The History of the Harlem Globetrotters
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2021
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Harlem Globetrotters are one of those great parts of American culture that almost everyone knows and loves. For most of us today, the Globetrotters are outstanding entertainers. But did you know that in the mid-20th century the Globetrotters were probably the single best basketball team on the planet? Did you know that they did travel the globe as agents of the US Department of State during the Cold War, but that they are not, in fact, from Harlem? If you want to know how all of this happened (and how the Globetrotters saved the NBA), you're going to love this interview with historian Ben Green on the History of the Harlem Globetrotters.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is in the loop, the Legion of Osiris Podcasts. |
| 0:03.9 | Osiris is creating a community that connects people like you |
| 0:06.8 | with live experiences and podcasts about artists and topics you love. |
| 0:11.6 | Get in the loop at Osirispod.com. |
| 0:24.1 | I'm Ben Sawyer, and this is the road to now. |
| 0:26.4 | Today's episode is a re-air. |
| 0:30.2 | It's a conversation with Ben Green on the history of the Harlem Globetrotters. |
| 0:32.6 | This is one of my favorite episodes ever. |
| 0:44.1 | This story of the Globetrotters, it really, it's the story of the team, but it's also just so much a story of the United States in the early to late 20th century. |
| 0:54.7 | And leading up to now, so much fascinating here about their origins, how they change their relationship to the NBA, and how they went from being the best basketball team in the world to what I would say is one of the most entertaining organizations there are, because the |
| 1:01.1 | Globetrotters are still fantastic. If you haven't been in a while, couldn't recommend it more. |
| 1:04.9 | I'm also excited to announce that beginning now, the road to now is going back to a weekly format. |
| 1:10.0 | We've been biweekly for a few months, but after this, every Monday, you can check us out. We will be there and really excited about using some of this time I've got this summer to create some good episodes. The next one will be Annette Gordon-Reed, who just published the book on Juneteenth, which I read and blew my mind, so it'll be a history of |
| 1:28.2 | Juneteenth with Annette Gordon-Reed. Then after that, we'll be talking more about the 70s |
| 1:32.5 | with Rick Pearlstein, who wrote the book, Reganland. That book's also fantastic. It's massive. |
| 1:37.9 | They're very different in size. But yeah, so I couldn't be more excited about these next two guests. |
| 1:43.6 | So look for us every Monday. |
| 1:45.1 | And with Rick Pearlstein, the author of Reaganland, the author of Nixonland, we will be doing that as a live Zoom webinar for our patrons. |
| 1:53.3 | That will be June 13th at 9.30 p.m. Eastern time. |
| 1:58.2 | So if you're with us on Patreon, we'll see you there, hopefully. |
| 2:02.1 | And if you're not, you can join us. Patreon, we'll see you there, hopefully. And if you're not, |
| 2:07.8 | you can join us. Come on over to The Roads Now. It's Patreon. It's patreon.com slash the roads now. |
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