Browsing Category
1900-Present
“As We Go Marching” | The Birth of International Women’s Day
‘The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist, nor to any one organization, but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights,’ – so says feminist campaigner and political activist, Gloria Steinem.…
Margaret Sanger, Contraceptive Pioneer
Margaret Sanger, the mother of Planned Parenthood, was born as Margaret Higgins in the city of Corning in upstate New York in 1879. Both of her parents were Irish immigrants. Her father Michael Higgins had emigrated to America as a teenager…
Welcoming the Mayor to Hell | The Story of Jane Byrne and Cabrini Green
In 1981, Mayor of Chicago Jane Byrne took the unusual step of moving into one of the housing units in Cabrini Green. In these days of politicians having second homes and travel allowances this seems like a strange thing for a politician to…
Blood on the Leaves | Ep. 2 | The Abduction of Hanns Martin Schleyer
Last Week: The Baader-Meinhof Death Night
The body of Max Weinberg lay outside the front door of Apartment 1, Connollystraße 31 in Munich’s Olympic village. Coach of the Israeli wrestling team at the 1972 Olympics, he was the first…
Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Policemen of World Peace
On June 22nd 1941, in the largest German military operation of World War II, Hitler struck east to invade the Soviet Union. It was a big affair; over three million German soldiers and three thousand tanks. In December of that year, four…
Blood on the Leaves | Ep. 1 | The Baader-Meinhof Death Night
It is October 18th, 1977. Five men make their way into Stammheim Prison, leaving behind the chilly morning air that hung over the West German city of Stuttgart.
They are Officers Stoll, Stapf, Griesenger and Hermann, along with Sergeant…
Exquisite Carps | How My Hot Dog Meal-Deal Came With a Japanese-Irish History Lecture
The Hiroshima Carp won their first baseball league pennant in twenty-five years the day my girlfriend and I visited Kobe City. The news hardly blew us away. Had it not happened however, one hot-dog chef would not have stepped out of his bar…
John B Watson, Dark Psychologist
John Broadus Watson was born in 1878, the fourth of six children. His father, Pickens Butler Watson, had fought for the Confederates in the Civil War and had never really settled down afterwards. He spent most of his time away from home,…
Egotism is Egregious If It’s Your Only Weapon for Election
Once upon a time, in a political landscape far, far away, a fascist buffoon said, “Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice, it is a fallacy. You in America will see that someday.”
The buffoon’s name was Benito Mussolini.
Now, as…
Titanic Thompson, aka Alvin Thomas – Gambler and Killer
Titanic Thompson, one of America’s most notorious gamblers, was born as Alvin Clarence Thomas in Missouri in 1893. His father abandoned his mother just after Alvin was born, and she remarried a farmer who lived in nearby Arkansas. Alvin…