Episodes: 5 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,...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Season 4 – Episode 6: No-No Boy and the Japanese-American Migration to Detroit

Barely two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order #9066. Some 120,000 Japanese...

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