Episode 10: Tomorrowland

All season long,

we’ve been asking a big question: Who killed truth? The answer has to do with a change in the elemental unit of knowledge: the fall of the fact, and the rise of data. So, for the last chapter in our investigation, we rented a cherry red convertible, and went to the place all the data goes: Silicon Valley. In our season finale, we reckon with a weird foreshortening of history, the fussiness of old punch cards, the unreality of simulation, and the difficulty of recording audio with the top down on the 101. Hop in.

Image: Two men examine the Westinghouse Time Capsule set to be buried at the 1939 World’s Fair. Getty Images.

Key Sources: 

We dramatized a story called, “The Warning from the Past,” which was published in the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1939. Go to page 34 to read it.

We used clips from this 1939 film about the Westinghouse Electric Company’s time capsule, the contents of which can be viewed here.

Read the New York Times’ 1961 coverage of Simulmatics via their Times Machine (not to be confused with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, also covered in this episode).

Witness Eugene Burdick taking aim at the Simulmatics crew in his novel, The 480, which is also available on the Internet Archive.

Play Watch Dogs 2. Or watch The Streets of San Francisco...or recall the glories of Midtown Madness...or, maybe, listen to old episodes of The Last Archive while we cook up some new ones for you?

Learn more about Jill’s new book about the Simulmatics Corporation, IF THEN.

Episode 9: For The Birds

What can the evidence of birds tell us about climate change?

In the spring of 1958, when the winter snow melted and the warm sun returned, the birds did not. Birdwatchers, ordinary people, everyone wondered where the birds had gone. Rachel Carson, a journalist and early environmentalist, figured it out — they’d been poisoned by DDT, a pesticide that towns all over the country had been spraying. Rachel Carson wrote a book about it, Silent Spring. It succeeded in stopping DDT, and it launched the modern environmental movement. But now, more than 60 years later, birds are dying off en masse again. Our question is simple: What are the birds trying to tell us this time, and why can’t we hear their message any more?

Image: Rachel Carson, out in the nature she helped preserve. (Getty Images)

Key Sources: 

For this episode, we used many letters, essays, and books written by Rachel Carson. Our main sources were: unpublished letters by the Rachel Carson Papers at the Beinekce Library at Yale; Rachel Carson, Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, edited by Linda Lear; Rachel Carson, Witness for Nature, by Linda Lear; Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson, by Rachel Carson, Dorothy Freedman, and Martha Freeman; Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson; and The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson.

Our re-enactment of a meeting of ornithologists came from an article in Forest and Stream from January 22, 1910, titled “To Save The Passenger Pigeon.”

We re-enacted part of an article from June 30, 1900, in the Toronto Globe and Mail titled, “Passenger Pigeons,” as well as a newspaper article from December 18, 1910 published in the Boston Globe titled, “Only One Wild Pigeon Left.”

Read Ken Rosenberg’s study on the decline of bird life in North America at SCIENCE.

Read Frances C. Moore’s study of tweets — human birdsong — and what they can tell us about how we normalize climate change.

Much of our archival audio of birdsong came from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Including:

American Birdsongs – copyright Cornell Lab of Ornithology

ML62621 American Redstart William W. H. Gunn

ML6562 Belted Kingfisher Martin Michener

ML7917 Eastern Phoebe Robert C. Stein

Episode 8: She Said, She Said

In 1969, radical feminists known as the Redstockings…

gathered in a church in Lower Manhattan, and spoke about their experiences with abortion. They called this ‘consciousness-raising’ or ‘speaking bitterness,’ and it changed the history of women’s rights, all the way down to the 1977 National Women’s Convention and, really, down to the present. This idea of ‘speaking bitterness’, which came from a Maoist practice, is foundational to both the #MeToo movement and the conservative Victim’s Rights movement. But at what cost?

Image: The 1977 National Women’s conference in Houston, Texas. (Getty Images)

Key Sources

We used these audio recordings from the Redstockings Rap, 1969.

You can watch Florynce Kennedy’s public access television show, The Flo Kennedy Show, online. We learned more about Kennedy from the Florynce Kennedy Papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

We used multiple recordings from the National Women’s Conference to recreate the scene in the convention hall, along with this special edition of the NBC nightly news, and this clip from PBS about the National Women’s Conference, and these clips from the Pro-Family Rally in Houston, TX, 1977. 

We excerpt President Ronald Reagan’s campaign advertisement, “Morning in America.”

We included clips from the anti-abortion film Silent Scream.

You can listen online to President Reagan’s remarks after signing Executive Order 12360 and establishing a Task Force on Victims of Crime. 

Here are recordings of victim impact statements read during Larry Nassar’s sentencing hearing. 

You can watch Christine Blasey Ford testifying in front of the Senate during Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, and watch his opening statement here.

Episode 7: The Computermen

In 1966, just as the foundations of the Internet were getting dreamed up…

the federal government considered building a National Data Center. It would be a centralized federal facility to hold computer records from each federal agency, in the same way that the Library of Congress holds books and the National Archives holds manuscripts. Proponents argued that it would help regulate and compile the vast quantities of data the government was collecting. Quickly, though, fears about privacy, government conspiracies, and government ineptitude buried the idea. But now, that National Data Center looks like a missed opportunity to create rules about data and privacy before the Internet took off. And in the absence of government action, corporations have made those rules themselves.

Image credit: UCLA and BBN

Key Sources

We used the minutes from these 1966 hearings before the House of Representatives Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, which are titled The Computer and Invasion Of Privacy. 

We also used the recordings of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony at Senate Committees on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the 2018 Judiciary hearing Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data. 

Our actors read letters to Representative Cornelius Gallagher, which can be found by visiting the Cornelius Gallagher Collection at the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center, University of Oklahoma, and searching in Box 21, Folders 15 and 16; Box 28, Folder 195; and Box 29, Folder 24.

Our Timmy the Terminal re-creation came from Scenarios for Using the ARPANET at the ICCC, courtesy of the Computer History Museum.

We used a clip from ABC’s coverage of election night, 1972. 

We also used a clip from President Nixon’s resignation address. You can listen to the full speech here. 

We used a clip from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s speech at an anti-war demonstration at the United Nations in 1967. You can watch the full speech here. 

We used this ad from Nixon’s 1972 campaign.

Episode 6: Cell Strain

In the 1950s, polio spread throughout the United States.

Heartbreakingly, it affected mainly children. Thousands died. Thousands more were paralyzed. Many ended up surviving only in iron lungs, a machine that breathed for polio victims, sometimes for years. Scientists raced to find a vaccine. After a few hard years of widespread quarantine and isolation, the scientists succeeded. The discovery of the polio vaccine was one of the brightest moments in public health history. But a vaccine required Americans to believe in a truth they couldn’t see with their own eyes. It also raised questions of access, of racial equity, and of the federal government’s role in healthcare, questions whose legacy we’re living with today.

Image: Vials of the polio vaccine are prepared to be shipped across the country and the world (Getty Images).

Key Sources

We used this cover story from Time magazine to describe Secretary Oveta Hobby. Here’s a photo of her on the cover. This article was published in Time when she resigned. 

This New York Times article from January 10, 1955, was one of the only public acknowledgments of the Black women scientists at Tuskegee whose cell lab was instrumental in developing the polio vaccine. 

Listen to then-Mayor Hubert Humphrey read the Sunday comics over the radio to entertain kids during a “Stay at Home” campaign in 1946.

Watch this educational video about polio from the March of Dimes Archives, and this one about the spread of disease, which was played in classrooms across the country.

This newsreel announces the discovery of the polio vaccine.

We used several sources to determine what Secretary Oveta Hobby said during her many appearances before Congress.

Our actors brought to life parts of an anti-vaccination pamphlet called “The Crime Against the School Child.” 

We dramatized a Cabinet meeting that took place on April 29, 1955. The full meeting minutes are available here.

We used the Congressional Record to find quotes from Senators and Congressmen about the polio vaccine. See page 37 especially.

Episode 5: Project X

The election of 1952…

brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to feature an American presidential candidate. And on election night, CBS News premiered the first computer to predict an American election — the UNIVAC. Safe to say, that part didn’t go according to plan. But election night 1952 is ground zero for our current, political post-truth moment. If a computer and a targeted advertisement can both use heaps data to predict every citizen’s every decision, can voters really know things for themselves after all?

Image: CBS Correspondent Charles Collingwood reads the predictions coming in from the UNIVAC in 1952. (Getty Images)

KEY SOURCES

Sig Mickleson, the Director of CBS news, and a central character in our episode, wrote this book, from which our actors read in the episode. 

Rosser Reeves, the Madison Avenue ad man who invented the Unique Selling Proposition, wrote this book, which we used extensively in our reenactments. His papers, which we also used, are stored at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Also, be sure to check out one of Rosser Reeves’ most enduring works: his ad for M&Ms: “Melts in your mouth – not in your hand.” 

We learned a lot about the use of computer predictions in the 1952 election from Ira Chinoy’s 2010 dissertation Battle of the Brains. And look out for the book he’s writing about the UNIVAC and election night 1952.

Michael Levin’s plan, the smoking gun of micro-targeted political advertising, is in Reeves’ papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society. 

This is the promotional video Remington Rand released for the UNIVAC in 1951.

We used the newspaper article, “Democrats See Radio-TV Blitz For Eisenhower: Assert Republicans Plan”, published on October 2 1952 in the New York Herald Tribune in our reenactments about ad strategies used by the Democrats and Republicans in the 1952 election.

Some of the original footage of CBS’ election night coverage, including its fake “UNIVAC” contraption with its blinking Christmas tree lights.

In these 20-second ad-spots, Eisenhower Answers America, one carefully segmented voting block at a time.

Here are the TV jingles for Stevenson and Eisenhower that we use in the episode.

Bonus Content:

An extended interview with CBS News Anchor, Bob Schieffer.

While reporting Episode 5: Project X, Jill spoke to Bob Schieffer, famed TV newsman of CBS, about how computers and the Internet changed the way we report on elections, and even the way they turn out. It's been sitting on the shelf here in the last archive for a little while now, but it feels eerily prescient. So, take a listen, take a deep breath, and good luck come November.

Episode 4: Unheard

In 1945, Ralph Ellison went to a barn in Vermont and began to write Invisible Man. He wrote it in the voice of a black man from the south, a voice that changed American literature. Invisible Man is a novel made up of black voices that had been excluded from the historical record until, decades earlier, he’d helped record them with the WPA’s Federal Writers Project. What is the evidence of a voice? How can we truly know history without everyone’s voices? This episode traces those questions — from the quest to record oral histories of formerly enslaved people, to Black Lives Matter and the effort to record the evidence of police brutality.

Image: Ralph Ellison outside with his typewriter. Credit: Library of Congress.

KEY SOURCES

The novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952. 

An oral history of Ralph Ellison collected by his friend Robert Penn Warren.

An oral history of Ralph Ellison collected by Studs Terkel. 

John Henry Faulk’s interview with Harriet Smith, a formerly enslaved woman. The transcript of those recordings can be read in full here, you can listen to the interview at the Library of Congress, and you can read Debbie Nathan’s story, “Hearing Harriet Smith,” here. 

Frederick Douglass’s encounter with ‘negro evidence,’ recorded in his 1845 autobiography,  Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass.

Much of this episode deals with the Federal Writers’ Project — a project conducted by the Works’ Progress Administration from 1935 to 1939. Part of the Project’s work is archived in the Library of Congress’s Slave Narratives Collection. Ellison was one of many Black authors who interviewed on behalf of the FWP.

You can read the story of Sweet The Monkey, read by one of our actors in this episode. Ralph Ellison collected the story from a man named Leo Gurley on June 14, 1938. The Library of Congress has also published an essay about Ralph Ellison and the folklore he collected, which you can read here.

A reflection on the folklore recording project in Florida. Kennedy, Stetson, et al. Opinion of recording program of folksongs in Florida. Jacksonville, Florida, 1939. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

Episode 3: The Invisible Lady

In 1804, an Invisible Lady arrived in New York City.

She went on to become the most popular attraction in the country. But why? And who was she? In this episode, we chase her through time, finding invisible women everywhere, wondering: What is the relationship between keeping women invisible and the histories of privacy, and of knowledge?

Image: Jill Lepore, The Invisible Girl, age 5

Onlookers listen to the Invisible Lady through a speaking trumpet while peering into a seemingly empty box.

KEY SOURCES

The newspaper articles about The Invisible Lady. You can see some images of here.

The newspaper articles about the death of Mrs. Bayard. You can check them out here.

Amy Gajda’s law journal article, “What If Samuel D. Warren Hadn’t Married a Senator’s Daughter?

The full text of the Supreme Court Case Olmstead vs. United States is available here.

Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis seminal article, “The Right to Privacy”, published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. 

H.G. Wells’s book, The Invisible Man, published in 1897.

The film, The Invisible Man, released in 1933. 

Episode 2: Detection of Deception

When James Frye, a young black man, is charged with murder…

under unusual circumstances in 1922, he trusts his fate to a strange new machine: The lie detector. Why did the lie detector’s inventor, William Moulton Marston, a psychology professor and lawyer, think a machine could tell if a human being is lying better than a jury? And what does it all have to do with Wonder Woman?

Image: Psychologists and lawyers conducting a lie detector test on James Frye, a murder suspect. (Getty Images)

In this comic strip from 1944, Wonder Woman, a creation of William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the lie detector, solves a case with her own truth telling device.

KEY SOURCES

The full text of Frye’s trial: United States v. Frye, No. 38325 (D.C. 1922). 

The full text of Frye’s appeal: Frye v. United States. 293 F. 1013 (D.C.. Cir 1923).

Excerpts from Frye’s applications for pardon.  You can find the full letters on file with the National Archives.

William Marston wrote a bunch of papers, including one published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1917 titled, “Systolic blood pressure symptoms of deception.” 

The newspaper article “Convict Slayer of Dr. Brown,” Chicago Defender, July 29, 1922.

A newsreel from 1931 in which William Marston uses a polygraph machine to study the difference between blondes, brunettes, and redheads. 

An ad for Gillette from 1938 in which Dr. William Marston conducts a lie detector study proving (so he says) that shavers prefer Gillette blades. 

The record of James Frye’s police interrogation. Equity Case No. 40432; “Equity Case Files, 1863–1938,” A1 Entry 69; Record Group 21, Records of District Courts of the United States; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

Episode 1: The Clue of the Blue Bottle

On a spring day in 1919…

a woman’s body was found bound, gagged, and strangled in a garden in Barre, Vermont. Who was she? Who killed her? In this episode, we try to solve a cold case — reopening a century-old murder investigation — as a way to uncover the history of evidence itself. What is a clue? What is a fact? What is a mystery? We put the pieces of the puzzle together: photographs, newspaper articles, a private eye’s notebook, the trial record and, last but not least, a trip to the scene of the crime.

Image: Tire tracks left at the scene of the murder

KEY SOURCES

The Barre Daily Times. You can search old issues here, at the Library of Congress. Or read the first story to report the discovery of the body here. 

James R. Wood’s detective notebooks, in the Wood Detective Agency Records at the Harvard Law School Library. You can read his notes on this case here. 

The crime scene photographs, in the Wood Detective Agency Records. You can search through those here. The very disturbing photograph discussed at the opening of the episode is here. 

State v. Long, 1919. The trial record is held in the Vermont State Archives in Montpelier, and isn’t digitized. But we have posted a little excerpt here. 

The Papers of Maud Wood Park, in the Women’s Rights Collection at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe.

An oral history with a doctor from Barre who lived there in 1918 and 1919 during the Spanish flu pandemic, in the archives of the Vermont Historical Society.