Latest Air and space Podcast Episodes
Broad Stripes, Bright Stars and White Lies
Sidedoor - March 23, 2022 04:00 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsBetsy Ross sewed the first American flag. At least, that's what we were taught in school. But when historians go searching… there’s no proof to be found. In this episode of Sidedoor, we unravel this vexillological tale tall to find out how this myth got started, and who Betsy Ross reall...
Title: Broad Stripes, Bright Stars and White Lies
Sidedoor - March 23, 2022 04:00 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsBetsy Ross sewed the first American flag. At least, that's what we were taught in school. But when historians go searching… there’s no proof to be found. In this episode of Sidedoor, we unravel this vexillological tale tall to find out how this myth got started, and who Betsy Ross reall...
Take Who Out to the Ball Game?
Sidedoor - March 09, 2022 05:00 - 30 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsBaseball fan or not, you know this song…or at least, you think you do. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is one of the top three most recognizable songs in the country, next to “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Happy Birthday.” But long-forgotten lyrics reveal a feminist message buried amid ...
Raven and the Box of Daylight
Sidedoor - February 23, 2022 05:00 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsBefore here was here Raven was a white bird, and the world was in darkness. So begins the story passed down among the Tlingit people of the Pacific Northwest since time immemorial. This origin story has survived by passing from the lips of one person to the ear of another – from generat...
The Robot in the Mirror
Sidedoor - January 26, 2022 05:00 - 32 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsIt’s easy to think artificial intelligence is objective. It doesn’t have emotions. It operates based on cold hard calculations. But artificial intelligence is built on human intelligence, and it may be carrying our old prejudices into the future with us. In this episode of Sidedoor, we ...
The Fugitive Brewer
Sidedoor - January 12, 2022 05:00 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsA skill for brewing beer and $100 reward for her capture. Those were the clues in an old newspaper ad that got Smithsonian brewing historian Theresa McCulla hooked on the story of Patsy Young, an enslaved African American woman who fled to freedom in 1808 and made a life for herself bre...
Edison’s Demon Dolls
Sidedoor - December 29, 2021 05:00 - 26 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsIn 1890, Americans were delighted when they heard the news that Thomas Edison was using his phonograph technology to give voice to porcelain dolls. But their delight soon turned to horror. In this episode of Sidedoor, we’ll hear a short story that imagines what happens when two little g...
Chiura Obata’s Glorious Struggle
Sidedoor - December 15, 2021 05:00 - 33 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsWhen Chiura Obata painted “Moonlight Over Topaz, Utah,” he was a prisoner at the camp: one of 120,000 Japanese Americans to be incarcerated during World War II. The painting shows a dreamy moonlit desert, with just a few dark lines to hint at the barbed wire fences and guard towers that...
Light of Freedom
Sidedoor - November 17, 2021 05:00 - 27 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsThere’s a new sculpture at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: a giant torch that’s strikingly familiar – and entirely unique. Artist Abigail DeVille has reimagined the Statue of Liberty’s torch to shine a light on historical contradictions of American freedom. Thro...
King of the Herbs
Sidedoor - November 03, 2021 04:00 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsIt’s a wild herb that countless cultures have used for centuries as a wonder drug to cure any ailment. It's so rare and valuable that it’s been dug to extinction nearly everywhere, except a small area of the United States. This time on Sidedoor, we go searching for the elusive wild Amer...
Bloodsuckers!
Sidedoor - October 20, 2021 04:00 - 30 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsLeeches don’t get a lot of love. They’re slimy, wriggly, and, well, they suck — blood that is. But there’s a lot to learn about the lowly leech. Led by a troupe of Smithsonian experts, we’ll discover how these toothy hangers-on wormed their way into medical practices, performance art, a...
Make Way for Elephants
Sidedoor - October 06, 2021 04:00 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsThe endangered Asian Elephant may be a conservation success story as its rapid decline appears to be stabilizing. But this has created a new set of problems. With little remaining habitat, these elephants have nowhere left to go but into roads, farms, and cities. This time on Sidedoor, ...
It’s Season Seven!
Sidedoor - September 29, 2021 19:51 - 1 minute ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsSidedoor returns for its seventh season on Wednesday, October 6th!
Bonus: Patsy Mink
Sidedoor - September 22, 2021 04:00 - 7 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsA new season of Sidedoor is just two weeks away! In the meantime, we’re sharing a special guest episode from Wonder Media Network’s podcast, “Encyclopedia Womannica.” In this episode, you’ll hear about the life of Patsy Mink, the first Asian-American woman to serve in Congress and run f...
Bonus: Happy Birthday to Us
Sidedoor - August 18, 2021 04:01 - 28 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsThe “Men of Progress” painting, from 1862, shows the first Secretary of the Smithsonian surrounded by a group of scientists and inventors credited with “altering the course of contemporary civilization.” But what may be most remarkable about this tableau is who’s not there. To mark the ...
Olympic Bonus: Shredding Skateboarding’s Glass Ceiling
Sidedoor - July 23, 2021 04:00 - 35 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsThis summer – for the first time ever - skateboarding will be an Olympic sport. In honor of its Olympic debut, we’re revisiting one of our favorite episodes: the story of how the best women skateboarders stood toe-to-toe with the most powerful people in the industry to demand equal pay....
The Battle of Blair Mountain
Sidedoor - July 14, 2021 04:01 - 28 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratings100 years ago, in the hills of West Virginia, Black, white and European immigrant coal miners banded together to demand better pay and safer working conditions and were met with machine guns. While the story made headlines in 1921, it didn't make it into the history books. In our final ...
Ode to Cicadas
Sidedoor - June 30, 2021 04:00 - 30 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsEvery 17 years, the notorious Brood X cicadas crawl out of the earth by the billions to deafen Washington D.C. After nearly two decades underground, they spend their few short weeks in the sun singing, mating, and dying so the next generation can start anew. The cicadas' distinctive sou...
The Goddess of Broadway
Sidedoor - June 16, 2021 04:00 - 25 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsWhen Diosa Costello took the stage in the 1939 production of “Too Many Girls,” she became the first Puerto Rican performer to tread the boards on Broadway. She was fearless, funny, and brimming with talent. She never considered herself a trailblazer, but her legacy – and the gowns she l...
The Artist Critics Love to Hate
Sidedoor - June 02, 2021 04:00 - 31 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsLeRoy Neiman was a colorful man, both figuratively and literally. His handlebar mustache, long cigar, and sketchpad were fixtures at the sidelines of American pop culture: from boxing matches to jazz clubs and political conventions. His paintings, sketches, and prints papered the second...
BONUS: Confronting the Past
Sidedoor - May 26, 2021 04:00 - 23 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsOne hundred years ago this week, from May 31 and June 1, 1921, a mob targeted and destroyed nearly 40 blocks of a wealthy black neighborhood in North Tulsa, Oklahoma. No one knows how many people died, no one was ever convicted, and no one really talked about it nearly a century later. ...
Best of the Rest III
Sidedoor - May 19, 2021 04:00 - 28 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsGroucho and Freddy. Oryx and ostriches. Cats and dinosaurs. These things go together like… well, they really don’t go together at all. These are fun-sized stories in one goodie bag of an episode. It’s Sidedoor’s third “Best of the Rest!”
On The Money
Sidedoor - May 05, 2021 04:00 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsWe carry portraits around all the time: pocket-sized history lessons in the form of dollars and cents. The recent decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill has us thinking about who’s on our money, and how they got there. This episode of the “Portraits” podcast, from the Smithsonia...
BONUS: The 1957 Pandemic That Wasn’t
Sidedoor - April 28, 2021 04:00 - 27 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsIn 1918, a flu pandemic killed more than 50 million people worldwide. Forty years later, it nearly happened again. This week on Sidedoor we go back to a time when the viruses were winning, and we remember one man, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, whose vaccine virtuosity helped turn the tide in th...
Holding out for a Herring
Sidedoor - April 21, 2021 04:00 - 30 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsHenrietta the river herring is not a particularly glamorous fish. But she’s got grit. Every summer, she swims out to the Atlantic ocean, and every spring, she makes the 500 mile journey back to Maryland’s Patapsco River, where she was born—a habitat that’s been only partially accessible...
Hot Bird Summer
Sidedoor - April 07, 2021 04:00 - 27 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsEvery spring, for as long as records have been kept, a crowd of hundreds of black crowned night herons descend on the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, mating, eating and generally causing a ruckus. Many of the keepers at the zoo enjoy them, but they can be a tough bird to love. Every fall, ...
America's Unknown Celebrity Chef
Sidedoor - March 24, 2021 04:00 - 32 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsWhen Lena Richard cooked her first chicken on television, she beat Julia Child to the screen by over a decade. At a time when most African American women cooks worked behind swinging kitchen doors, Richard claimed her place as a culinary authority, broadcasting in the living rooms of Ne...
A Very Cold Case
Sidedoor - March 10, 2021 05:00 - 32 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsAmerican newspaper publisher and all-around eccentric, Charles Francis Hall, was an unlikely candidate to become an Arctic explorer. Nevertheless, he made three trips to the frozen north, until he died there under suspicious circumstances. Sharpen your powers of deduction and join us on...
Life is Hard, Let's Meditate!
Sidedoor - February 24, 2021 05:00 - 27 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsAs Americans approach a full year of pandemic life, there’s an overwhelming sense of anticipation: when can we get vaccinated? What will life look like in six months? When will life return to normal? Maybe because looking outward feels so daunting, a lot of people are looking inward, th...
Sing a Song of Protest
Sidedoor - January 27, 2021 05:00 - 30 minutes ★★★★★ - 2K ratingsAs an up-and-coming young blues singer in the 1950s, Barbara Dane faced a choice: fame and fortune, or her principles. She left the mainstream music industry and became a revolutionary music producer – literally. Spurred by Fidel Castro’s international gathering of protest singers, Dane...
Related Air and space Topics