HISTORY This Week

November 11, 1926. The country’s state highway officials meet to give America’s roads numbers, and a patchwork of dirt, gravel and wooden planks running from Chicago to Los Angeles becomes Route 66. Two years later, promoter C.C. Pyle sends 199 runners down it on a 3,422-mile race to New York, with a traveling carnival behind them. Among them are Andy Payne, a Cherokee farm kid trying to save his family’s land, and Eddie Gardner, a Black runner from Seattle heading into the Jim Crow South.
How did a footrace nicknamed the “Bunion Derby” turn a road on a map into an American icon?
Special thanks to our guests: Keith Austin, Historic Consultant for Cherokee Nation Business, and Chuck Kastner, author of Race Across America: Eddie Gardner and the Great Bunion Derbies.
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November 8, 1864. Election Day. Abraham Lincoln watches from a White House window, convinced he might lose. Three thousand miles away in Los Angeles, a Confederate hotbed in a so-called free state, Biddy Mason has more riding on the result than almost anyone in the country.
Sixteen years earlier, she walked from Mississippi to Utah at the back of a Mormon wagon train, enslaved, with three young daughters in tow. Her owner then carried her into California, where slavery was illegal and where, for years, nobody enforced the law. In 1856, a sheriff’s posse rode into the owner’s camp in the Santa Monica Mountains with a court order. What followed was a trial before a former slaveholder, a verdict that freed fourteen people, and a second act in which a formerly enslaved midwife became one of the wealthiest Black women in America.
How did a slave ranch operate in plain sight in a free state? And how did Biddy Mason win, not once, but twice?
With Kevin Waite, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of The Boundless Biddy Mason; and Jackie Broxton, President and Founder of the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation.
This episode includes a mention of sexual violence. Please listen with care.
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Happy Halloween! Today, we're bringing back a particularly spooky episode from the archives...
June 10, 1692. Bridget Bishop is loaded into a two-wheeled cart and brought from her Salem jail cell to a pasture on a hill, where a rope is hanging from freshly-installed gallows. A crowd forms around her: law officers to read the death warrant, ministers to offer last rites, and onlookers, curious to see a witch in the flesh. Bishop’s execution raises doubts that could have stopped the Salem witch trials in their tracks. But instead, it became the first in a deluge of convictions, trials, and hangings that made the summer of 1692 go down in infamy. What happened that summer to cause a witch hunt? And what can we learn from the story of 19 supposed witches condemned to death?
Special thanks to our guest, Marilynne Roach, author of The Salem Witch Trials: a Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege.
** This episode originally aired June 7, 2021.

October 28, 1065. The king’s council meets in Oxford and throws a man out of England. His name is Tostig Godwinson, and the north of England already hates him. His own brother Harold, the most powerful earl in the realm and the likely next king, refuses to save him.
Tostig does not take it well. Over the next year, he sails from royal court to royal court, pitching anyone with ships on an invasion of England. He finds takers. And the year that follows, 1066, becomes the most pivotal in English history: three men claiming one crown, two invasions in a single month, a Viking king sunbathing at the wrong moment, and a duke from Normandy who trips face-first into the mud and gets up a conqueror.
Sally is joined by historian Greg Jenner, host of the BBC podcast You’re Dead to Me, as the Bayeux Tapestry goes on display in Britain for the first time in nearly a thousand years. Together they ask: how did a scorned little brother help push England over the edge?
Special thanks to our guest Greg Jenner. His series, You’re Dead to Me, is available wherever you get your podcasts.
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