Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Averkin.

This day, May 25th, 1978, a brown paper wrapped package was found on the campus of the University of Illinois in Chicago.

No one claimed the package, so it was returned to the supposed sender of professor at Northwestern University not that far away in Chicago

The professor had not mailed the package so he handed it over to campus security the The package then exploded, injuring the security guard who was attempting to open it.

And that was the beginning of a decade and a half bombing spree by a man that would eventually come to be known as the Unabomber. In 1995 a man by the name of Ted Kaczynski was arrested and exposed as the Unabomber between 1978 and 1995 he killed three people and injured 23 others in this nationwide bombing

campaign targeting people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the environment.

All of that is stuff we would learn in the mid-90s when Kaczynski was arrested,

but in 1978, this was the very beginning of the Saga of the

beginning of the Saga of the Unabomber with this package at the University of Illinois and that is where we will start here to discuss as always

are Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello Jody.

Hey there.

So, Nicky, I'm curious, 1978,

this feels like such a 90s story, and that's obviously when he was arrested but now of a sudden here we are in 1978

I'm just very curious kind of what it does to the Unabomber story to think of it as something situated in the late 70s, not in the 90s.

I think that's the right place to locate it for two reasons.

One, as we would later learn, he has this kind of back to the land,

environmentalist ethos, and the more

militant and sometimes violent part of the environmental movement

was really getting underway in the late 1970s and this is also a

period where there is a lot of political violence we've talked about you know a number of

...