Episodes: 2 Columns

Season 5 Finale- The Development of PCP and Ketamine

Ketamine has found wide uses since the 1960s: as a painkiller, an anesthetic, a street drug consumed at raves, and — now — considered by many to be an...

Read More

Season 5 – Episode 9: Fran Harris, The First Female Newscaster in Michigan

Newscaster Fran Harris’s life was a lifetime of firsts. She was the first woman newscaster in Detroit radio during World War II, persuading her bosses at WWJ to abandon...

Read More

Season 5 – Episode 8: A Century of Mexicantown

A longstanding community called Mexicantown on Detroit’s southwest side has persevered for around a century. The area of restaurants, shops, and bakeries anchors a key ethnic community in Detroit....

Read More

Season 5 – Episode 7: The Biography of a Rumor: The “Paul McCartney Is Dead” Hoax

Thousands of phonograph records were destroyed, as were thousands of needles used on the old-style record players. Teenage sleuths were conducting their own investigations in the great conspiracy theory...

Read More

Season 5 – Episode 6: The Origins of Detroit Style Pizza

Sometime in the mid-1940s, an Italian immigrant bar owner by the name of Gus Guerra started making pizzas in his joint to bring in a few extra dollars. Decades...

Read More

Season 5 – Episode 5: The Michigan Democratic Social Club Triple Beheading

It was horrific, even by the low standards of the urban drug trade. Three dead bodies found in a van on Detroit’s east side one night in 1979. All...

Read More

Season 5 – Episode 4: The Native American Origins of Detroit

The beginnings of Detroit are inaccurately pinned to the arrival of Cadillac on these shores in 1701, but there were various Native American tribes in the area for centuries...

Read More

Season 5 – Episode 3: The 1863 Civil War Riot 

Smack in the middle of the Civil War, Detroit experienced a riot that was characterized as “the most brutal and bloody riot that ever disgraced any community.” A local...

Read More

Season 5 – Episode 2: The Ford Hunger March

On a cold winter day in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, some 3,000 or more people met at a park on Detroit’s southwest side. They hoped...

Read More

Season 5 – Episode 1: Joe Louis, The Punch of Detroit

Joe Louis may have been the most famous person to come out of Detroit. He arrived here in the mid-1920s as part of the Great Migration, that influx of...

Read More

Season 4 – Finale: Jeff Montgomery, Detroit’s Fierce LGBTQ+ Rights Activist

Jeff Montgomery was a born activist who played an important role in saving Orchestra Hall. When a hate crime brought tragedy to his personal life, he channeled his talent...

Read More

Season 4 – Episode 9: When The Cold War Seemed Hot: Nike Missiles Around Metro Detroit, And A Nuclear Warhead On Belle Isle

Between 1955 and 1974, a nuclear war with the Soviet Union seemed like a possibility. We armed ourselves by placing Nike Missiles around many major cities across the U.S....

Read More