Retropod

In 1956, New York City’s bomb squad used criminal profiling to catch a terrorist known as “The Mad Bomber.”

An 8-year-old found an ancient sword in a Swedish lake. Does that make her the queen?

She was short. He was tall. Her family wasn't well off. His was. She was a worrier. He had not a care in the world. If you looked up mismatch in the dictionary, Ruth Bader and Martin D. Ginsburg fit the definition perfectly.

Civil rights crusader Fannie Lou Hamer rivaled Martin Luther King Jr. in her command of audiences.

Before becoming a legendary big hitter, Babe Ruth was one of baseball’s best from the mound.

Caroll Spinney and his iconic character were inseparable for almost 50 years.

Family and friends had known about the president’s intimate relationship with Mary Peck for years, but whispers about their involvement were growing.

As Jacqueline Kennedy transitioned from wife-in-chief to widow-in-mourning, there was tension between whom she had been and whom she was allowed to become.

Emmett Till’s mother opened his casket and sparked the civil rights movement.

Photographer Boris Yaro shot the photo of Bobby Kennedy lying fatally wounded in the arms of Juan Romero, a busboy. The photo would haunt both of them.

If you think your family is overrun with controlling lunatics, please meet the Romanovs.

More than 50,000 soldiers died during the Battle of Waterloo, but their teeth lived on.

In the fall of 1902, a year into his presidency, President Teddy Roosevelt set off to Mississippi for a bear-hunting vacation. It ended differently than planned.

It was rare to be a woman or African American covering the White House in the 1940s. Alice Dunnigan was both.

In the fall of 1957, as the world was moving on from World War II and the extermination of 6 million Jews, Sylvia Hermann knocked on the door of a modest home in Buenos Aires.

The debate was always about more than swimsuits.

Freddie Oversteegen was 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, though with her long, dark hair in braids she looked at least two years younger.

The 25th Amendment passed after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Despite warnings of icebergs, the John Rutledge set sail from Liverpool, England, to New York.

Nine months before the Iran hostage crisis, Kenneth Kraus was held hostage in Iran for eight days.

Ida Lewis saved as many as 25 people during her service at the lighthouse. But her deeds have largely been forgotten.

In 1890, Henry Brown sailed through the confirmation process after being accused of shooting and killing someone in self defense.

William Liebenow rescued John F. Kennedy from an island filled with coconuts.

An American in the 1940s would not recognize the woman from the “We Can Do It!” poster as Rosie the Riveter.

When Gerald Ford took over the presidency after Richard Nixon’s resignation, he soon made a controversial choice: He pardoned Nixon.

No women served on the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991. The ugly Anita Hill hearings changed that.

The Alien and Sedition Acts passed under President John Adams led to the arrests of more than two dozen people.

Lewis Hine posed as a Bible salesman or machinery photographer to expose the hardships of child labor.

All of George Washington’s Supreme Court nominees were confirmed in only two days, but half of them didn't show up on time.

Their 38-year marriage endured his incarceration and hers.

In 1925, 30,000 Klansmen descended on Washington, D.C. The city cheered their arrival.

Before an unnamed senior official in the Trump administration published the opinion piece, “I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration" in the New York Times, another mysterious anonymous author lit up Washington.

In 1935, the Florida Keys ignored the threat of a looming hurricane. When the Category 5 storm made landfall, it left a wake of death and destruction.

It may be hard to believe, but one single event rocketed Einstein to fame.

Heather Penney was among the first female combat pilots in the country. On Sept. 11, 2001, she got a mission: Bring down the fourth hijacked plane hurtling towards Washington.

President Abraham Lincoln had two loving and supportive mothers in his lifetime. The second helped him cope with the tragic loss of the first.

This episode is co-hosted by Madeline Daly, who won Retropod trivia last Saturday at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Dallas prosecutor Henry Wade never intended to become a central figure in Supreme Court history.

In 1927, the world watched as two French aviators attempted the world’s first transatlantic flight.

The first mass police shooting on a U.S. college campus happened two years before the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University.

In 1931, President Herbert Hoover started a program that would result in the illegal deportation of 1.8 million people to Mexico by the end of the 1930s. Of those people, 60 percent were U.S. citizens.

Benjamin Lay wrote one of the first treatises against slavery in Colonial America, a time when many prosperous Pennsylvania Quakers were slave owners. But for speaking out, the Quakers disowned him.

Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist, an anti-lynching activist, a suffragette and a teacher.

Muhammad Ali was so close to going to jail for evading the draft. He has a Supreme Court clerk to thank for his freedom.

Thomas Blood had somewhat of a shady past. According to Ireland’s History magazine, he had a reputation for espionage and conducting terrorist campaigns — though many of his plans were foiled just in time.

At the Naval Academy, McCain was in a group called the “Bad Bunch” as he rebelled against his father’s expectations.

According to James Madison’s Virginia mansion Montpelier, Paul Jennings’ account reveals, “how the racial and gender hierarchies of the time complicate the way we understand roles in historic events.”

Millions of British children were evacuated from London and other cities to escape the horrors of war. But the family separations seemed to impart long-term trauma that was in many cases as severe as if they had stayed behind and faced the bombs.

When President Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” it was not seen as a historic moment. It took the actual fall of the wall to resurrect the speech and drill the quote into our consciousness.

The greatest emoluments-clause dilemma of the 1800s involved two lions.