Retropod

When Harry Truman became president in 1945, Southern members of Congress were delighted. They thought he’d be sympathetic to segregationists. He proved them wrong.

On display in Washington, D.C. are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and another document that details a fundamental institution in American life: baseball.

A hungry congressman didn’t get the breakfast he ordered. So he shot the waiter.

Back in 1941, a get-together that should have been fraught with uneasiness didn't turn out that way, which is surprising given the participants: President Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin.

Samuel Cutler Ward, also known as the “King of the Lobby,” is credited with shaping the craft of lobbying. And like lobbyist and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, he also had some seriously expensive tastes.

A stamp collector’s discovery of the “Inverted Jenny” stamp created a headache for the U.S. Postal Service.

Mister Rogers’s approach to dealing with tragedy began with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

The Alderson Federal Prison Camp has a history filled with powerful women who both pushed for the walls to be built there and served time within them.

During the American Revolution, more patriots died as prisoners of war in or around New York City than died in combat.

The one night that changed President Nixon’s fate has stuck with us as a reminder of the limits of presidential power.

A group of poor women in Puerto Rico were the first test subjects for the birth control pill. Were they guinea pigs or pioneers?

Sixty years after Congress welcomed its first woman, it welcomed its first baby.

The Boy Scout movement began 110 years ago on a tiny island just off the southern coast of England.

The anti-Semitic conspiracy theories surrounding the Rothschild family date all the way back to The Battle of Waterloo.

A professor at The University of Virginia was fatally shot by a student in 1840.

For over 50 years, the phrase “under God” was not a part of the Pledge of Allegiance. One sermon changed that.

This episode addresses the history of the bikini in, naturally, two parts.

Linda Brown and her father Oliver Brown are heroes of the civil rights movement. The backstory of the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education is more complicated than what you learned in school.

In 1951, a televised Senate hearing caught America’s attention.

It did not rain, at least not in Ellicott City, Md. That’s what made the 1868 flood so bizarre and unexpected.

One simple change to how the Supreme Court bench was designed made a world of difference to how the justices communicated.

On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Memphis to support sanitation workers who were protesting for their civil rights. It was there that King delivered his last speech.

From all over the country, couples rushed to Las Vegas to get married. The demand for quickie weddings was at a fever pitch. But it wasn't Cupid's arrow causing the frenzy. It was the Vietnam War.

The deadliest wildfire in U.S. history wasn’t in California.

Whether you believe in this stuff or not, the many accounts that have spilled out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over two centuries give ghosts an undeniable place in the country’s history.