Believe It

The Last Archive

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 true and false on the air.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A series of strange and violent deaths rocked Osage County, Oklahoma a century ago.
0:14.9	Sisters Rita, Mini, Anna and their mother Lizzie all left behind lucrative rights to the
0:19.9	oil beneath Osage land while lawman Tom White was horrified by the chilling plot he uncovered.
0:26.2	Join me, Tim Harford, host of the Cauched Metales Podcast, for my new two-part on the Osage
0:31.7	Killings, the story behind the book and film Killers of the Flower Moon.
0:36.0	Both episodes are available now wherever you get your podcasts.
0:43.2	There's a place in our world where the known things go.
0:47.2	A quarter of the mind, lined with shelves, cluttered with proof.
0:54.2	Inside that place, behind another darker door, is our morgue.
1:01.2	Not that kind of morgue. Our morgue is a collection of evidence.
1:08.2	Detectives used to have morgues where they'd keep files on old cases.
1:14.2	Newspapers kept morgues too, where they mainly stored old research notes.
1:19.2	The last archive's morgue is where we put stuff we've killed.
1:23.2	Stories we liked a lot, but couldn't use because the facts didn't check.
1:28.2	There were lies, fakes, hoaxes.
1:32.2	We couldn't use this stuff in season one, which is about truth.
1:36.2	But in this season, season two, all bets are off.
1:41.2	Because this season is about doubt.
1:44.2	Welcome to the last archive. Welcome to our Vault of Fakes.
1:49.2	I'm Jill LaPore.
1:51.2	We've got a nifty old radio in here.
1:54.2	Listen.
	...

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