S5E7: Bonus Episode: The Forgotten Giant of Women’s Basketball

Nera White dominated her sport for 15 years, and even beat the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. But you’ve probably never heard of the Michael Jordan of women’s basketball.

S5E6: Successful But Not Equal

Thanks to Title IX and the trailblazing women behind it, the U.S. has now dominated women’s soccer for almost three decades. The national team has won four Olympic gold medals, and now four World Cups. But, even in 2019, female athletes in America are far from equal to their male counterparts, and the members of the national team are not treated the same as their male peers – not even close. In this episode, we talk to everyone from historians to players, including current team members Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd and others, about the national team’s history-making role this year.

S5E5: The Civil Rights Pioneer That History Forgot

The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was a pioneering civil rights attorney and a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. She helped draw attention to the dual costs of racism and sexism and was instrumental in making sure that the push for women’s rights, including Title IX, built on the successes of the civil rights movement.

S5E4: Too Strong for a Woman

After learning she had not been considered for any of the teaching openings in her college department and that she came on “too strong for a woman,” Bernice “Bunny” Sandler went home and cried. Then she showed just how strong a woman she was. Sandler’s remarkable behind-the-scenes efforts proved instrumental to the passage of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in higher education.

S5E3: These Are the Bodies

More than 23 years before Brandi Chastain took off her jersey, the women of the Yale women's crew team were taking off more than theirs. In March 1976, 19 members of the Yale women's crew team stripped naked in a college athletic director’s office to protest the team’s lack of shower facilities and changed the way that female athletes are treated on college campuses.

S5E2: A Team of Their Own

In the summer of 1985, the first U.S. women’s national soccer team made their debut in Italy. The ragtag group, cobbled together in less than a week and with a shoestring budget, little time to practice, and hand-me-down uniforms, struggled to keep up with their international competition. But their perseverance and their love of the game laid the groundwork for the winning team culture that fueled the championship teams of the 1990s.

S5E1: Ours to Win

When Brandi Chastain ripped off her jersey after scoring the winning penalty kick in the 1999 Women's World Cup Final, her iconic celebration marked the arrival of women’s soccer, both on the global sports stage and in the public imagination. With “The '99ers,” as the team is known, America had assembled a talented group of women and given them an unprecedented opportunity to succeed. But it was an opportunity that did not come easily… or happen overnight.

Season Five Trailer: Let Us Play

When Brandi Chastain ripped off her jersey after scoring the winning penalty in the 1999 Women's World Cup Final, her now iconic goal celebration marked the arrival of women’s soccer, both on the global sports stage and in the public imagination. In "Let Us Play," the latest season of The Thread, we tell the hidden story behind the greatest women’s team in American sports history. We show how Chastain’s celebration originated decades earlier and how the '99ers stood on the shoulders of a series of unheralded athletes, policymakers and scholars, from the Brooklyn teacher who helped pass the landmark Title IX civil rights legislation in 1972 to the the Black transgender attorney who made that achievement possible.

S4E7: Bonus Episode: A Tale of Two Killers

What is it about The Catcher in the Rye that prompted two of the world’s most infamous assassination attempts? In Season 4 of The Thread we saw how the acquittal of President Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassin John Hinckley Jr. on grounds of insanity helped change the landscape of American criminal law. But Hinckley’s story also connects with Season 1 of The Thread and another early 1980s murder by a deranged 25-year-old.

S4E6: An Insane Defense?

The 2015 conviction of Aurora gunman James Holmes really begins almost two centuries earlier in England, with the attempted assassination of the king. This episode explores how the insanity defense challenges lawyers, judges and juries in their pursuit of justice, and how it speaks to things that all of us hold dear, such as moral responsibility, free will and even our own sanity.

S4E5: A Star-Spangled Murder

Francis Scott Key, the pro-slavery lawyer and amateur poet who penned “The Star-Spangled Banner” after witnessing the British bombardment of Fort McHenry 200 years ago, was famously inspired by the resilient spirit of a young nation. Forty-five years later, Key’s other notable creation, his only son, Philip Barton Key II, would experience an entirely different side of American life when he was slain in 1859 by a U.S. congressman and disgruntled cuckold named Daniel Sickles.

S4E4: America's Pet Murderer

It was a grand time to be a rich New Yorker. The wealthy architect Stanford White was responsible for designing several iconic public, institutional and religious buildings in the city in a decadent beaux arts “American Renaissance” style, including the original Madison Square Garden, which he owned. White, more than any other man, was responsible for the look of what was quickly becoming the wealthiest city on Earth. This week, we tell the story of the murder of Stanford White. White’s killer was an eccentric businessman from Pittsburgh named Harry Thaw. Thaw’s wealthy family was prepared to pay a million dollars to spare him from the electric chair. They were also prepared to embrace an unorthodox legal strategy. Harry Thaw’s murder trial, and his temporary insanity plea, shook America to its core.

S4E3: “The Greatest Love Offering in the History of the World"

In 1981, on his way to look for the actress Jodi Foster at Yale, where he had been stalking her, John Hinckley Jr. stopped off in Washington, D.C., and ended up shooting U.S. President Ronald Reagan in front of the Hilton Hotel. Hinckley claimed he was trying to impress Foster, with whom he was infatuated. He later described the incident in a letter to The New York Times as “the greatest love offering in the history of the world. ... I am Romeo and she is Juliet.”

S4E2: An Irresistible Impulse

The ultimate act of revenge or the act of a woman driven so crazy by domestic violence that she could not comprehend what she was doing? It seemed crazy to raise that defense given the deliberateness of the act, the fact her husband was asleep at the time and more. And prosecutors thought the defense had no chance: They were ready to argue that Lorena was not insane, and one sign of that is that she acted out of revenge. Revenge, the prosecution argued, is a rational act, not an irrational one.

S4E1: Insights Into The Mind of Madness

Shortly after midnight on July 20, 2012, in Aurora, Colorado, a man in dark body armor and a gas mask entered a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises with a tactical shotgun, a high-capacity assault rifle, and a sidearm. He threw a canister of tear gas into the crowd and began firing. Soon 12 were dead and 58 were wounded; young children and pregnant women were among them.

Season Four Trailer: By Way of Insanity

This season of The Thread, from the trial of James Hadfield in 1800 to the trial of Aurora gunman James Holmes over two centuries later, we explore six of the most high-profile murder cases in history through the lens of the controversial legal defense that unites them all: not guilty by way of insanity. The Thread examines the question: does the insanity defense represent a way of recognizing the psychological complications that underlie criminal culpability or rather a misguided means for escaping justice? Were they bad, or were they mad?

The Soul Force

In the final episode of this season, we trace the path of the revolutionary idea that spread across the globe to become the dominant form of political resistance today. We also examine the role that personal psychology, and even mental illness, play in what Gandhi, King and others recognized as the secret ingredient of any nonviolent approach: empathy.

‘I Will Be Heard'

William Lloyd Garrison, one of the leading figures of the early abolitionist movement in America, was a major influence on Leo Tolstoy. Garrison believed in using “moral suasion” rather than violence to achieve social change. Armed only with his newspaper and pen, the social reformer forced America to confront the most defining moral issue in its history, kick-starting a nonviolent revolution that would change the world.

The Transformation of Leo Tolstoy

Just before his death in 1910, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy struck up a correspondence with a young lawyer in South Africa named Mohandas Gandhi, one that would change the young Indian’s life. Today Tolstoy is best known for penning War and Peace and Anna Karenina. But the Russian writer’s biggest legacy — and gift to the world — might be his ideas on nonviolent resistance, which emerged after he had a profound spiritual crisis in midlife.

Turning Enemies Into Friends

The Indian lawyer and activist Mohandas Gandhi was the first leader to take up the age-old doctrines of love and nonviolence and transform them into tools of political and social resistance. In doing so, he would inspire Bayard Rustin and other activists across the world. Armed only with love, humility and disobedience, Gandhi brought the most powerful empire on earth to the bargaining table — and eventually to its knees.

An Angelic Troublemaker

The seasoned activist and Quaker Bayard Rustin was King’s mentor in nonviolence and the organizing genius behind the March on Washington in 1963. Many felt that Rustin was on his way to becoming the “American Gandhi.” There was just one problem: Rustin was gay, and as a result, would be forced to the sidelines of the civil rights struggle, and to the margins of American history.

The Pride and The Power

Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated after leading the most influential protest movement in American history. King revolutionized the use of nonviolent resistance to combat racial injustice in the United States, but the Alabama preacher did not always believe in nonviolence. In fact, early on, King relied on armed guards for his protection until an older Quaker activist named Bayard Rustin walked into King’s home and changed the direction of the civil rights movement.

A History of Nonviolent Resistance

Coming September 10, Season 3 of the Thread will chart how a revolutionary idea--nonviolent resistance--changed the course of history.

Bonus Episode: From Drug Deals to the New Deal

Bonus Episode: The Bard and a Bird Strike

In this bonus episode, OZY brings you our first mini-Thread which begins with one of William Shakespeare's characters uttering a single word in 1597 and ends as a passenger plane plunges into the waters outside Boston almost four centuries later.

S1E6: From Lennon to Lenin

In this final episode of the season, host Sean Braswell ties up some of our thread's loose ends, explores some more surprising connections between our characters and reflects on the nature of art, life, fate and redemption.

S1E5: The Bohemians

We chronicle the life and times of Louise Bryant and her husband, John Reed, two Greenwich Village Bohemians who ended up at ground zero for the greatest revolution the world has ever known.

S1E4: America’s Troubled Shakespeare

Considered by many to be “America’s Shakespeare,” Eugene O’Neill revolutionized American drama. But O’Neill suffered greatly for his art, battling alcoholism and depression for decades, and many, including his daughter, suffered for it as well.

S1E3: Caught Between Two Postage Stamps

Wooed by perhaps the greatest American writer of the 20th century, born from the loins of its greatest playwright and ultimately wed to the most famous performer on the planet, Oona O'Neill Chaplin lived in the shadow of three of the greatest artists of the 20th century, and her story is interwoven with them all.

S1E2: Holden Caulfield Goes to War

If The Catcher in the Rye resonates with people in dark places like Mark David Chapman, then it may be because the novel, and its author, passed through hell itself on the way to publication.

S1E1: The Murder of John Lennon

After shooting the rock star John Lennon in front of the Dakota Building in Manhattan on December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman remained at the crime scene reading his favorite book, The Catcher in the Rye, until police arrived. Chapman identified powerfully with Holden Caulfield, the novel’s alienated protagonist, and in this episode we explore Chapman’s motivations, their grounding in Catcher, and ask the question: What makes someone kill their own hero in cold blood?

Season One Trailer: From Lennon to Lenin

The Thread's first season will connect the dots between John Lennon's murder and Vladimir Lenin's revolution 63 years earlier.