Lives of the Great Depression (2020)

The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide the amendment's boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? In this hour, the shifting definition of cruel and unusual punishment. This episode was originally ...  Show more

Call it standing ovation inflation: these days, it feels like it's mandatory to stand and clap for live performances. Has our please clap era gone too far? That's what one Throughline listener wanted to know. So we traced the winding road from Shakespeare’s epilogues to Broadway ...  Show more

The Great Depression was the worst and deepest peacetime economic shock of the twentieth century. It affected millions of lives, redefined global trade, and contributed to the drift towards the Second World War.But how were the seeds of this financial disaster sown in the First W ...  Show more

Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School. When we last left the United States of America in our economic telling of history, it was the early 1900s and the country's leaders were starting to feel l ...  Show more

The Great Depression was the worst and deepest peacetime economic shock in the history of the industrialized world. It brought about profound social change and was a significant factor in the drift towards the Second World War. The depth of suffering during the Depression years i ...  Show more

As legal challenges to his New Deal programs mounted, President Roosevelt and his attorney general devised dramatic reforms to the Supreme Court’s structure. The proposed changes would open new rifts between the president and conservative members of his own party.Other greater ch ...  Show more