Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This is 50 Weeks that shaped America, Week 19, and this week we are pairing two stories that we knew we wanted to get to in this series, 50 Weeks to Shaped America,

and they each bracket 10, incredibly tense days in the spring of 1970.

So as always, we're going to do this in two parts, but they're going to be a little more

distinct than some of our previous conversations.

Episode one, we are going to look at the shooting at Kent State University in Ohio.

Anti-war protesters gunned down by the National Guard,

an indelible photo of a 14-year-old girl

grieving over the body of a slain student.

And then in episode two, we'll track the mounting tension

around the country after Kent State

and how it culminates in many ways in New York City,

in mid-May, with what

came to be known as the Hard Hat riots. Here, anti-war protesters were confronted by

construction workers. There were huge crowds, violence, and chaos right there in lower Manhattan,

and all the tensions of that era and that moment were playing out in public. The growing disillusionment

with the Vietnam War, but also the emerging conservative backlash against the hippies.

And it is hard to say as we look back and as we'll discuss which force most shaped that era

and most shaped American history. Of course, it's both. It's always the dynamic between backlash

and backlash to the backlash and backlash to the

backlash and backlash to the backlash, same as it ever was. So this week, Kent State, the Vietnam War,

Nixon's late night visit to the Lincoln Memorial, hippies versus hard hats on the streets of New York

...