September 26, 1960. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon meet in a CBS studio in Chicago for the first televised debate between presidential nominees. Kennedy arrives tan, relaxed, and fully prepped. Nixon arrives with a fever and a bad knee, turns down the studio makeup, and goes on live TV covered in a drugstore powder called "Lazy Shave."

It took CBS president Frank Stanton years of lobbying, and a change in federal law, to get the two men on stage. Seventy million Americans watched, and the night has been remembered ever since as the moment image beat substance. But is that really what happened? And did the TV audience and the radio audience really see two different winners?

Special thanks to our guest David Greenberg, professor of history, journalism, and media studies at Rutgers University and author of Republic of Spin: An Inside Look at the American Presidency.

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Introducing History's Greatest Mysteries–a new History Channel podcast from Rewind Studios–available wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Wednesday.

One of the holiest and most powerful relics from the Bible has been missing for over 2,000 years. While some believe the Ark of the Covenant was destroyed, many people think it’s still out there. Could new clues finally tell us what happened to the Ark, and lead us to where it can be found?

September 24, 1955. President Eisenhower is asleep in his bed at his in-laws’ house in Denver. At around 2 AM in the morning, he’s jolted awake by chest pains. No one realizes it until the morning, but Eisenhower has had a heart attack. His cardiologist calms the public and tells them that their President will be alright – with some lifestyle changes partially inspired by new, cutting-edge research from a little-known scientist: Ancel Keys. And that very research will change the way Americans, and the world, will eat forever. How did Keys, an oceanographer-turned-nutrition-scientist, end up changing the world’s relationship with fats? And was this a change for the better?

Thank you to our guests, Dr. Steven Nissen, Chief Academic Officer, Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic; Sarah Tracy, Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor, History of Medicine and Food Studies at the University of Oklahoma; and Nina Teicholz, investigative science journalist and author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.

**This episode originally aired September 21, 2020.

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1381. In the English countryside, one peasant has had enough. His resistance leads tens of thousands of armed peasants to march on London. They’re furious about taxes, about wages held down by law, about a world that feels abandoned by God. But they aren’t marching to overthrow the king. They are marching to rescue him.

Paul Greengrass and Dan Jones join Sally Helm to talk about The Uprising, the new film starring Andrew Garfield as a fictional plowman who becomes the face of England's Peasants' Revolt. They get into what life was actually like a generation after the Black Death, why the rebels burned every written record they could find, and how a disturbed 14-year-old king ended up as the last hope of the people marching on his city.

Paul Greengrass is the writer and director of The Uprising, in theaters now. Dan Jones is the film's historical advisor and the author of Summer of Blood. You can follow him at danjones.substack.com for more.

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September 20, 1187. It’s daytime outside the walls of Jerusalem. Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt, ponders his next attack. His troops encircle and lay siege to the city. They vastly outnumber the Crusader knights inside, and Saladin is on the cusp of a victory he never dreamed possible. But he has a problem. Balian of Ibelin leads the Crusader defenses within the city walls. He threatens to destroy Muslim holy sites if Saladin attacks. The Sultan must make a choice. One that will impact his legacy, the lives of thousands, and the future of Jerusalem. 

Special thanks to our guest, Dr. Suleiman Mourad, Professor of Religion at Smith College and author of Ibn Asakir of Damascus: Champion of Sunni Islam at the Time of the Crusades.

**This episode originally aired September 19, 2022.

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On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we're bringing you Blindspot: The Road to 9/11 – a collaboration between the History Channel and WNYC Studios. This was adapted from the complete nine-part series, which you can find by searching for Blindspot: The Road to 9/11 wherever you get your podcasts.

September 11, 2001. On a clear and sunny day, Captain Richard Thornton is piloting his ferry boat back and forth between New Jersey and New York City. But when he hears an airplane flying too low to the ground, he knows something is wrong. After the World Trade Center’s North Tower is struck, Thornton instinctively drives his ship down towards Lower Manhattan. He will soon be joined by countless other marine craft: ferries, fishing boats, tugboats, and more. 

With the roads, bridges, and trains that connect the island of Manhattan to the rest of the world shut down, this collection of civilian, commercial, and military boats manages to carry more than 500,000 survivors to safety. How did this impromptu evacuation, which was larger than Dunkirk during WWII, come together? And how does one ferry boat captain reflect on the shared sense of duty he felt on that fateful day?

**This episode originally aired September 6, 2021.

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September 12, 1922. Twenty-four-year-old Mollie Maggia has a toothache. In less than a year, this otherwise healthy young woman will be dead. Others like her will soon follow. They’d all shared what seemed to be a dream job: applying glow-in-the-dark paint to clock faces. The paint glowed because it was saturated with radium, the wonder element of its day. And now that radium has burrowed inside the bones and lungs of the women. How did a supposed wonder element and cure-all come to be seen for what it was – a deadly poison? And how did a group of courageous young women, racing the clock of their own mortality, expose this truth?

Special thanks to Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. Also, a huge thank you to Art Fryer, nephew of Grace Fryer, one of the “Radium Girls.”

**This episode originally aired September 12, 2022.

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A five-minute taste of our full interview on how Las Vegas became Las Vegas. Subscribe to HTW+ to hear the rest at htwpod.com or in your Apple Podcasts app.

August, sometime in the 500s BCE. In Athens, the Great Panathenaia is in full swing: chariot races, boat races, a hundred cattle slaughtered for the feast. And at the center of it, a competition in which performers recite the work of one poet, and one poet only: Homer. But nobody recites the Odyssey alone. It takes some eighteen hours. So the performers hand it off in relay, each one picking up exactly where the last man stopped.

That relay may be the closest thing we have to the truth about Homer. Almost no scholar today believes a single blind bard composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. So who made them? And what happens to a masterpiece when you accept that it never had an author?

Special thanks to our guests: Mary Ebbott, professor of classics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts; and Casey Dué, professor of classical studies at the University of Houston. They are the editors of the Homer Multitext Project, which you can find at homermultitext.org.

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August 17, 1858. New York City wakes to a hundred-gun salute. Church bells ring, flags fly from public buildings, and by nightfall, fireworks light up the sky. The city is celebrating a telegram from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. Not what it says, but how it traveled: along a 2,000-mile cable running under the Atlantic Ocean. Messages that once took two weeks by steamship now arrive in an instant. And the man behind the cable, a retired paper tycoon named Cyrus Field, is about to become the most famous person in America. But Field has a secret. His cable is already failing.

Why did a bored millionaire attempt the moonshot of the Victorian era? And how did one fragile wire lay the foundation for our connected world?

Special thanks to our guest, James M. Tabor, author of Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World at the Dawn of the Information Age.

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