Throughline is a time machine. Each episode, we travel beyond the headlines to answer the question, "How did we get here?" We use sound and stories to bring history to life and put you into the middle of it. From ancient civilizations to forgotten figures, we take you directly to the moments that shaped our world. Throughline is hosted by Peabody Award-winning journalists Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei.Subscribe to Throughline+. You'll be supporting the history-reframing, perspective-shifting, time-warping stories you can't get enough of - and you'll unlock access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org/throughline
350 episodes transcribedBayard Rustin, the man behind the March on Washington, was one of the most consequential architects of the civil rights movement you may never have he...
Octavia Butler's alternate realities and 'speculative fiction' reveal striking, and often devastating parallels to the world we live in today. She was...
Decades before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey attracted millions with a simple, uncompromising message: Black people deserved...
Why does Whitney Houston's 1991 Super Bowl national anthem still resonate 30 years later? Listen to this episode from our friends at It's Been A Minut...
What happens after everything falls apart? The end of the Bronze Age was a moment when an entire network of ancient civilizations collapsed, leaving b...
Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen talks to us about how the rule of the people becomes the rule of the one, the role of the media, and what we can...
When a mob of pro-Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, they also incited a defining moment in United States history. Now...
When Andrew Johnson became president in 1865, the United States was in the midst of one of its most volatile chapters. The country was divided after f...
In the mid-1980's a woman who didn't consider herself a feminist was asked to solve perhaps the biggest problem women face. How she and a small group...
The Sunni-Shia divide is a conflict that most people have heard about - two sects with Sunni Islam being in the majority and Shia Islam the minority....
50 years ago the world watched as man first landed on the moon, an incredible accomplishment by the engineers and scientists of NASA. But what if some...
The US and Iran have been in some state of conflict for the last 40 years, since the Iranian revolution. This week, we look at three key moments in th...
It has been nearly twenty years since 9/11 and during that time much of the media coverage and government attention has been directed at the threat of...
The story of how the Endangered Species Act went from unanimous passage under a Republican president to becoming a deeply partisan wedge. The act was...
The idea that race is a social construct comes from the pioneering work of anthropologist Franz Boas. During a time when race-based science and the eu...
This week we're bringing you something extra, an episode from the NPR Music series, Louder Than A Riot. The series examines the relationship between h...
The Constitution is like America's secular bible, our sacred founding document. In her play, What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck goes thr...
In the 2000 presidential election, results weren't known in one night, a week, or even a month. This week, we share an episode we loved from It's Been...
Frederick Douglass dreamed of a country where all people could vote and he did everything in his power to make that dream a reality. In the face of sl...
