The Wrong Side of History is a narrative podcast that explores why intelligent, well-meaning people opposed changes we now take for granted, women’s suffrage, civil rights, medical advances, and more.
Instead of flattening the past into heroes and villains, we do something harder: we take these people seriously. Using their own essays, speeches, letters, and books, each season reconstructs how the world looked to them; the fears they had, the values they held, the trade-offs they believed they were defending.
The goal isn’t to agree with them. It’s to understand what made sense to them at the time.
Because nobody thinks they’re the villain. And if we can’t fairly explain why past beliefs felt reasonable, we probably don’t understand our own as well as we think. This is history as an exercise in intellectual humility — and a challenge to ask a harder question:
