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Radio Diaries

Radio Diaries

Written by: Radio Diaries & Radiotopia
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About this listen

First-person diaries, sound portraits, and hidden chapters of history from Peabody Award-winning producer Joe Richman and the Radio Diaries team. From teenagers to octogenarians, prisoners to prison guards, bra saleswomen to lighthouse keepers. The extraordinary stories of ordinary life. Radio Diaries is a proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm

Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved.
Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair
    May 7 2026

    This episode includes topics and archival audio that some people will find disturbing.

    Seventy-five years ago, on the night of May 7th, 1951, close to a thousand people gathered around the courthouse in the small town of Laurel, Mississippi. They came to witness an execution. Willie McGee was a young Black man who had been accused of raping a white woman and sentenced to death.

    Six decades later, Bridgette McGee-Robinson teamed up with Radio Diaries to find the truth about what happened to her grandfather.

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    28 mins
  • Sealab: A Home on the Ocean Floor
    Apr 23 2026

    From ancient myths of sea monsters lurking below to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the ocean has long been both a source of fear and fascination. For Captain George Bond, a Navy medical officer in the 1960s, the deep sea was humanity's next frontier. Undersea agriculture, deep sea mining, and human colonies on the ocean floor made up his dream for the future.

    Today we bring you the story of the U.S. Navy's little-known experiment building homes on the ocean floor. They called it, Sealab.

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    20 mins
  • Guest Spotlight: William Parker's War on Slave Catchers
    Apr 2 2026

    This week we're bringing you a story from our friends at History This Week, a podcast from the History Channel.

    April 3, 1951. A man who escaped slavery is grabbed off the streets of Boston and thrown into a carriage. He fights back, shouting to the crowd, but it doesn’t matter. Under a new federal law, even the North isn’t safe.

    The Fugitive Slave Act has turned cities like Boston into hunting grounds. Freedom seekers are being captured, and ordinary citizens are being forced to help.

    But across the North, resistance is growing. In Pennsylvania, a man named William Parker is building a network to fight back. When slave catchers come to his door, that resistance explodes into violence.

    How did one law push the country dramatically closer to war? And what happens when the people targeted by this law refuse to surrender?

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    39 mins
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