Listener Tadd Williams often sees the 16th Street Station from I-880. It's a huge, stately building in the Beaux-Arts style. It's looking a little rundown now, but it clearly was grand at one time. He wants to know about its past lives, and how was this spot important to West Oakland's Black community and the Civil Rights Movement.
Ever since people have had secrets, people have taken measures to protect those secrets.
The first methods to hide secrets were simple and mechanical. Over time they became more elaborate and used machines. Today, they are mathematical and would require an enormous amount of computing power to decipher.
Learn more about cryptography and how communications are kept secret, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Geographically, Chicago is smack in the middle of the Midwest. But not everyone seems to think that’s enough to make us “real” Midwesterners. Is being a Midwesterner about where you are on a map, or about state of mind? We found that people’s answer to this question says a lot about how they view Midwestern identity and the growing urban-rural divide.
Geographically, Chicago is smack in the middle of the Midwest. But not everyone seems to think that’s enough to make us “real” Midwesterners. Is being a Midwesterner about where you are on a map, or about state of mind? We found that people’s answer to this question says a lot about how they view Midwestern identity and the growing urban-rural divide.
Bonnie Garmus' new novel Lessons In Chemistry has been getting a lot of buzz. Elizabeth Zott is a talented chemist but because it's the 1960s she faces sexism in her quest to work as a scientist. So instead she has a cooking show that is wildly popular. Garmus told NPR's Scott Simon that the character of Elizabeth lived in her head for many years before she started writing this novel.
The election of 1860 was unquestionably the most important election in American history.
The presidential election after that was still important, but it has the distinction of being the oddest presidential election in history, if for no other reason than it was conducted in the middle of a civil war.
Learn more about the election of 1864 and all the ways we’ve never seen anything like it before or since, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Former Homeland Security official and author Juliette Kayyem has a new book out that encourages preparedness. The Devil Never Sleeps makes the case that disasters are going to happen, and gives advice on how to manage them. Kayyem told NPR's Steve Inskeep that we need to redefine our definition of success after disasters occur.
In 1946 after the conclusion of the Second World War, a Dutch man was accused of collaborating with the Nazis and plundering the Netherlands of some of its greatest artistic works.
During the trial, he came up with a defense that seemed to everyone to be preposterous, yet wound up being true.
Learn more about Han van Meegeren, the painter who duped the Nazis, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Author Jenny Tinghui Zhang is out with a new historical fiction novel, Four Treasures In The Sky. Set in the 1800s during the height of anti-Chinese sentiment, a young girl named Daiyu is kidnapped and brought to the U.S. Zhang told NPR's Ayesha Rascoe that she has seen a lot of reviews that refer to this book as 'timely' – and that she does not think that is a good thing when a book is about racism.
