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Featured story: Meet Miss Subways
Beauty pageants promote the fantasy of the ideal woman. But for 35 years, the Miss Subways contest in New York City celebrated the everyday working girl.
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Featured story: The Gospel Ranger
Outside the Appalachian mountains, his name was barely known. But Claude Ely influenced some of the pioneers of rock & roll.
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Featured story: Mandela’s Election: 30 Years Later
Mandela was a lawyer, freedom fighter, leader of the African National Congress, and finally, president.
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Diaries We give people tape recorders and help them document their own lives in their own words
Matthew and the Judge: Juvenile Court Diary
Through their diaries, Matthew and Judge Jeremiah tell the same story from two different sides of the bench.
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Melissa: 16 Years Later
As an 18 year old raised in the foster care system, Melissa took NPR listeners along when she gave birth to her son Issaiah. Sixteen years later she chronicles her life as a working single mother.
ListenPortraits Extraordinary stories from ordinary places
Selma Koch, Bra Saleswoman
94-year old Selma Koch runs the Town Shop, one of New York’s last old-style bra fitting shops.
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The Last Man on the Mountain
In the 1990s, Arch Coal began mining Pigeonroost Hollow. Now Jimmy Weekley is the last person left there.
ListenHistories Exploring the past to tell the History of Now.
The Almost Astronaut
In an attempt to beat the Soviet Union in the space race, the Kennedy administration enlisted Air Force captain Ed Dwight to enter the astronaut training program as its first Black trainee.
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Working, Then and Now
We present a special, one hour episode of our series The Working Tapes of Studs Terkel.
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