The Lost Archive
Jill Lepore goes back to her first archive — the public library in the town where she grew up. In this season finale, old books, hot dogs, and a town…
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The Last Archive is a show about the history of truth, and the historical context for our current fake news, post-truth moment. It’s a show about how we know what we know, and why it seems, these days, as if we don’t know anything at all anymore. The show is driven by host Jill Lepore’s work as a historian uncovering the secrets of the past the way a detective might.
The Last Archive is a history show. Our evidence is the evidence of history, the evidence of archives. Learn more about how we turned historical record into a podcast.
People have asked about teaching The Last Archive, especially during the COVID-19 crisis. We are here to help! There’s lots in the show that can be used in college or high school classes, and even some middle school classes. Learn more about how to teach The Last Archive.
Jill Lepore goes back to her first archive — the public library in the town where she grew up. In this season finale, old books, hot dogs, and a town…
Jill Lepore goes back to her first archive — the public library in the town where she grew up. In this season finale, old books, hot dogs, and a town…
The story of weather forecasting is the story of how humans came to think they could predict the future. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at the history of meteorology,…
In 1920, a young writer named Hugh Lofting published the first Dr. Dolittle story. A century years later, Jill Lepore goes in search of the new Dr. Dolittles changing the…
During the 1970s farm crisis, a young family nearly lost everything as family farms and agricultural folk knowledge began to vanish. Then, they invented a board game. For a transcript…
This episode, the celebration of an anniversary — sort of. The anniversary of a dream. An alternate history: imagining what the world might be like if, fifty years ago, in…
The fact-checking experiment gets scaled up with 40 students in two states. The Super Bowl of fact-checking, and a final test of an idea that might help save American democracy.…
What if there were a way to stop politicians from lying on social media? Jill Lepore heads to a local high school to test out a crazy idea: Should juries…
What if one book could contain the sum of human knowledge? Jill Lepore looks at the history of an improbable Enlightenment idea, tracing it from Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia and…
Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore returns with the third season of her Pushkin Industries podcast The Last Archive. Across two seasons, Lepore has unspooled a history…
This season has chronicled a long, dark century of lies, fakes, frauds, and hoaxes. In the season 2 finale, Jill Lepore draws that history all the way down to the…
In the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh transformed talk radio. In the process, he radicalized his listeners and the conservative movement. Limbaugh’s talk radio style became a staple of the modern right.…
In the 1970s, a Soviet journalist named Valentin Zorin made a series of documentary films about the United States. At a time when few Russian journalists came to the U.S.,…
A fake moon landing. Astronauts carrying space pathogens back to earth. Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain. HIV manufactured in a government laboratory. COVID-19 vaccines killing millions. In this episode, Jill Lepore…
This photograph is courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, specifically the NASA History Office and the NASA JSC Media Services Center.In 1961, President Kennedy announced that the United…
One night in 1952, a Coloradan businessman hypnotized a local housewife. Under his spell, she began to recount her past life as a 19th-century Irish woman. He caught it on…
During World War II, Nazi radio broadcast the voice of an American woman who came to be known as Axis Sally. She spoke, via shortwave radio, to American women, attempting…
NEW YORK - AUGUST 2: CBS Radios "Believe It Or Not" host Robert Ripley at his home in New York. He is seen with part of his collection of oddities.…
In 1925, John Scopes, a high school teacher from Dayton, Tennessee, was put on trial for teaching evolution. It came to be called the "monkey trial," a landmark in the…
Coming Soon: the second season of The Last Archive, a podcast about the history of truth and the shadow of doubt written and hosted by New Yorker writer and celebrated…
We’re back with a special, election-themed episode of The Last Archive! While reporting Episode 5: Project X, Jill spoke to Bob Schieffer, famed TV newsman of CBS, about how computers…
For ten episodes, we’ve been asking a big question: Who killed truth? The answer has to do with a change in the elemental unit of knowledge: the fall of the…
In the spring of 1958, when the winter snow melted and the warm sun returned, the birds did not. Birdwatchers, ordinary people, everyone wondered where the birds had gone. Rachel…
In 1969, radical feminists known as the Redstockings gathered in a church in Greenwich Village, and spoke about their experiences with abortion. They called this ‘consciousness-raising’ or ‘speaking bitterness,’ and…
In 1966, just as the foundations of the Internet were being imagined, the federal government considered building a National Data Center. It would be a centralized federal facility to hold…
In the 1950s, polio spread throughout the United States. Heartbreakingly, it affected mainly children. Thousands died. Thousands more were paralyzed. Many ended up surviving only in iron lungs, a machine…
The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to feature an American presidential candidate. And…
In 1945, Ralph Ellison went to a barn in Vermont and began to write Invisible Man. He wrote it in the voice of a black man from the south, a…
In 1804, an Invisible Lady arrived in New York City.She went on to become the most popular attraction in the country. But why? And who was she? In this episode,…
When James Frye, a young black man, is charged with murder under unusual circumstances in 1922, he trusts his fate to a strange new machine: the lie detector. Why did…
On a spring day in 1919, a woman’s body was found bound, gagged, and strangled in a garden in Barre, Vermont. Who was she? Who killed her? In this episode,…
The Last Archive: a new podcast about the history of evidence written and hosted by New Yorker writer, author, and celebrated historian Jill Lepore.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she writes about politics,…