The people and struggles that changed America—one year at a time. In each episode, host Josh Levin explores a story you may have forgotten, or one you’ve never heard of before. What were the moments that transformed politics, culture, science, religion, and more? And how does the nation’s past shape our present?
https://slate.com/tag/slate-podcast
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 1 day 22 hours 36 minutes
episode 1: 1977: Anita Bryant's War on Gay Rights
The pop singer who launched an anti-gay movement, and the activists who fought back.
Slow Burn S4 Ep. 1: White Knight
Here's Episode 1 of Slow Burn Season 4: David Duke. Subscribe here. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a white supremacist became an American political phenomenon. David Duke’s rise to power and prominence—his election to the Louisiana legislature, and then his campaigns for the U.S. Senate and the governorship—was an existential crisis for the state and the nation...
Bonus | The Queen: How to Write This Book
David Grann, Eliza Griswold, and James Forman Jr. on what it takes to write a reporting-intensive book.
Bonus | The Queen: The Kidnapping of Baby Fronczak
What connects the woman who was vilified as the “welfare queen” to a much graver crime.
The Queen | Ep. 04: Bobbie and Diana
Linda Taylor had a tendency to emerge from out of nowhere, upend everything in her path, then vanish without leaving a forwarding address. The final episode of The Queen focuses on two different stories about the lives Taylor changed. In one case, she helped a vulnerable family escape the degradations of the Jim Crow South. In the other, she kidnapped a child and may have been responsible for her own husband’s death...
The Queen | Ep. 03: Constance
A decade before she became known as the “welfare queen,” Linda Taylor put herself at the center of a different Chicago scandal. Upon the death of gambling kingpin Lawrence Wakefield, Taylor posed as the heir to his sizable fortune. The ensuing court proceeding was full of lies and surprise witnesses. That heirship hearing would ultimately reveal Taylor’s real identity and offer a window into her troubled past...
The Queen | Ep. 02: An Incredible Con
In the 1970s, a pair of very different men fought to define Linda Taylor’s image. For presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, Taylor epitomized the brokenness of the federal bureaucracy and the broader trend of poor people getting rich off the public dime. Taylor’s defense lawyer, the civil rights attorney R. Eugene Pincham, believed she was a scapegoat, and that her actions were crimes of survival...