Episode 9: Epiphany

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 lie that the 2020 election was stolen. This week: the winding path from the little-known Iron Mountain hoax of the late-1960s to the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021.

Image: By Tyler Merbler from USA. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Key accessible sources

• Learn more about the real Iron Mountain Inc., the company, from its FAQ page.

• Read the hoax Report from Iron Mountain.

• We used this 1971 news clip covering the Pentagon Papers scandal.

• Hear more about the The Report from Iron Mountain from Victor Navasky.

• We used excerpts of this 1993 conspiracy theorist’s retelling of The Report from Iron Mountain.

• We used clips of former President Trump speaking about election unfairness including this and this.

• Listen here for William F. Buckley’s critique of academia.

• Senator Barry Goldwater footage courtesy of CBS News Archive.

• Footage from the January 6 attack on the Capitol, from the riot to the pre-riot rally, can be found here.

• This footage takes you inside the January 6 riot.

• We also used this footage of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial.

Episode 8: Hush Rush

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. Then, the left joined the fray. This week: partisan loudmouth versus partisan loudmouth, and the shifting media landscape that helped create modern political warfare.

Image Author: Eddie~S

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Key accessible sources

• This episode features many clips of Rush Limbaugh speaking. You can watch a broadcast of his show here and here; an interview with him on Donahue here, and a speech he gave to CPAC here.

• Read Brian Rosenwald’s excellent Talk Radio’s America.

• Read about the decline of newspapers here.

• Listen to an oral history with FCC Commissioner Clifford Durr.

• Watch Al Franken discuss his book about Rush Limbaugh.

• We used clips from Al Franken’s Air America show here.

• We used audio of Conservative talk radio host Leeann Tweeden discussing allegations against Al Franken.

• Listen to Jane Mayer discuss her reinvestigation of Tweeden’s accusations.

Episode 7: Children of Zorin

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., Zorin traveled all across the country, and gained access few American journalists had. The Cold War was a battle of ideas, and Zorin saw himself on the frontlines. He was on a quest to unmask the United States by spreading doubt, conspiracy theories, and a strange cocktail of truth and misinformation. 

Photo: SPUTNIK / Alamy Stock Photo

Key Sources:

• Watch and listen to a subtitled excerpt of one of Zorin’s films called America Autumn 1971.

• Read about the history of Soviet television in Ellen Mickiewicz’s Split Signals.

• Learn more about the history of Cold War journalists like Zorin in historian Dina Fainberg’s new book Cold War Correspondents.

• Listen to a 1970 radio interview of oil tycoon and conservative American propagandist, H.L. Hunt.

• You can watch many of Zorin’s films (including The Puzzle of Dallas and Boston Contrasts) online (in Russian, no subtitles).

• Watch the opening of the 1967 Cold War thriller Billion Dollar Brain.

• Listen to Senator Susan Collins querying Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at the Senate Intelligence Hearing on the Russian Influence in the 2016 Presidential Elections.

• Watch and listen to President Reagan's Interview With Soviet Television on May 20, 1988.

• Listen to reporter Charles Maynes’s interview with Russian journalist Lyudmila Savchuk.

• Watch a news report about Valentin Zorin’s visit to Disneyland (at 6:48 in the linked video).

• For more stories about Cold War cultural diplomacy, check out our editor Julia Barton’s podcast Spacebridge, co-hosted with Charles Maynes.

Episode 6: It Came From Outer Space

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 follows a trail of disease stories and conspiracies from Apollo 11 to COVID-19. In part two of our series about the moon landing: Apollo’s splashdown, and the tidal wave of doubt it set off.

Photo: National Museum of the U.S. Navy

Key Sources

• You can listen to NASA’s Mission Control communicating with Apollo 11 here.

• Listen to “In the Year 2525” by Zager and Evans.

• Read the NASA Apollo 11 re-entry flight journal here.

• Watch President Richard Nixon greeting the quarantined Apollo 11 crew.

• Watch a 1976 PSA warning about the swine flu, and read the government-commissioned account of the vaccination saga.

• Watch this 60 Minutes episode about the swine flu.

• Read a timeline of HIV/AIDS here.

• Here’s a 1987 CBS broadcast airing the falsehood that AIDS was created in a U.S. laboratory.

• Watch more of the Reagan administration’s response to the AIDS epidemic here.

• Read historian of science Joanna Radin’s writing about Michael Crichton.

• Mae Brussell tapes courtesy of www.maebrussell.com.

Episode 5: Remote Control

In 1961, President Kennedy announced …

that the United States would go to the moon. Eight years later, the Apollo 11 astronauts set foot upon its surface. Millions of Americans watched live on their televisions as it happened, but somehow the pinnacle of man’s achievement became a wellspring of conspiracy theories. In this first episode of a two-part series on the moon landing, Jill Lepore traces the explosion of conspiratorial thinking that began with Apollo 11’s lift off — a path winding from awe of science, to the unshakeable faith that everything is a conspiracy. The more extraordinary scientific research and technology got, the more difficult it became to keep sight of the line between fact and fiction, and between the believable and the unbelievable. 

Photo: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Key Sources

• Listen to audio clips and transcripts of Day 1 of the Apollo 11 Flight mission by reading this journal entry.

• Read Kevin Young’s book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.

• Read Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire On The Moon.

• Watch the trippy 1968 BBC broadcast, The News-Benders.

• Watch Rod Serling’s In Search of Ancient Astronauts.

• Read the original Apollo 11 conspiracy, “We Never Went to the Moon” by Bill Kaysing and Randy Reed.

• Mae Brussell’s tapes are courtesy of www.maebrussell.com.

Episode 4: Repeat After Me

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 tape. The story of her reincarnation tore out of their Colorado town and across the world. It spawned major motion pictures, an international bestselling book, and a national hypnosis craze. But beneath all the uproar lay a set of questions that revealed a deep worry about the nature of self in the 1950s, the decade’s mishmash of psychology and spiritualism, and an anxiety about gender. This episode of The Last Archive: Who are you, really?

Image: Denver Library

Key Accessible Sources

Read Morey Bernstein’s The Search for Bridey Murphy, Robert Bernstein’s memoir The Sheik and the Shadow, and Hazel Higgins’ memoir My Brother Eddie.

For more on Bridey Murphy story, read Alison Winter’s “The Three Lives of Bridey Murphy” chapter in Memory, or this article.

For more on mesmerism, Freud & hypnosis check out Maria Tatar’s Spellbound or this article in the Public Domain Review.

Read about the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory in Stacy Horn’s Unbelievable, and about the Exorcist letter here.

Learn more about the history of behaviorism in John Mills’ Control.

Pages 87-95 of this 1940 issue of LIFE Magazine detail Dr. Rhine’s E.S.P. methods. Read their coverage of the Bridey Murphy craze in the March 19, 1956 article “Bridey Murphy Puts Nation In A Hypno-Tizzy.”

Listen to "Do You Believe in Reincarnation," words and music Lalo Guerrero Barrio Libre Music BMI, as heard in the episode. Also, check out “The Love Of Bridey Murphy” by Billy Devroe’s Devilaries.

Watch the 1966 episode of To Tell the Truth featuring Virginia Tighe.

Audio of The Search for Bridey Murphy can be found here, with full tapes of the sessions at the Pueblo Historical Society.

Watch the film version of Bernstein’s book and the trailer of The She-Creature.

Episode 3: The Inner Front

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 to turn them against their country and the American war effort. She was waging a battle on what came to be called the Inner Front, the war of public opinion. Propaganda by radio was new then; so was psychological warfare. Writers, poets, psychologists, propagandists, and broadcasters all took to the airwaves in the 1930s and 1940s in a pitched battle of words and sound. After the war, two American women who had broadcast for Axis powers, Germany and Japan, were prosecuted for treason. How did the courts measure the power of words, over radio, to change minds?

Image: National Archives at College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Key Sources

Listen to Archibald MacLeish read his poems, “Words in Time,” “The Silent Slain,” and “Geography of This Time“

Read Arthur Ponsonby’s book, Falsehood in Wartime, on the rise of propaganda.

Read The Strategy of Terror on the risks of Axis propaganda.

Listen to a German propaganda broadcast by "Paul Revere."

Scan the Department of Justice Documentation of Mildred Elizabeth Gillars’ Treason April 25, 1948.

Watch the CBS News report on Iva Toguri.

Watch Iva Toguri’s recreations of Japanese wartime broadcasts.

Episode 2: Believe It

Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! was…

one of the most popular radio shows of the 1930s, and for good reason: early radio, not unlike the Internet of nearly a century later, was obsessed with doubt about belief. On this episode of The Last Archive, Jill Lepore spins the dial and takes a tour of 1930s radio — from Robert Ripley to Charlie Chan, from Mexican broadcaster Pedro González to the shows of Orson Welles: the full spectrum of fakery on the air.

Image: CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images

KEY SOURCES

Ripley’s Believe it or Not! radio program, this one from 1944.

Footage of Bob Ripley.

An episode of America's Town Meeting of the Air debating “Will The Machine Dominate Man?”

Listen to vintage Charlie Chan episodes here and here.

Watch interviews with Pedro González in Ballad of an Unsung Hero.

Learn more about Pedro González’s music with Los Madrugadores.

Listen to Orson Welles’ infamous “War of the Worlds” adaptation here.

In this clip, Welles speaks to reporters about hysteria caused by his broadcast.

Listen to Ed Murrow reporting from WWII air raids in London here.

Episode 1: Monkey Business

In 1925, John Scopes, a high school teacher

from Dayton, Tennessee was put on trial for teaching evolution in what came to be called the monkey trial, a landmark in the history of doubt. All over the country, Americans tuned in on their radios as science and faith battled in the courtroom. But the nation also witnessed something else: the beginnings of a culture war that’s been waged ever since. This season on The Last Archive, a skeptical chronicle of an early battle in that war.

Image: Hulton Deutsch / Corbis Historical via Getty Images

KEY SOURCES

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward Larson.

Journalist H.L. Mencken's Account of the Scopes Trial in the Baltimore Sun (here & here).

Footage of the Scopes Trial.

The Menace of Darwinism by William Jennings Bryan.

The Clarence Darrow Collection is hosted by the University of Minnesota, and includes trial documents and transcripts.

Watch Inherit the Wind, the 1960 film about the trial.

American Inquisitors: a Commentary on Dayton and Chicago by Walter Lippmann.