The Preamble

Today, on Here's Where It Gets Interesting, we revisit a favorite first lady, Abigail Adams. Follow along as Abigail travels across the Atlantic, adventuring in Paris and France with her husband, John Adams. The power couple ultimately lands back in Boston only to move again into new roles, as President and First Lady of the United States. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informatio...

On today’s episode of Here's Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon takes us deep into the lives of the women who greatly influenced the same man: Aaron Burr. Theirs are stories of great minds, insatiable appetites for knowledge, grief in motherhood, and untimely tragedy. Listen in as Sharon turns over the stones of their lives and hear about a disappearance at sea, a mysteriously scavenged portrait, a...

Over the next several weeks Sharon will be sharing stories about the lives of American first ladies and the different ways in which they have influenced their families, the presidency, and the whole of the nation. During her lifetime, Martha was never given the title of First Lady as we know it. Instead, she was called “Lady Washington” and was held in high esteem as George’s “worthy partner.” Tod...

On the last episode in our series, Momentum, Sharon ties up a few loose ends. The 1950s was a decade full of change, but the Civil Rights Movement didn’t end when the calendar flipped to 1960. Most of the people we’ve followed throughout this series continued their crusade for–or against–civil freedoms well into the next several decades. We hear about Barbara Johns and the next steps in integrated...

On our second to last episode in our series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, We learn about the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the commission born of it. For two years, the United States Commission on Civil Rights researched and released a 600+ page report about the state of voting rights in the US. They found, time after time, accounts of Black Americans who faced roadblocks and threats of vio...

On today’s episode in our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, we learn about the women who gave the movement its backbone. Listen in as Sharon speaks about the Queen of the Civil Rights Movement, Septima Poinsette Clark, and another woman, Bernice Robinson, who, together, were effective teachers and leaders in the Civil Rights community. Septima knew that education was the key to...

On today’s episode in our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon talks about some of the most important components of a successful movement: money and reputation. Movements take a lot of financial support and many of the organizers worked day jobs with humble salaries. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? He made $8,000 a year in his position as a minister. But organizing rallies and m...

On today’s episode in our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon tackles the vast topic of religion within the Civil Rights Movement. During the Civil Rights Movement, religion was used as a tool of oppression and an excuse for many white people, especially in the South, to remain firm and justified in their belief of white supremacy. But religion was also a catalyst for chang...

Today in our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon rewinds and takes us back to the origin story of a life lost far too soon due to a brutal and racist attack: the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. What began with a young boy who desired to connect with family and learn where his mother came from in Mississippi, ended in horror for the Chicago 14-year-old boy. Though no one will...

Today in our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon talks about the rising popularity of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and how, with greater visibility comes greater threat. We follow Dr. King as he and his comrades persevere through bombings, arrests, scathing rumors, wiretaps, and assassination attempts. Who was one of Dr. King’s biggest adversaries? If you’ve been following al...

Today in our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon begins with a woman who is surely familiar to anyone who has received a crash course on the Civil Rights movement in America: Rosa Parks. While Rosa Parks earned her position in history, this story does not begin with a tired woman who simply needed to rest her feet on a bus in Birmingham, Alabama. Before Rosa Parks, there wa...

Today in our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon begins by picking up after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision was released. The courts ordered for integration “with all deliberate speed” which meant slowly and over time. This vague order left room for schools to drag their heels or ignore the ruling all together. A young student activist in Farmville, Virginia, Barb...

On today’s episode of Momentum, Sharon talks about America’s push to eradicate communists during the Red Scare and Korean War. Many people working toward the goal of civil rights and liberties shared links to the Communist Party, like William Patterson and Paul Robeson. In 1951, Patterson submitted a 237-page petition to the United Nations, called We Charge Genocide. After Patterson and Robeson pr...

On today’s episode of our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon establishes the foundation of another man who played a pivotal role in Brown v. The Board of Education. Today, in 2022, the idea of someone serving as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court with no previous experience working in the Judicial Branch of government, would be unheard of. And it would certainly be un...

On today’s episode of our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon continues a riveting conversation with pulitzer-prize winning author, Gilbert King. We pick up with the involvement of J.Edgar Hoover and the case of The Groveland Four, including the political dance Thurgood Marshall did with Hoover to strategically move the Civil Rights movement forward.  Often flying under the...

On today’s episode of our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon speaks with pulitzer-prize winning author, Gilbert King. It's Important for people to know that the popular narrative of the 1950s – depicted as a time full of sock hops, poodle skirts, and Rock & Roll – was not the lived experience of many Black Americans. In numerous ways, their experience was often worse t...

On today’s episode of our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon makes the connection between the desegregation of the United States military to the power or writing a letter. It can be hard to believe sometimes that writing a letter or contacting our representatives can make a difference, but that is exactly what one honorably discharged decorated Veteran did in 1948. The rip...

On today’s episode of our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon guides us to a lawsuit years in the making, that shaped America. While some of the names tied with the milestone have been all but lost to history, you will hear many of those uncredited names mentioned in this episode, including McKinley Bernet, Vivian Marshall, and Lucinda Todd. The year was 1952 when Brown v....

On today’s episode of our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon continues the story of young Thurgood Marshall as he travels to rural Tennessee on behalf of the NAACP and finds himself on the wrong side of trumped up charges and an angry mob. We also reconnect with George McLaurin and hear about Ada Fisher, two lifelong students who wanted equal opportunities in education and...

Welcome to the first episode of our new special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s. Today, Sharon introduces us to a few key people who became the driving force behind early Civil Rights activism. We meet a young man named Thuroughgood–a bit of a troublemaker who put his curiosity and sense of justice to work and sought incremental change through the legal system. Joining him in the fight...

In this episode, Sharon is joined by writer and author Patrick Radden Keefe, whose new book, Rogues, tells twelve stories of people with big personalities–the grifters, the rebels, the crooks, the crime families, and the people who don’t play by the rules. Patrick talks about how he researches his larger-than-life stories, and gives us a few teasers, like what it was like to interview a woman who...

In this episode, Sharon talks to Minnesota State Legislator Jen Schultz. Jen is currently running for Congress, and is also an educator who has taught economics at the University of Minnesota Duluth for about twenty years. Rep Schultz talks about the ins and outs of working in state government: how budgets are set as well as how bills are written, introduced, prioritized, and voted on. She touches...

In today’s episode, Jenna Kutcher sits down to talk with Sharon about the release of her first book, How Are You, Really?: Living Your Truth One Answer at a Time and how she wrote the manuscript in secret, doing it on her own terms. Jenna loved the refining process with her book, which saw it evolve from a business and marketing subject into a book that gets more personal, tackling topics like bod...

In this episode, Sharon spends time speaking with Dr. Aaron Ahuvia, who is an expert on a specific kind of love: our love of things–things like places, objects, brands, and activities. The things we love tend to be part of our own identity: perhaps a part of our childhood, or something we spend a lot of time with. Aaron advocates for using our particular loves–poker, PEZ dispensers, sneakers, wate...

In this episode, Sharon chats with Professor Nick Seabrook, who has written a new book, One Person, One Voice , that details the long history of gerrymandering in the United States. While gerrymandering predates our country, Professor Seabrook argues that it’s a bigger problem today than it has been in the past because we have more sophisticated access to data and technology. This access has flipp...