The Radium Girls story is already horrifying: young women told to paint glow-in-the-dark watch dials with radioactive paint, sharpen their brushes with their lips, and trust the companies that swore everything was safe.

But the main episode only scratches the glowing surface.

In this Naked History: Debrief, we’re opening the drawer of radioactive footnotes: what got left out, how corporate denial kept dragging on, why the Radium Girls’ fight still matters, and how their bones became evidence when the companies tried to bury the truth.

We’ll also step into This Week in History for the week of June 15th, because history never takes a week off from being dramatic, weird, and deeply inconvenient.

This is the after-party for The Radium Girls: Corporate Denial with a Glow, a story about workplace lies, radioactive bodies, women refusing to disappear quietly, and the long shadow of companies choosing profit over people.

Because sometimes the past does not whisper.

Sometimes it glows in the dark.

Music Credit:

• "In The West" Kevin MacLeod (⁠⁠⁠incompetech.com⁠⁠⁠) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License ⁠⁠⁠http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠⁠

• Music by Ievgen Poltavskyi from Pixabay

• Music by FreeMusicForVideo from Pixabay

• Music track: lavender by massobeats

• Source: https://freetouse.com/music

Podcast Description

In this episode of Naked History, we’re turning off the lights and following the glow straight into one of the most horrifying workplace scandals of the twentieth century.

The Radium Girls were young women hired to paint glow-in-the-dark watch and instrument dials with radium-laced paint. They were told the work was safe. They were taught to sharpen their brushes with their lips. Dip. Lip. Paint. Over and over again.

But the glow that made the dials useful also settled into their bones.

As workers began losing teeth, suffering horrific injuries, and dying from radiation poisoning, the companies behind the luminous paint denied responsibility, delayed justice, blamed the women, and protected profits over people. But the Radium Girls fought back from sickbeds, courtrooms, and bodies that had been turned into evidence.

This is a story about science, labor, corporate denial, women’s pain being dismissed, and the workers who helped change the future of workplace safety.

Because sometimes the past does not whisper.

Sometimes it glows in the dark.

Music Credit:

• "In The West" Kevin MacLeod (⁠⁠⁠incompetech.com⁠⁠⁠)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License ⁠⁠⁠http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠⁠

• Music track: lavender by massobeats Source: ⁠⁠⁠https://freetouse.com/music ⁠⁠⁠Royalty Free Music for Video (Safe)

One year. Dozens of stories. Far too many historical red flags.

This week, Naked History celebrates its first anniversary with the official, deeply unserious, emotionally sincere Naked History Yearbook.

Dyllan looks back at a year of weird little doors and big human messes. From the Paris Catacombs to the Emu War, the Great Molasses Flood, the Year Without a Summer, D.B. Cooper, Laika, and more. Along the way, we hand out awards for “Most Likely to Haunt a Tourist Attraction,” “Best Use of Birds as Military Resistance,” “Stickiest Public Safety Disaster,” and other categories that probably should not exist, but history insisted.

It’s a celebration of the show’s first year, the stories that shaped its voice, and the lesson that keeps coming up again and again: history is rarely clean, never boring, and usually hiding something very weird under the fig leaf.

Thank you for one year of listening, sharing, reviewing, and following us into the weirdest corners of the past.

One year down. Still naked.

Music Credit:

• "In The West" Kevin MacLeod (⁠⁠⁠incompetech.com⁠⁠⁠) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License ⁠⁠⁠http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠⁠

• Music by Ievgen Poltavskyi from Pixabay

• Music by FreeMusicForVideo from Pixabay

• Music by Yauheni Kachan from Pixabay

• Music by ⁠Denis Pavlov⁠ from ⁠Pixabay⁠

• Music track: lavender by massobeats

• Source: https://freetouse.com/music