Retropod

No women served on the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991. The ugly Anita Hill hearings changed that.

The Alien and Sedition Acts passed under President John Adams led to the arrests of more than two dozen people.

Lewis Hine posed as a Bible salesman or machinery photographer to expose the hardships of child labor.

All of George Washington’s Supreme Court nominees were confirmed in only two days, but half of them didn't show up on time.

Their 38-year marriage endured his incarceration and hers.

In 1925, 30,000 Klansmen descended on Washington, D.C. The city cheered their arrival.

Before an unnamed senior official in the Trump administration published the opinion piece, “I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration" in the New York Times, another mysterious anonymous author lit up Washington.

In 1935, the Florida Keys ignored the threat of a looming hurricane. When the Category 5 storm made landfall, it left a wake of death and destruction.

It may be hard to believe, but one single event rocketed Einstein to fame.

Heather Penney was among the first female combat pilots in the country. On Sept. 11, 2001, she got a mission: Bring down the fourth hijacked plane hurtling towards Washington.

President Abraham Lincoln had two loving and supportive mothers in his lifetime. The second helped him cope with the tragic loss of the first.

This episode is co-hosted by Madeline Daly, who won Retropod trivia last Saturday at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Dallas prosecutor Henry Wade never intended to become a central figure in Supreme Court history.

In 1927, the world watched as two French aviators attempted the world’s first transatlantic flight.

The first mass police shooting on a U.S. college campus happened two years before the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University.

In 1931, President Herbert Hoover started a program that would result in the illegal deportation of 1.8 million people to Mexico by the end of the 1930s. Of those people, 60 percent were U.S. citizens.

Benjamin Lay wrote one of the first treatises against slavery in Colonial America, a time when many prosperous Pennsylvania Quakers were slave owners. But for speaking out, the Quakers disowned him.

Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist, an anti-lynching activist, a suffragette and a teacher.

Muhammad Ali was so close to going to jail for evading the draft. He has a Supreme Court clerk to thank for his freedom.

Thomas Blood had somewhat of a shady past. According to Ireland’s History magazine, he had a reputation for espionage and conducting terrorist campaigns — though many of his plans were foiled just in time.

At the Naval Academy, McCain was in a group called the “Bad Bunch” as he rebelled against his father’s expectations.

According to James Madison’s Virginia mansion Montpelier, Paul Jennings’ account reveals, “how the racial and gender hierarchies of the time complicate the way we understand roles in historic events.”

Millions of British children were evacuated from London and other cities to escape the horrors of war. But the family separations seemed to impart long-term trauma that was in many cases as severe as if they had stayed behind and faced the bombs.

When President Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” it was not seen as a historic moment. It took the actual fall of the wall to resurrect the speech and drill the quote into our consciousness.

The greatest emoluments-clause dilemma of the 1800s involved two lions.