Revisionist History

This transcript introduces 'First America,' a podcast exploring how Native Americans are erased from US founding narratives despite being central to the Declaration of Independence. Host Rebecca Nagel reveals that the founders' anger at Indigenous resistance—not taxes—was the primary grievance driving the Revolution, and connects this historical erasure to contemporary immigration enforcement policies.

This Planet Money episode tells the story of George Johnson, who built Johnson Products Company into the first Black-owned company on the American Stock Exchange by creating innovative hair care products for Black consumers. The episode traces the company's rise through three hairstyles—the conch, afro, and jerry curl—and its eventual decline after going public, culminating in its 1993 sale to a white-owned pharmaceutical company.

This final episode of "The Staten Island Problem" traces how the 1993 Staten Island secession movement and Rudy Giuliani's mayoral victory were driven by the same engine of resentment from forgotten peripheral places, establishing a political pattern that would resurface with Donald Trump's 2016 election and the January 6th Capitol riot.

This episode of Revisionist History explores the parallel rise of Wu-Tang Clan and the Staten Island secession movement in the early 1990s, arguing that RZA's creation of an independent hip-hop empire mirrored the secessionists' fantasy of breaking away from oppressive central authority. Both movements emerged simultaneously from Staten Island's isolated, segregated environment and represented a shared desire for self-determination.

This episode of Revisionist History examines the anti-secession movement on Staten Island in the early 1990s, focusing on David Goldfarb and Staten Islanders for Unified New York (SIFUNI) who opposed secession. The narrative connects Staten Island's secession movement to island studies theory, particularly the "Tuvalu Effect," which explains how islands in archipelagos have a tendency to centrifugally pull away from each other due to psychological and economic resentment.

This episode of Revisionist History explores Staten Island's secession movement of the 1980s-90s, tracing how the Supreme Court's ruling on the Board of Estimate—which stripped Staten Island of its disproportionate political power—triggered a grassroots movement led by activist Dan Singletary and others who felt their island had been exploited as New York City's dumping ground and were seeking independence.

In this opening episode of a five-part series about 1990s Staten Island, host Ben Natta-Faffrey introduces the Forgotten Borough's secessionist movement and its escalating conflict with Mayor David Dinkins, particularly through Borough President Guy Molinari's political opposition following the police shooting of Kiko Garcia in Washington Heights.

Malcolm Gladwell revisits his 2017 episode criticizing private golf courses in Los Angeles for occupying valuable public land while avoiding property taxes through legal loopholes. A decade later, LA City Council member Audre Nazarian heard the podcast and introduced a ballot proposition to tax these clubs fairly, sparking negotiations and public debate about land use and inequality.

This is a promotional transcript for "The Staten Island Problem," a podcast series examining Staten Island's 1990s secession movement from New York City. The creator argues this overlooked historical moment anticipated contemporary political divisions and national polarization driven by feelings of resentment among forgotten communities.

This Revisionist History episode explores how naming and communication shape consumer acceptance of new food technologies, using the cautionary tale of GMOs in the 1990s and applying lessons to the emerging cultivated meat industry. Barbara Stuckey from Mattson, a food science lab, advocates for the term "cultivated meat" instead of "lab-grown meat" to avoid repeating the GMO backlash that devastated the Flavr Savr tomato.

This is the first episode of 'Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise,' an eight-part podcast hosted by Malcolm Gladwell in collaboration with Barack Obama. The episode traces the post-Civil War Reconstruction era through the stories of Frederick Douglass, Andrew Johnson, and Carl Schurz, examining the political battles over Black citizenship, voting rights, and the reunification of the United States. It argues that Reconstruction was a pivotal, largely overlooked period whose successes and failures shaped American society for the next 150 years.

Malcolm Gladwell revisits his Revisionist History episode 'Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment,' which examines the overlooked consequences of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The episode argues that while Brown is celebrated as a civil rights victory, it inadvertently led to the mass firing of approximately 40,000 Black teachers across the South. Gladwell contends that the Supreme Court's framing of the case around psychological damage rather than structural inequality set the stage for this tragic and largely forgotten outcome.

This is the first episode of Season 8 of 'Scene on Radio,' titled 'The News,' which examines the deep crisis in American news media. Hosts John Bewin and Chenjerai Kumunika explore why Americans distrust the media, how political sorting and identity drive news consumption, and why the 'echo chamber' narrative may be more myth than reality. The episode features interviews with a North Carolina farmer and media scholar Danigal Young to illuminate how survival instincts and group identity shape how people process information.

Malcolm Gladwell explores why the United States has fewer elevators per capita than almost any other high-income country, tracing the problem to expensive labor practices, oversized elevator requirements, and a pivotal 2003-2004 building code amendment by Glendale, Arizona fire inspector Gregory A. Victor. The episode argues that well-intentioned pursuit of perfection — making elevators larger to accommodate stretchers — made them so expensive that developers routinely skip them in smaller and affordable apartment buildings.