Since the world’s been turning

We’ve covered a lot of military history throughout this series, but in this final episode we’re discussing a different kind of war. It’s the not-so-sweet rivalry that ignited in the 1980s: the Cola Wars between Coke and Pepsi.

Both drinks are icons of American pop culture, but if you were asked to taste the two beverages, could you tell the difference? That’s the question our special guest Priya Raghubir asks her students - and only 1% get it right.

 Priya is the Dean Abraham L Gitlow Chair of Business, from the New York University Sterne School of Business. She takes us through the history of the Cola Wars, the importance of branding, and the battle that advertisers wage for the hearts and minds of consumers. 

 In this episode, we’re returning to communist China after the death of Chairman Mao, and learning about one of the grimmest moments of the 1980s: Tiananmen Square.

Footage and photographs of the Chinese army cracking down on protesters travel around the world - but due to state censorship, much about the massacre there is still unknown.

 We’re joined by special guest Jeff Wasserstrom, who is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. Jeff’s area of particular interest is China and Hong Kong. 

In this episode, we’re heading to America’s Atlantic Coast, circa 1987. People are fleeing the beaches, and it’s not because of sharks. To the horror of both tourists and residents alike, the coasts of New York City, Long Island, and the Jersey Shore have been covered in medical waste. Hypodermic syringes, to be specific. 

To help us with this episode is our guest, Jeremy Greene. Jeremy is a historian of medicine, and the director of the history of medicine department at Johns Hopkins University.

 He’s also the author of Hypodermics on the Shore, a brilliant article published in the Atlantic which we highly recommend.

 In this episode we’re back in New York in the 1980s and looking at a controversial figure who’s little-known today: Bernie Goetz. Goetz, who shot four teenagers on the New York subway, has been variously portrayed as a racist villain, a victim, and a hero.

 We’re very lucky to be joined in this episode by a guest who was almost as close to the case as you can get. He’s civil rights and criminal defence lawyer Ron Kuby, who represented the family of Darrell Cabey, one of the victims, in a civil lawsuit against Goetz. 

Following on from our previous episode on the AIDS epidemic, this time we’re focussing on another large scale social issue that swept the world - but more specifically the United States - in the late 1980s and early 90s. This is an epidemic of a different kind - drug use, in the form of Crack Cocaine.

  The so-called “War on Drugs” will reach a fever pitch over this period, irrevocably changing the United States’ relationship with its black population, drug use, and its federal prison system

This episode's guest is Craig Reinarman, Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies Emeritus, at the University of California Santa Cruz. Professor Reinarman has written extensively on drug scares and Crack in particular.