The Last Archive – Details, episodes & analysis

Jill Lepore returns to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education with a special episode of The Last Archive. She and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey explore the amazing new AI-powered recreation of the Brown v. Board cases over at the Oyez project. Then, Kenneth W. Mack, the Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard University, stops by to discuss the enduring significance of the case.

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Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our own archive to help put our present politics into historical context.

This episode, Epiphany, first ran in 2021, as the finale to Season 2, which was all about lies, fakes, frauds, and hoaxes. In this episode, Jill Lepore takes listeners down the winding path from the little-known Iron Mountain hoax of the late 1960s to the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021.

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Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to help put our present politics into historical context. 

In the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh transformed talk radio. In the process, he radicalized his listeners and the conservative movement. Limbaugh’s talk radio style became a staple of the modern right. Then, the left joined the fray. This week: partisan loudmouth versus partisan loudmouth, and the shifting media landscape that helped create modern political warfare.

This episode first ran in June, 2021.

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Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to put our present politics into historical context.

The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to feature an American presidential candidate. And on election night, CBS News premiered the first computer to predict an American election — the UNIVAC. Safe to say, that part didn’t go according to plan. But election night 1952 is ground zero for our current, political post-truth moment. If a computer and a targeted advertisement can both use heaps of data to predict every citizen’s every decision, can voters really know things for themselves after all?

This episode first ran in the summer of 2020.

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Election Year 2024 is upon us. And it promises to be a bit of a mess. But where did all this mess come from? In a 4-episode mini-series drawing from our own archive, Jill Lepore and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey investigate, situate, and contextualize our present moment in the history that brought us here. This series contains episodes from our original seasons alongside new material. Coming next week.

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This is the first episode in Radio Diaries’ new series The Unmarked Graveyard, untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery. Each week, they’re bringing you stories of how people ended up on New York City's Hart Island, the lives they lived, and the people they left behind.

This debut episode goes back to a few years ago, when a young man who called himself Stephen became a fixture in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Locals started noticing him sitting on the same park bench day after day. He said little and asked for nothing.

When Stephen’s body was found in 2017, the police were unable to identify him, and he was buried on Hart Island. Then, one day, a woman who knew him from the park stumbled upon his true identity, and his backstory came to light.

Listen to new episodes of The Unmarked Graveyard from Radio Diaries every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In our season finale, we travel through time.

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In the 1940s, a freelance wiretapper named Big Jim Vaus got mixed up with the cops, the mob, and the most famous evangelist in America. This week on The Last Archive: The ballad of Big Jim and what the intersections of telephone history and American spirituality reveal about how we understand the phone. 

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In the 1930s, at a women's reformatory in upstate New York, an upstart social scientist made a study that launched the field of social network analysis. It was revolutionary, but missed something happening at the same time at the same school, something we know now in part from the story of the school's most famous inmate: Ella Fitzgerald.

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When invasive parakeets began to spread in New York City in the 1970s, the government decided it needed to kill them all. Today: The offbeat panic about wild parrots, and a history of anxieties about population growth.

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