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
342 episodes transcribedDefeating old age? In 1899, Elie Metchnikoff woke up in Paris to learn he had done just that. At least, that's what the newspaper headlines said. Befo...
How did love – this thing that's supposed to be beautiful, magical, transformative – turn into a neverending slog? We went searching for answers, and...
In the Xinjiang region of western China, the government has rounded up and detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups. M...
"History" can seem big and imposing. But it's always intensely personal – it's all of our individual experiences that add up to historical events. Ove...
Throughline associate producer Anya Steinberg talks to supervising senior editor Julie Caine about her reporting trip to Owens Valley in northeastern...
Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But in 19th-century London, it went viral. When Charles Dickens published...
The U.S. has long professed to be a country where people can seek refuge. That's the promise etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty. But it's n...
By the time his book went to press in London, on November 18, 1633, Thomas Morton had been exiled from the Puritan colonies in Massachusetts. His crim...
The Thanksgiving story most of us hear is about friendship and unity. And that's what Sarah Josepha Hale had on her mind when she sat down to write a...
Today on the show, we're taking you behind the scenes. We'll tell you how Throughline was born, some of what goes into making our episodes, and a litt...
What is it, why do we have it, and why hasn't it changed? Born from a rushed, fraught, imperfect process, the origins and evolution of the Electoral C...
The question of settlements has loomed over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, and has only intensified in the past year. According to a UN...
Today on the show, two stories of building power in swing states: from the top down, and the bottom up.First, how a future Supreme Court justice helpe...
Drunken brawls, coercion, and lace curtains: believe it or not, how regular people vote was not something the Founding Fathers thought much about. Ame...
References to God and Christianity are sprinkled throughout American life. Our money has "In God We Trust" printed on it. Most presidents have chosen...
Today, the city of Jerusalem is seen as so important that people are willing to kill and die to control it. And that struggle goes back centuries. Nea...
Hezbollah is a Lebanese paramilitary organization and political party that's directly supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the wake of the Oc...
Climate change, political unrest, random violence - Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls, "a thin layer of ice o...
9/11 was an inside job. Aliens have already made contact. COVID-19 was created in a lab.Maybe you rolled your eyes at some point while reading that li...
Airline workers — pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, baggage handlers, and more — represent a huge cross-section of the country. And for decades, t...
