Wrong Side Of History

Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here Why would a group of English Catholics try to blow up Parliament? On November 5th, 1605, Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators planned to destroy Parliament with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. But the men behind t...

Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. ⁠Join here⁠ If integration meant depending on white institutions, what would it take for Black Americans to build something of their own? For Black nationalists, self-determination meant more than political independence. Marcu...

Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. ⁠Join here⁠ Could Black Americans use the American system to dismantle segregation — or was the system itself the problem? In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated schools unconstitutional. A year later, the mu...

Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here Why would Black Americans fight segregation and reject integration? For some Black nationalists, integration meant asking people who despised them for permission to belong. They wanted something else: institutions th...

. ⁠⁠ Join here ⁠ to become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the full End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show ______________________________________________________________ In this members only episode we’ll  talk about: How Eugenics was practiced differently in different places The central anxiety that helped justify t...

Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here What kind of future did the eugenicists believe they were building? Eugenics did not only promise to prevent human decline. Its supporters imagined a world without hereditary disease, a more intelligent and cooperati...

Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here Why did eugenics become mainstream among some of the most educated, scientifically minded and socially conscious people of the early twentieth century? Before eugenics became inseparable in public memory from Nazi Ge...

Get End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here __________________________________ What does it mean to believe something without really understanding why? John Stuart Mill called this dead dogma : a belief that may be true, but has become little more than a script. I look at why Mill thought even correct ideas becom...

Become a member of Wrong Side of History Get End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here _____________________ Queen Victoria called women’s rights a “mad, wicked folly.” But unlike their American counterparts, some British anti-suffragists proposed women’s councils, a ministry for women and even a separate women’s c...

Up until 1916, women’s suffrage was never backed by a majority of American women. In this final episode on the anti-suffragists, we look at why many of them did not see the vote as a natural right, or even as the real source of political power. To them, governments enforced public opinion, men enforced the law, and women’s real influence came through status, moral authority, and shaping the cultur...

In 1895, anti-suffragists in Massachusetts were asked to do something absurd: vote to show they opposed voting. What happened next helps explain one of the strangest ideas in the anti-suffrage worldview; that the vote was only one part...and maybe even the smallest part of the whole political process In this episode, we look at how anti-suffragists understood indirect political power: shaping legi...

In the last episode, we looked at separate spheres (ie. gender roles). In this one, we go deeper into the political role many anti-suffragists thought women already had. Long before the fight over suffrage reached its peak, American women were given a civic calling: republican motherhood. They were told the republic depended on them not as voters, but as the people who formed citizens, guarded vir...

Why did so many women oppose women’s suffrage?
 Before 1916, suffrage was never backed by a majority of women, and for years men were more progressive on the issue than women were. 

 In this episode, we enter the worldview of the American anti-suffragists and begin with their core idea: separate spheres.
 To them, the vote was never just a ballot. It was a sign of a much larger social change, one...

No one thinks they’re the bad guy. No one wakes up and says, ‘Today I’ll be on the wrong side of history.’ So here’s the question: if nobody thinks they’re the villain… what were they thinking? The Wrong Side of History is a show about understanding history’s bad guys the way they understood themselves: what they feared, what they valued, and why their worldview made sense to them at the time. You...