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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....