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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
My So-Called Lungs (Revisited)
Laura Rothenberg tried to live a normal life, with lungs that betrayed her and the awareness that she might not live to see her 30th birthday.
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Going Home: Cristel’s Diary
At 15, Cristel attacked a classmate with a razor blade. After 3 years of incarceration, she’s being released.
ListenPortraits Extraordinary stories from ordinary places
Quarantined in the Pizzeria
COVID-19 has forced many families to improvise childcare. For some, it’s been like a four month long ‘bring your child to work’ day.
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Walter Backerman, Seltzer Man
Once there were thousands of seltzer men in New York City. Today, Walter Backerman is one of the last.
ListenHistories Exploring the past to tell the History of Now.
Prisoners Of War
During the war in Vietnam, there was a notorious American prison on the outskirts of Saigon…a prison for American soldiers.
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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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