Throughline
Throughline is a time machine. Each episode, we travel beyond the headlines to answer the question, "How did we get here?" We use sound and stories to bring history to life and put you into the middle of it. From ancient civilizations to forgotten figures, we take you directly to the moments that shaped our world. Throughline is hosted by Peabody Award-winning journalists Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei.
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Subscribe to Throughline+. You'll be supporting the history-reframing, perspective-shifting, time-warping stories you can't get enough of - and you'll unlock access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org/throughline
Episodes (51)
Get Rich Quick: The American Lottery
Want to get rich quick? You're not alone. Right now, Americans spend over $100 billion, yes billion, every year on lottery tickets. Today on the show, in collaboration with Scratch and Win from WGBH,Scratch>billion...
We the People: The Right to Remain Silent
The Fifth Amendment. You have the right to remain silent when you're being questioned in police custody, thanks to the Fifth's protection against self-incrimination. But most people end up talking to...
Sesame Street
Big Bird, politics, and the ABCs: how a television show made to represent New York City neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx became beloved by families around a divided country. This episode...
Winter is Coming
Dinosaurs, Carl Sagan, and nuclear war. There was a moment in the not-so-distant past when we learned what drove the dinosaurs extinct — and that discovery, made during the Cold War, may have helped...
We the People: Succession of Power
The 25th amendment. A few years before JFK was shot, an idealistic young lawyer set out on a mission to convince people something essential was missing from the Constitution: clear instructions for...
Health Insurance in America
Millions of Americans depend on their jobs for health insurance. But that's not the case in many other wealthy countries. How did the U.S. end up with a system that's so expensive, yet leaves so many...
The Evolution of Presidential Power
What can and can't the president do — and how do we know? The framers of the U.S. Constitution left the powers of the executive branch powers deliberately vague, and in doing so opened the door for...
The Anti-Vaccine Movement
The alleged link between vaccines and autism was first published in 1998, in a since-retracted study in medical journal The Lancet. The claim has been repeatedly disproven: there is no evidence that...
Birthright Citizenship
Wong Kim Ark was born in the U.S. and lived his whole life here. But when he returned from a trip to China in August of 1895, officials wouldn't let him leave his ship. Citing the Chinese Exclusion...
The Kingdom Behind Glass
Who owns stolen art? Today on the show, the bloody journey of a Benin Bronze from West Africa to the halls of one of England's most elite universities — a tale of imperialism, betrayal, and the...
We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? Today on Throughline's We the...
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
Whether it's pesticides in your cereal or the door plug flying off your airplane, consumers today have plenty of reasons to feel like corporations might not have their best interests at heart. At a...
History of the Self: Dreams
Our dreams can haunt us. But what are we to make of them? From omens and art to modern science, we tell the story of dreams and the surprising role they may play in our lives. (Originally ran as The...
History of the Self: Aging
Defeating old age? In 1899, Elie Metchnikoff woke up in Paris to learn he had done just that. At least, that's what the newspaper headlines said. Before long he was inundated with mail from people...
History of the Self: Love
How did love – this thing that's supposed to be beautiful, magical, transformative – turn into a neverending slog? We went searching for answers, and we found them in surprising places. On today's...
Embedded: The Black Gate
In the Xinjiang region of western China, the government has rounded up and detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups. Many haven't been heard from in years, and more...
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
"History" can seem big and imposing. But it's always intensely personal – it's all of our individual experiences that add up to historical events. Over the next few episodes, we're exploring the...
Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Throughline associate producer Anya Steinberg talks to supervising senior editor Julie Caine about her reporting trip to Owens Valley in northeastern California for the episode, "Water in the West,"...
When Christmas Went Viral
Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But in 19th-century London, it went viral. When Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the book's tale of miserly...
Seeking Asylum in the U.S.
The U.S. has long professed to be a country where people can seek refuge. That's the promise etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty. But it's never been that clear-cut.
Today on the show, the...
Today on the show, the...
The Lord Of Misrule (Throwback)
By the time his book went to press in London, on November 18, 1633, Thomas Morton had been exiled from the Puritan colonies in Massachusetts. His crimes: drinking, carousing, and — crucially —...
The Mother of Thanksgiving
The Thanksgiving story most of us hear is about friendship and unity. And that's what Sarah Josepha Hale had on her mind when she sat down to write a letter to President Lincoln in 1863, deep into...
Behind the Scenes of Throughline
Today on the show, we're taking you behind the scenes. We'll tell you how Throughline was born, some of what goes into making our episodes, and a little bit about how we make our special sauce — the...
The Electoral College (Throwback)
What is it, why do we have it, and why hasn't it changed? Born from a rushed, fraught, imperfect process, the origins and evolution of the Electoral College might surprise you and make you think...
A History of Settlements
The question of settlements has loomed over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, and has only intensified in the past year. According to a UN report, since October 7, 2023, there has been a...
The Swing State Power Brokers
Today on the show, two stories of building power in swing states: from the top down, and the bottom up.
First, how a future Supreme Court justice helped launch a program to challenge voters at the...
First, how a future Supreme Court justice helped launch a program to challenge voters at the...
How We Vote (Throwback)
Drunken brawls, coercion, and lace curtains: believe it or not, how regular people vote was not something the Founding Fathers thought much about. Americans went from casting votes at wild parties in...
A History of Christian Nationalism
References to God and Christianity are sprinkled throughout American life. Our money has "In God We Trust" printed on it. Most presidents have chosen to swear their oath of office on the...
The Battle For Jerusalem
Today, the city of Jerusalem is seen as so important that people are willing to kill and die to control it. And that struggle goes back centuries. Nearly a thousand years ago, European Christians...
A History of Hezbollah (Throwback)
Hezbollah is a Lebanese paramilitary organization and political party that's directly supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, and...
When Things Fall Apart (Throwback)
Climate change, political unrest, random violence - Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls, "a thin layer of ice on top of an ocean of chaos and darkness." In the...
The Conspiracy Files
9/11 was an inside job. Aliens have already made contact. COVID-19 was created in a lab.
Maybe you rolled your eyes at some point while reading that list. Or maybe you paused on one and thought......
Maybe you rolled your eyes at some point while reading that list. Or maybe you paused on one and thought......
How U.S. Unions Took Flight (Throwback)
Airline workers — pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, baggage handlers, and more — represent a huge cross-section of the country. And for decades, they've used their unions to fight not just for...
Water in the West
What does it mean to do the greatest good for the greatest number? When the Los Angeles Aqueduct opened in 1913, it rerouted the Owens River from its natural path through an Eastern California valley...
We The People: Canary in the Coal Mine
The Third Amendment. Maybe you've heard it as part of a punchline. It's the one about quartering troops — two words you probably haven't heard side by side since about the late 1700s.
At first glance,...
At first glance,...
We The People: Equal Protection
The Fourteenth Amendment. Of all the amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 14th is a big one. It's shaped all of our lives, whether we realize it or not: Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education,...
We The People: Legal Representation
The Sixth Amendment. Most of us take it for granted that if we're ever in court and we can't afford a lawyer, the court will provide one for us. And in fact, the right to an attorney is written into...
Tested: Questions of a Physical Nature
In 1966, the governing body of the Olympic track and field event started mandatory examinations of all women athletes. These inspections would come to be known as "nude parades," and if you were a...
We the People: Gun Rights
The Second Amendment. In April 1938, an Oklahoma bank robber was arrested for carrying an unregistered sawed-off shotgun across state lines. The robber, Jack Miller, put forward a novel defense: that...
We The People: Free Speech
The First Amendment. Book bans, disinformation, the wild world of the internet. Free speech debates are all around us. What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they created the First Amendment,...
The Creeping Coup
Sudan has been at the center of a deadly and brutal war for over a year. It's the site of the world's largest hunger crisis, and the world's largest displacement crisis.
On the surface, it's a story...
On the surface, it's a story...
The Roots of Poverty in America
The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, yet over 10 percent of people – nearly 40 million – live in poverty. It's something we see, say, if we live near a tent encampment....
Road to Rickwood: The Holy Grail of Baseball
Birmingham, Alabama was one of the fiercest battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement. And in order to understand the struggle, you don't have to look any further than Rickwood Field, the oldest...
Pop Music's First Black Stars
Today, the U.S. popular music industry is worth billions of dollars. And some of its deepest roots are in blackface minstrelsy and other racist genres. You may not have heard their names, but Black...
The Lavender Scare (Throwback)
One day in late April 1958, a young economist named Madeleine Tress was approached by two men in suits at her office at the U.S. Department of Commerce. They took her to a private room, turned on a...
A History of Zionism
Since October 7th, the term Zionism has been everywhere in the news. It's been used to support Israel in what it calls its war against Hamas: a refrain to remind everyone why Israel exists and why it...
The Whiteness Myth (Throwback)
In 1923, an Indian American man named Bhagat Singh Thind told the U.S. Supreme Court that he was white, and therefore eligible to become a naturalized citizen. He based his claim on the fact that he...
The Rules of War
International courts investigating alleged war crimes have made headlines often in recent months. An arrest warrant has been issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin; arrest warrants have also...
Mythos and Melodrama in the Philippines (Throwback)
Welcome to the "Epic of Marcos." In this tale of a family that's larger than life, Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator of the Philippines, is at the center. But the figures that surround him are...
The Mandela Effect
For nearly thirty years, the South African government held a man it initially labeled prisoner number 46664, the anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela. But in 1994, Mandela transformed from the...
The Labor Of Love (Throwback)
There's a powerful fantasy in American society: the fantasy of the ideal mother. This mother is devoted to her family above all else. She raises the kids, volunteers at the school, cleans the house,...
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