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Wondry app. As a member of NoisorPlus at noisor.com or in Apple Podcasts, or you can get all of

History Daily plus other fantastic history podcasts at IntoHistory.com. There's this thing I call the magic trick of history. I get asked all the time,

do you choose your topics to reflect on current events? Even for History Daily, which has a

pretty obvious This Day in History theme, listeners sometimes wonder if we have chosen a specific topic, a specific story,

as commentary on today's news.

Well, the answer is no, even if sometimes it seems as if it were all planned, all perfectly timed.

That's the magic trick of history.

Almost any story I tell you about the past will resonate in the present.

That's the whole point of studying history. What happened years, decades, centuries ago is really

pretty meaningless unless it tells us something about ourselves today. Today's Saturday

matinee is no different. We did plan to share this episode as part of a celebration of Pride Month, but we certainly

did not plan to share this episode the same week. Two horribly politically motivated assassinations

took place here in the United States. Our hearts are with the grieving families of Minnesota

State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband. But another tragic political assassination,

almost 47 years ago, occurred when George Mascone, mayor of San Francisco and Harvey Milk,

a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, were both shot and killed inside

San Francisco City Hall by former supervisor Dan White.

Today we're sharing the first episode of our series on these murders from the podcast American Criminal.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California.

He was audacious, outspoken, infuriating, and inspiring, and he paid the price.

I hope you enjoy.

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