Hashtag History

This week on Hashtag History for our Season Seventeen Finale, we are joined author and historian John Garrison Marks as he tells us all about his latest book, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy with Slavery and the Fight for American Legacy. We had a great conversation about Americans’ struggle to come to terms with Washington’s legacy of slavery and how we navigate those complexitie...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. On March 30, 1981, President of the United States Ronald Reagan was shot outside of the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC, as he was leaving a speaking engagement. He was shot by a man named John Hinckley, Jr., a twenty-five year old man who had fallen in love with actress Jodie Foster after seeing...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the second part of the Watergate Scandal. In last week's episode, we left off with the White House Plumbers that Nixon had recruited to serve as his secret task force to stop any potential leaks—not actual plumbing leaks, but leaks like the 7,000 pages of Pentagon Papers that exposed just how much the US Government had been lying to the Ameri...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Watergate Scandal. This was an absolutely explosive political scandal that – sadly, pales in comparison to modern-day political scandals – but was truly monumental at the time, and continues to be to this day. That is because this was a political scandal that went all the way up to the top, proving that the President of the United States, Ric...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing Shirley Chisholm. She was the first Black woman to be elected to the US Congress, she was the first Black candidate for a major-party when she ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and was a major supporter and advocate for women’s rights, social services, and racial justice. I think Shirley Chisholm is a very recognizable face...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the annexation of Hawaii…otherwise known as the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Because, when Hawaii was annexed to the United States, becoming the fiftieth state to join the union, it was done so via a coup de tat that overthrew the sovereignty of the Hawaiian people, something the vast majority of them were largely against. The US’s motivati...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the very first major US law restricting immigration to the United States of a specific national group. This act made it so that Chinese people could not immigrate to the United States for, initially, ten years. But then, it was renewed, made permanent, and then not officially repeal...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the assassination of 20th President of the United States James A. Garfield, an assassination that occurred in the summer of 1881. And the reason I give a more vague date of “the summer of 1881” as opposed to a specific date is because, although Garfield was shot on July 2nd of that year, he did not die until September 19th…a very slow and very pa...

NOTE: THIS EPISODE WAS RELEASED IN MID-MARCH 2026 BUT WAS RECORDED IN EARLY-JANUARY 2026. This week on Hashtag History, we will be wrapping up our discussion of the American Presidents which we first brought to you in Episode 159 with Part One. We will be picking up with the twenty-sixth President of the United States and going to present day, sharing quick tidbits about their accomplishments, the...

WELCOME BACK FOR SEASON SEVENTEEN AND A LEAH TAKEOVER EPISODE! This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the  1899 Newsboy Strike. In the summer of 1899, New York City newsboys (or newsies) organized a strike against two major newspaper publishers after a price increase for papers cut into their earnings. The strike disrupted newspaper distribution across the city and became a highly vis...

This week on Hashtag History for our Season Sixteen Finale, we are joined by Emily Glankler of Anti Social Studies. Emily is a historian, podcaster, teacher, and content creator who walks us through Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and how it shifted the current structure of the two main American political parties. She also speaks to the Southern Strategy and how the roots of that are still relevant...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the American Presidents. All of them…well, most of them. In this week's episode, we will be sharing some quick tidbits about the first twenty-five presidents (with more to come in Part Two next season): Their accomplishments, their downfalls, and how they shaped American history...but also, the juicy details. This goes without saying that the...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Lynwood Vikings, one of many deputy gangs of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Deputy gangs are gangs, formed and founded, by deputies of the LASD. And, like most gangs, they involve tattoos and racism and acts of violence as a form of initiation into the gang. But unlike other gangs, these are gangs made up of law enforcement offi...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Trojan War, a once-believed-to-be strictly mythological tale about a conflict between Troy and Greece which destroyed the city of Troy. This is the battle that involves the infamous Trojan horse in which the Greeks left an allegedly hollowed out wooden horse outside the Trojan city gates. The Trojans eventually determine it to be a gift and b...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Lavender Scare, a roughly forty-year period in history (spanning from the late-1940s and into the early-1990s) in which thousands of government employees lost their job as part of a federal anti-gay policy. Under Executive Order 10450 issued in 1953, it became a legal policy to remove all known gay men and women from federal service because i...

IT'S A LEAH TAKEOVER EPISODE! This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing Woodstock ‘99. Everyone has heard of the Woodstock Music Festival that took place in 1969, on a farm in Bethel, New York. It was one of the largest music festivals in history and became synonymous with the counterculture of the 1960s. But fewer, I think, are aware that there were multiple attempts at emulating th...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing Mary Jane Richards, a Black, once-enslaved woman who served as a Union spy during the Civil War. We only know of Richards because, in 1911 (nearly fifty years after the end of the Civil War), a white woman named Annie Van Lew Hall was interviewed by Harper’s Magazine in which she told them a story about how her aunt, Elizabeth Van Lew, had operat...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Stanford Prison Experiment. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a super controversial and somewhat shady psychological experiment that raised a lot of concern at the time and continues to invoke questions and worry to this day. Essentially, this was an experiment conducted in 1971 in which participants were placed in a prison-like environment...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing Monica Lewinsky and the event that thrust her into the national spotlight in 1998 when it was revealed that she and the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, had engaged in a sexual affair while she was serving as a White House intern (and later, employee). This all came to light because Lewinsky had revealed this affair to a colleague of...

WELCOME BACK FOR SEASON SIXTEEN OF THE HASHTAG HISTORY PODCAST! This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who fought in the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II until…1974. As I'm sure you are aware, World War II was not happening in 1974. In fact, the Second World War ended in, well, 1945. Onoda, along with a few other Japanese soldiers, continued t...

This week on Hashtag History, we are joined by our dear friend, Kelsie Brook Eckert! Kelsie is a professor, author, and the Executive Director of the Remedial Herstory Project (a non-profit organization working to get women's history in the classroom). We chat all things Remedial Herstory Project, education, funding, and politics in this week's episode! Follow Hashtag History on Instagram...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing a time in history where the United States, Great Britain, France, and the then-Soviet Union carried out together a series of trials against Nazis for the war crimes they committed over the course of the Second World War. This series of thirteen trials was held in Nuremberg, Germany between the years of 1945 and 1949, resulting in the convictions...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the deadliest shipwreck in American history. On April 27, 1865, a commercial steamboat called the Sultana, carrying over 2,000 passengers (though it was legally only allowed to carry 376) burst into flames due to unresolved issues with the boilers. Between the people that died immediately as a result of the explosion, those that died later of bur...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Lindbergh Kidnapping. In March of 1932, the one-year-old son of Charles Lindbergh (the famous American aviator who is most known for being the first person to complete a solo, nonstop transatlantic flight) went missing. While other people were in the home – including the baby’s parents – Charles Lindbergh, Jr. was taken from his crib from the...

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Radium Girls. The Radium Girls refers to the female employees of a radium factory that contracted radiation poisoning from painting radium dials and hands on watches. The women were instructed to use their lips to make the bristles of the paintbrush form into a fine point that would then be used to paint radium onto the watch faces. Lip-dip-p...