This 2011 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers the U.S. in the late 1800s, when no one really monitored food additives. After Congress refused to regulate food safety, Harvey Wiley had groups of healthy men ingest poisons for six months. Tune in to learn how these "Poison Squads" shed new light on Wiley's cause.

Tracy and Holly talk about family and experiential history with headaches, and the persistent problems in what people do and don't know about them. They then cover their swill-milk episode, and how utterly vile the whole thing is.

In the 1850s, much of the milk supply in New York was anything but appetizing and wholesome – it was often deadly. But efforts to address the problem were blocked by corrupt officials.

Migraine is one of the three most prevalent conditions in the world along with anemia and hearing loss. But in spite of that prevalence, migraine is widely misunderstood, really at every level.

This 2017 episode covers one of the first Americans to achieve fame as a Shakespearean actor, and the first black man to do so, becoming a famous figure on the Victorian stage. But Aldridge has largely been excluded from biographies of Shakespearean actors.

It's divisive figures week! Holly and Tracy discuss the difficulty in sorting out the reality of Lorenz's work, because of the polarized view of him within the medical community. Then talk turns to Hugo Gernsback, and the ongoing divide over him.

Ray Bradbury said Hugo “made us fall in love with the future.” But he’s also been berated as a hack whose proclamations about what does and does not qualify as science fiction have been problematic and limiting from the start.

Lorenz is credited with developing treatments that addressed pediatric orthopedic problems. During his lifetime, he was both celebrated and protested within the medical community. 

Part two of our Fort Shaw classic covers the four months the Fort Shaw Indian School women's basketball team spent at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. The team performed mandolin recitals, literary recitations, demonstrations of gymnastics and calisthenics, and became World Champions.

Holly and Tracy talk about the localization of copycat companies in the cleaning industry, and Holly shares how her robotic vacuum met its untimely end. The legacy of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg is also discussed in terms of his status as an outlier across various communities.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has come up in a lot of research for the show. Schomburg the man was an Afro-Puerto Rican activist and collector, who historian and journalist Joel Augustus Rogers nicknamed “the Sherlock Holmes of Negro History.”

Tracking the history of how we clean and why our cleaning needs have shifted also tells the story of human progress in a wider sense. How did we get from natural-fiber brooms to gasoline-powered vacuum cleaners and ultimately to the home-use models we know today?

This 2017 episode covers the Fort Shaw Indian School , part of a boarding school system designed to make Native American students conform to white culture. In a surprising twist, it also boasted a champion women's basketball team.

Tracy and Holly discuss the difficulty of covering the Dreyfus Affair, including the contextual history that needs to be covered for it. They also talk about the familiarity of the events of the affair because of similar events happening today.

The court-martial and exile of Alfred Dreyfus was such big news that it started to be referred to simply as “The Affair.” And it divided French society and became international news.

Part one contextualizes the Dreyfus Affair by covering the Franco-Prussian War and the founding of the French Third Republic. Then we’ll cover Alfred Dreyfus and the accusation of treason that he faced in 1894.

We're continuing our classics with Harriet Tubman's story, which came out in 2016. There was a whole lot more to her life and work than the Underground Railroad. During the U.S. Civil War, she worked as a Union spy, eventually earning the nickname "General."

Tracy and Holly talk about their own experiences with and thoughts about kudzu. They also discuss Harriet Quimby's journalism career, her stance on feminism, and that fabulous purple satin jumpsuit.

Quimby is most well-known for aviation, but journalism was an even bigger part of her life. Before taking up flying, she had managed to carve out a life for herself by merging her love of adventure with her knack for writing.