HISTORY This Week

February 23, 2005. New York City's culinary elite gather at Gotham Hall. Tuxedoed waiters pass around champagne flutes and decadent hors d'oeuvres, as famous chefs like Eric Ripert and Anthony Bourdain pose for photos and gossip with their peers before the night’s main event: an announcement that could change their lives and the fate of America's dining scene.
Édouard Michelin takes the stage. His company, Michelin, is one of the world's largest manufacturers of tires, but they also produce a restaurant guide that has dictated the fortunes of European restaurants for over 100 years. Now, the Michelin Guide, and its coveted stars, will be coming to America.
When Michelin descends on New York City, which restaurants win? Which lose? And how does the battle itself transform American food culture?
Special thanks to Peter Esmond, the former general manager of Per Se and current sales leader at DoorDash; Eric Ripert, chef of Le Bernardin in New York City; and Kathleen Squires, a food and travel writer whose work appears in the Wall Street Journal, Conde Nast Traveler and more.
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February 15, 1935. The American Medical Association, the AMA, is holding an emergency meeting in Chicago. The crisis? The possibility that the federal government is about to pass universal health insurance.
Health insurance is a new concept in America at this time, but President Franklin Roosevelt's administration is looking to include it in a package that will include another piece of new legislation - Social Security. The AMA, which represents thousands of American doctors, fears that government-backed insurance could dictate how doctors care for patients, and how much money they're allowed to make. The AMA's resistance is the beginning of a nearly 20-year battle against this initiative.
How does the AMA eventually use never-before-seen tactics to fight against a national healthcare program? And how is that program ultimately defeated?
Special thanks to Marcella Alsan, Angelopoulos Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a Professor of Public Health at the Chan School of Public Health at Harvard. Her working paper on this topic is titled, Why Doesn’t the United States Have National Health Insurance? The Role of the American Medical Association.
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February 11, 2005. FBI agents bust down the door of a cinder block house near the University of Kentucky campus. Amid flash grenades and screaming teens, they arrest three students – plus a fourth student in a nearby dorm. The crime? Stealing almost $750,000 of rare books and manuscripts from the library at Transylvania University. Why did four freshmen decide to actually go through with their real life version of Ocean’s Eleven? And how did they plan to get away with it?
Special thanks to our guests, BJ Gooch, retired special collections librarian; Eric Borsuk, whose memoir is called American Animals: A True Crime Memoir; and Tom Lecky, rare book and manuscript specialist.
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** This episode originally aired February 6, 2023.

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January 28, 1986. It's freezing in Central Florida, a historically cold day. That's bad news for citrus growers, and for NASA, which is scheduled to launch the Space Shuttle Challenger from Cape Canaveral this morning.
Engineers have ben cautioning NASA that cold temperatures can make space launches dangerous. And yet, NASA decides to move ahead. They consider it an "acceptable risk" and send seven astronauts hurtling into the sky.
What went wrong with the Space Shuttle Challenger? And if engineers knew what could happen, why wasn’t this disaster avoided?
Special thanks to Adam Higginbotham, author of Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space.
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To further celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we're re-releasing our classic episode about the Children's Crusade, an effort to bring the youth of Birmingham, Alabama into the Civil Rights Movement in order to affect change across the country.
April 20, 1963. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walks out of Alabama’s Birmingham Jail after being held for a week for peacefully protesting. He spent most of that time writing a letter that passionately defends the civil rights movement’s nonviolent tactics. But despite King’s passion, the movement’s progress has stalled. King needs a major victory in Birmingham, but he’s running out of people willing to risk their livelihoods and safety for this cause. So a new tactic starts taking shape: recruiting young people to protest. After all, kids have the least to lose and the most to gain from a more equal future. But King says the risk is too high. So what changes his mind about putting kids on the front lines? And how did the Children’s March shift Americans’ support of civil rights?
Special thanks to our guests: Children’s Crusade participants Jessie Shepherd, Janice Wesley Kelsey, and Charles Avery. And Ahmad Ward, former head of education at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and current Executive Director at Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park.
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** This episode originally aired April 17, 2023.

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