Destroyer of Worlds

LINK TO OUR LIVE SHOW! (or visit historythisweekpodcast.com) Feb 13, 1920. For over thirty years, Black baseball players have been locked out of the major leagues. So on this day in Kansas City, Rube Foster, a former pitcher and now a team owner, is trying to make his own league ...  Show more

February 4, 1955. In a New York courtroom, the Comics Czar takes the stand. He’s in charge of enforcing a new code, meant to keep comic books from corrupting America’s youth, and he’s here to prove that his work has cleaned up the industry. But that afternoon, a noted psychologis ...  Show more

The new Oppenheimer movie has everyone asking questions about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 - were two bombs necessary? Would the war have ended without it? Was there an ulterior motive? Would the Americans have dropped a third if they had it?

At the end ...

On a summer morning in 1945, a device known simply as 'Gadget' was detonated. An enormous explosion tore a crater into the New Mexico desert, melting sand into radioactive green glass and sending a mushroom cloud 7.5 miles into the sky. This was the first controlled detonation ...

Christopher Nolan's new film 'Oppenheimer' chronicles the life and legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the first director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and so-called "Father of the Atomic Bomb." The movie does not shy away from science — and neither do we. We talked to current s ...  Show more

For 3 years, scientists in secret cities around the U.S. had been in a race against time to complete the world’s first atomic weapon. And in July of 1945, the very first plutonium bomb was ready. Constructing “The Gadget” as it was called, had taken 2 billion dollars and the coll ...  Show more