On the morning of November 1, 1755, the citizens of Lisbon, Portugal set out to go to church for the feast of All Saints Day.
Little did they know that moments later, their lives and the lives of everyone in Lisbon were about to be turned upside down and that the city of Lisbon would almost cease to exist.
Learn more about the Great Lisbon Earthquake, one of the most devastating earthquakes in history, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with Axis Powers.
All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's CIA. Brian Masaru Hayashi brings to light for the first time the role played by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans in America's first centralized intelligence agency in its fight against the Imperial Japanese forces in east Asia during World War II. They served deep behind enemy lines gathering intelligence for American and Chinese troops locked in a desperate struggle against Imperial Japanese forces on the Asian continent. Other Asian Americans produced and disseminated statements by bogus peace groups inside the Japanese empire to weaken the fighting resolve of the Japanese. Still others served with guerrilla forces attacking enemy supply and communication lines behind enemy lines. Engaged in this deadly conflict, these Asian Americans agents encountered pirates, smugglers, prostitutes, and dancers serving as the enemy's spies, all the while being subverted from within the OSS by a double agent and without by co-ethnic collaborators in wartime Shanghai.
Drawing on recently declassified documents, Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory(Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the romanticized and stereotyped image of these Chinese, Japanese, and Korean American agents--the Model Minority-while offering a fresh perspective on the Allied victory in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
Jessica Moloughney is a public librarian in New York and a recent graduate of Queens College with a Master’s Degree in History and Library Science.
We have updates about the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border: which controversial policy was just extended and why the federal government is now suing the state of Texas.
Also, a new milestone for vaccines and new mask mandates are set to impact millions of Americans.
Plus, more delays and cancelations at airports, another spacecraft launch today, and gymnast Simone Biles is getting one last chance to compete in Tokyo.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said that students must be in classrooms this year and that schools should require everyone to mask up, but local districts will ultimately decide on their policies themselves. Some workplaces are moving forward with vaccine and mask mandates, but predominantly among their white-collar employees.
The House failed to pass an extension of the federal eviction moratorium before it ended last weekend, although several states have their own local moratoriums still in place. But millions of Americans could face eviction in the coming months, with an estimated 15 million renters owing a collective $20 billion to landlords in back rent.
And in headlines: the flooding death toll in China rises, Simone Biles makes a comeback, and a MAGA twitter clone has an ISIS problem.
For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday
Brandon Tatum, a black former police officer in Tucson, Arizona, says he started out as a liberal, but through a personal evolution over time, he became a conservative.
"I started out like most young, black men in the country, where default is being liberal. Default is being a Democrat," he explains.
"All of the Democrat positions that you see most African-American men believing today is what I believed before, even though I wasn't politically involved as much as I am today. But over time, I began to wake up and be more involved, and I woke up to what the reality was," Tatum said. "A lot of that happened when I was in college. I started to see that the country isn't as racist as I thought it was."
We also cover these stories:
The Senate is moving forward with a 2,700-page, $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
A report from Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee asserts that COVID-19 was accidentally released from a lab at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Former President Barack Obama turns 60 on Wednesday and plans to celebrate with a huge birthday bash at his mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, a Massachusetts island, this coming weekend. But concerns about COVID-19 and the delta variant are prompting some to question whether the party plans, with 475 invited guests, including A-list celebrities, should proceed.
Whales are more than just beautiful creatures — they play a vital role in the ocean's ecosystem. Today, Asha de Vos, marine biologist and pioneer of long-term blue whale research within the Northern Indian Ocean, explains why protecting whales is crucial for protecting the entire sea in this excerpt of TED Radio Hour.
Listen to the full episode, An SOS From The Ocean,here.
Amanda Holmes reads Henry Timrod’s poem “Sonnet: Grief Dies.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
We start today looking at Democrats’ feckless failure to extend the eviction moratorium. That being a fairly dismal topic, we try to lighten things up with two reading series checking in with how some old friends of the show are handling their new post-election lives in DC.
Democrats make another run at passing a voting rights bill, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health Dr. Ashish Jha talks about what the latest CDC guidance and scary Covid headlines actually mean for you, and a new analysis about why we’re all so angry points to Fox News as the culprit.
