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Welcome to the Detroit History Podcast. We’ll mine this city’s history, telling the story through this town’s cultural, social, political, musical and automotive heritage. Our chosen tool is the podcast.

During the second season we’ll be dealing with topics as varied as Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism; Detroit’s 1943 riot, which killed 34 people; the National Football League Champion Detroit Lions of 1957; and a history of one of this country’s last great newspaper saloons, the Anchor Bar. 

For Android users, listen on Spotify or our website: detroithistorypodcast.com

Dec 12, 2022

Ketamine has found wide uses since the 1960s: As a painkiller, an anesthetic, a street drug consumed at raves, and -- now -- considered by many to be an exciting new treatment for depression. We explore how ketamine was developed here in Detroit, at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company, with help from a Wayne...


Dec 5, 2022

Broadcaster Fran Harris's life was a lifetime of firsts. She was the first woman newscaster in Detroit radio during World War II, persuading her bosses at WWJ to abandon its "guys only" tradition. And when television came along in Detroit on Channel 4 in 1946, she was on the air for that, too. When she retired from the...


Nov 28, 2022

A longstanding community called Mexicantown on Detroit's southwest side has persevered for around a century. The area of restaurants, shops, and bakeries anchors a key ethnic community in Detroit. For many, the journey here was prompted by a search for jobs. We explore the rise of the community, and the decline...


Nov 14, 2022

Thousands of phonograph records were destroyed, as were thousands of needles used on the old-style record players. Teenage sleuths were conducting their own investigations in the great conspiracy theory of the fall of 1969: Beatle Paul McCartney had died, but that his death was covered up. However, as the theory went,...


Nov 7, 2022

Sometime in the mid-1940s, an Italian immigrant bar owner by the name of Gus Guerra started making pizzas in his joint to bring in a few extra dollars. Decades later, Gus’s creation is big business, and world-renowned. Detroit Style Pizza is being served up in uber hip places in Brooklyn. The big chains are in on it....