Hello and welcome to This Day, a history podcast from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

And this day, it is June 19th, also known as Juneteenth. It is a federal holiday here in the United

States commemorating the end of slavery. Though as we'll lay out

in this episode we're going to run for you, it is a bit of a twisty, turny story as to why

June 19th specifically marks that day. But look, on this show, we love obviously telling

stories from history. We also are really interested in looking at how stories become history, how history

gets written and contested and codified in real time. And sometimes that results in a change in

curriculum or a new historical work or book or film. Sometimes that results in books being banned or

unband. And sometimes that results in a new federal holiday,

declaring something a holiday is an act of history. So Juneteenth is a really fascinating and

really recent case study. It's just a few years old, and it's kind of all still playing out

before our eyes. So maybe this episode that we're going to run from our

archives will help you brush up on the origins of the holiday, but also get your antenna up a little

bit for seeing how the story of Juneteenth is playing out before us. And there is a larger context

here. As we've mentioned on the show, there is a lot of history being written and rewritten

before our eyes right now.

We're hurtling towards this big America 250 celebration, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

We're actually going to talk a lot more about that in a couple episodes.

Our thoughts on how the history of America 250 is already being contested and how we plan to be

part of that conversation. So keep your ears out for that. But yeah, I would argue that Juneteenth

becoming a federal holiday is a part of this larger era we're living in right now, where this

country is starting to rewrite some of the stories that it tells about itself. But anyway,

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