December 1, 1969. Millions across America are tuned in to the same TV broadcast. They see a bland stage with some government workers behind desks. But there's also a large, plastic container filled with small blue capsules. In each of these capsules, a birth date. The order in which they're chosen will determine who is eligible to be sent off to fight in the ... Show More
Mar 16
HTW Live: Busting the Myths of Irish Immigration — Recorded at the Tenement Museum
March 18, 1879. A crowd gathers around an indoor track in Brooklyn, NY, as an Irish immigrant named Bartholomew O’Donnell attempts a strange feat: walking 80 miles in 26 hours. Newspapers claim he’s eighty years old. Lap after lap, he circles the track: smoking a pipe, sipping ho ... Show More
40m 56s
Mar 12
From Radio Diaries: Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier
Why did Orson Welles take on a murder mystery? Listen for yourself. This week, we're sharing a special preview of Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier from the podcast Radio Diaries. In this series, we learn how Welles used his platform to shed light on a crime in a small, southern ... Show More
11m 5s
Oct 2024
508. America in '68: Nightmare in Vietnam (Part 1)
"Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.”
On the night of Sunday, 31st of March 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, after announcing an end to the bombing of North Vietnam, stunned the world by revealing he would not seek the democratic nomination fo ... Show More
1h 13m
Aug 2024
178. The Vietnam War: Nixon, Vietnamisation, and the Fall of Saigon
With Richard Nixon now in the White House and not wanting to have his presidency consumed by Vietnam like his predecessor’s was, he begins to search for ways to disentangle America from the war. It begins with Vietnamisation and an attempt to reduce South Vietnamese reliance on t ... Show More
55m 13s
Apr 2025
Vietnam Draft Board Raids, Part 1
<p>The draft board raids were part of an antiwar movement, largely grounded in Catholic religious convictions, that spanned almost four years. Part one covers the basic context of the Vietnam War and why the U.S. was involved in the first place, and the earliest raids on draft bo ... Show More
43m 2s
Mar 2020
Unsolved: Did the US abandon soldiers in the Vietnam War?
<p>At the close of the Paris Peace Accords, the US and Vietnam agreed to return any POWs to their home country -- however, for decades after the close of the conflict, people in country reported seeing missing American soldiers, sometimes held by foreign officials, sometimes on t ... Show More
57m 26s
Sep 2025
The Massacre at My Lai | Interview | Rules of Engagement: How My Lai Changed the US Military | 5
<p>On March 16, 1968, American soldiers carried out what remains one of the most brutal war crimes in U.S. history. Over the course of a single morning, they killed between 300 and 500 Vietnamese civilians. The My Lai Massacre stands as a lasting stain on the U.S. military’s lega ... Show More
43m 17s
Aug 2024
177. The Vietnam War: Lyndon Johnson, Americanisation, and Operation Rolling Thunder
With the death of JFK, Lyndon B. Johnson took over the Presidency and immediately had to wrestle with America’s relationship with Vietnam after the killing of Diem. Right from the start he prophesised that it would be his downfall and so it was. He consistently resented it and th ... Show More
56m 57s
Aug 2025
Gregory A. Daddis, "Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War Since 1945" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In a groundbreaking reassessment of the long Cold War era, historian Gregory A. Daddis argues that ever since the Second World War's fateful conclusion, faith in and fear of war became central to Americans' thinking about the world around them. With war pervading nearly all aspec ... Show More
59m 43s