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3 hours ago

36 min

ABC:LHS #091-2    Roy Wilson White...
...was a gifted young UPenn law instructor who in 1900 was robbed and killed near the campus. Drawing on contemporary newspapers and archival research, the podcast traces how racial panic, sensational reporting, coercive interrogation, and institutional pressure shaped the cases against Henry Ivory, Charles Perry, and Amos Stirling. The result is both a portrait of a promising life cut short and a cautionary account of how the demand for certainty can overwhelm justice.

3 hours ago

36 min

2 days ago

26 min

ABC:LHS 091-1     Samuel Morris Waln...
...was a wealthy Philadelphian who spent his free time in the "wild west" each summer until he and his companion were murdered in their sleep by their cook and guide. A cross stands in his memory in Wyoming.

2 days ago

26 min

3 days ago

2 hr 45 min

ABC:LHS #091   Murder was part of the background noise in some areas of Philadelphia. 
S. Morris Waln, born into one of Philadelphia’s founding families, was murdered by his guide and cook during an annual journey west. His stone at Laurel Hill is melting, while a monument in his honor still rises from the Wyoming plains. 
Roy Wilson White, a promising Penn Law scholar, was robbed and killed after an evening class. Three men were hanged for the crime—but how many were truly guilty?
Baldwin Locomotive Works employee George Boehm died after a violent shop-floor attack. The man accused of killing him traveled a long path through the courts, Moyamensing Prison, and Eastern State Penitentiary. Learn of that journey on October 4th.
Ten-year-old Jacqueline Powell was killed as she slept. Her mother, Emily, spent the rest of her life confined to an asylum for the crime. October 5th is the solo date for this one.
Landscape artist and PAFA instructor Frank Whiteside was shot and killed by a home intruder who took nothing. The case remains unsolved—or does it? Tune in October 6th to find out or keep listening right now as we dive into ABC:LHS #091.
   

3 days ago

2 hr 45 min

5 days ago

1 hr 8 min

Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences...
...was open to anyone who wished to meet dinosaurs, birds, shells, fossils and the people who studied them. Now its public doors are closed, and I have come to Laurel Hill East to break that news to more than 50 of the founders, presidents, curators, collectors and supporters buried here. As we walk from grave to grave, we will follow the Academy from a rented room in 1812 to an internationally important museum—and ask how so much accumulated trust reached such an uncertain moment. This will not be an indictment delivered from a distance, but a careful conversation about the people who devoted their lives to the institution. Welcome to A Cabinet of Memory.

5 days ago

1 hr 8 min

Sep 15, 2026

1 hr 23 min

BBB:LHWS 060    Edward G. Budd and Rupen Eksergian...
...were design and structural engineers who forced the Age of Steam into the Modern Era with their iconic Silver Zephyr Diesel Electric car in 1934. Eksergian took his skills further during the Cold War when he was one of the people behind Atomic Annie, a mobile artillery piece with a nuclear warhead. Both men rest at Laurel Hill West. 

Sep 15, 2026

1 hr 23 min

Sep 6, 2026

38 min

ABC:LHS 090-5     Thomas E. Murphy ...
... knew virtually nothing about baseball, but found himself owning hundreds of shares of the Phillies during their horrible years of the 1920s and 1930s. He is remembered more as a yachtsman and a co-founder of Jupiter Island, Florida. 

Sep 6, 2026

38 min