by polite history.  We discuss the rRise of Black Wall Street in the Greenwood District of Oklahoma.  How discovering oil in the early twenties brought people of all colors to to the young state of Oklahoma unintentionally creatin...

This week, we step away from doom, gloom and reminders of the fact that we are currently under an authoritarian administration thaat does not value human life and only serves to protect the billionaire class to talk about a magical event that happens every February in the tiny city of  Montpelier, Vermont.  It seems that, since 2002 when people in Montpelier on Valentine's day morning, they find t...

Such an episode.  One of three episodes for Black History Month this Month, we cover the amazing life of Frederick Douglass, born a slave, he managed to sneak an education which propelled him to Freedom and so much more.  He learned letters and managed to improve his education by challenging white school children and allowing them to correct him, watching men in lumberyards and shipyards mark word...

Man this week is a powerful episode.  Arthur talks dating, mental health, and art and we share our reasons for supporting the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and why we support #AbolishIce and #FreeMinnesota.  Then we dig into the story of teenager Grace Darling and how she, with a little help from her father, rowed out in a tiny rowboat (specifically a coble) to help 8 people who had survi...

2026 has been an interesting year for us and so far, all the episodes, we've done have had a real world echo to something happening in our world right now.  This was unplanned and this week continues that trend as we discuss the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project.  An attempt in Saint Louis to create a new type of housing for the urban poor was met with removal of any communal or public space, to maximiz...