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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
Thembi’s AIDS Diary
Thembi Ngubane was willing to stand up and speak out at a time when few South Africans were willing to say, “I have AIDS.”
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Sofia’s Choice: A Ukrainian Diary
Sofia’s mother Vita was living in Kharkiv, Ukraine when Russian forces invaded. The family is now faced with an difficult choice.
ListenPortraits Extraordinary stories from ordinary places
Walter Backerman, Seltzer Man
Once there were thousands of seltzer men in New York City. Today, Walter Backerman is one of the last.
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The Final Frontline
Fourth generation funeral directors reflect on their experience of the coronavirus pandemic and prepare for a second wave.
ListenHistories Exploring the past to tell the History of Now.
The Pygmy in the Zoo
On September 8th, 1906, New York’s Bronx Zoo unveiled a new exhibit that would attract thousands of visitors. Inside a cage, in the monkey house, was a man.
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Busman’s Holiday
The story of William Cimillo, a New York City bus driver who snapped one day in 1947, left his regular route in the Bronx, and drove his municipal bus down to Florida.
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