Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm doubling and chokoate boarding. And you could be forgiven for thinking it's nineteen sixty one again with all of the big civil rights anniversaries that have been in the news this year, fiftieth anniversaries, that's so true, um, most notably the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides this past May, when more than four hundred people of all ages, male, female, black, white, different religions from all over the country decided to challenge the racial segregation of interstate buses. Yeah, and the Freedom Rides have been really well covered this year. There have been articles, news stories, two reunions of riders, one in Jackson, Mississippi, one in Chicago. I think that one was hosted by Oprah herself. There was a fantastic American experience Dock and Entery based on the book on the Freedom Writers by Raymond Arsenal. There have been op eds and reflections from the writers and national papers. But we are not ones to let the May anniversary of the Freedom Ride stop us from doing a podcast on them in September, because September is also a really important date for the Freedom Rides. It's when change actually happened, when the Interstate Commerce Commission finally ruled that the sign segregating whites and blacks at bus and train facilities had to come down and actually backed up that ruling with a really hefty fine for offenders. So that ruling validated the Riders in their tactics, and that's worth pointing out before we get into this two part episode on the Freedom Rides, and before we get into how the ride started, because even though today the riders are clearly celebrated as civil rights heroes, at the time, what they were doing was extremely troversial, even within the civil rights movement itself. So they didn't know what they were what they were setting out to do. They just knew they had to do it. Yeah, But before we even get to the rides themselves, our story really starts in nineteen forty four with a woman named Irene Morgan. Now everyone knows Rosa Parks Right and her refusal to give up her bus seat in the nineteen fifties, but a decade earlier, Morgan refused to give up her seat on a Greyhound traveling through Virginia, and Morgan, who made World War Two bomber planes for a plant for a living, was coming home to Baltimore after visiting her mother. So after refusing to move, she kicked the sheriff's deputy who tried to take her off the bus. And later she said, quote, I started to bite him, but he looked dirty, so I couldn't bite him. So all I could do was claw and tear his clothes. Yeah, and that and other great quotes are from her New York Times obituary. But Morgan was arrested and went ahead paid that one hundred dollar fine for resisting arrest, but she refused to pay a the ten dollar fine for violating a Virginia law about segregated seating, So it was off to court she went, and eventually the n double a c p. Took up her case and appealed to the Supreme Court, and in ninety the court actually ruled in her favor in Morgan Versus Virginia, and um just the gist of the ruling here. Seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single uniform rule to promote and protect national travel. Sounds simple enough. Basically, you can't make African Americans sit in the back of the bus and white people sit in the front, and nobody should be giving up their seat unless just to an old person or something like that. So it sounds simple, but it wasn't because Southern states continued to flaunt the law with segregated seating, segregated waiting rooms, restrooms, water fountains. So eventually somebody decided that they needed to do something and actually test out this new law, and that was a group organized by the Congress of Racial Equality or CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. They decided to test the new ruling by staging the Journey of Reconciliation through the Upper South. The Upper South. Yeah, and that's important here, especially when we get into the later Freedom Rides where they head into Alabama in Mississippi and and things get a lot different. Back in nine seven, they knew that wasn't an option, right, So basically this is how it worked. Eight black men and eight white men would ride on interstate buses and trains and see if Morgan versus Virginia was a law in action or in name only. So there was a catch though it would be non violent. Even if they were faced with arrests or beatings, the writers would not react. So while Morgan had been the inspiration for this, she was obviously not their non violent role model, with her attempted bites and all of that. I think that makes Morgan such an interesting character in this whole thing, too, which such a famous non violent movement, that she is the inspiration for it. But for that non violent inspiration, leaders instead turned to Gandhi and he actually was the inspiration for Courts Founding back in nineteen two. But the Journey of Reconciliation, it sounds like it's gonna make waves. It sounds like a big deal, but it really didn't have that much of an impact. The writers did meet with violence, three of them spent a month on a North Carolina chain gang after violating segregation rules in Chapel Hill, but the story wasn't really picked up by national media, and folks just weren't that interested. So Arsenal writes that the ride ultimately quote brought about little change and was soon forgotten by all but a handful of non violent activists. So a decade goes by, and then in nineteen sixties, some important things start to happen to inspire a new wave of freedom rides. One of those things is that JFK is elected president. Another is that Nashville sit ins and segregation at city lunch counters there. And also the Supreme Court issues another decision related to interstate travel. This time it's a point in versus Virginia, which made any racial segregation illegal in interstate commerce. And that's anything. So not only should a black person be able to take any seat on the bus, he should also be able to use any waiting room, restroom, coffee counter, and so on. All Right, so there's a new Supreme Court decision and this momentum going from the Nashville sit ins, and Core and its director James Farmer decide, let's test this new ruling boy in versus Virginia. So this time, not only would the new writers keep that direct action movement of the Siddens going, they would help promote CORE too on this national scale, since it was, after all, less well known than the N double A c P or SNIC or the SCLC. And that's something, as we mentioned in the beginning, that this was kind of controversial within the movement that was something that added to the ambivalence or sometimes outright hostility directed at the initial ride by much of the movement um. But we've got to give you a sense of how these initial core riders were picked, because they weren't just willy nilly passengers on the bus. They all had to be trained, they all had to come with recommendations even and again they all kind of came from different sort of facets of life. One member, James Peck, was from Manhattan and he had participated in the nineteen forties Journey of Reconciliation, so he had some experience with this. The others were handpicked to maintain their non violent directive. So in addition to having to get recommendations, as Sarah said, the youngest of them also had to get parental permission. They also underwent careful training to resist that violent impulse, but really they only anticipated refusal of service and possibly maybe arrest. You can see videos though, of this training, and it's pretty fascinating to watch and really uncomfortable because you know, it is a simulated situation and these people actually all know each other. Well, there's the man playing the antagonizer, the woman playing the waitress, and it's it's strange to see. But as you mentioned, they were from all different walks of life. They were all ages, all professions, students, retirees, editors, was a folk singer, and most were from the North or the Midwest, with a few southern exceptions, including probably the most famous writer, John Lewis, who was from Alabama. UM. But that's something also to consider when we were mentioning earlier about the hostility or ambivalence within the movement, that these people were largely Northerners, were largely Midwesterners, and they were coming into the South to to test these segregated Jim Crow rules. So the first riders left May fourth, nineteen sixty one. They were departing from Washington, d C. And ultimately the final destination was going to be New Orleans, which it's above thride. That was going to take a while, and they didn't really know what they would encounter along the way. But the bus started out winding its way through Virginia and North Carolina. There were thirteen riders. They were taking Greyhound and Trailways buses, so two different lines, just testing out the whole range of the system. And at first they really saw what they expected stations would sort of reluctantly break from their segregationist policies just while the riders were there, So just go ahead and let them sit in the black sitting room or the white sitting room, whatever race they weren't, let them use the wrong restroom, whatever they were doing, and then just um let them be, Let them get on their bus and move on through town, get out of their hair, and presumably return to business as usual, which was full on segregation. But by Charlotte, North Carolina, that wasn't what was happening anymore. People weren't just letting it slide until they were gone. Troubles arted. There were arrests and beatings in rock Hill, South Carolina, and by May thirteenth, the writers finally made it to Atlanta, where they had this little get together sort of pause in the ride planned with Dr Martin Luther King. Yeah, and they were really hoping that when they got there he would join in become a freedom writer with them, but instead he took a very different attitude. He warned them, He told them that he had heard bad news coming out of Alabama and they should seriously reconsider continuing on and even questioning the wisdom of what they were doing in the first place, whether this was really helping the movement. So this is pretty discouraging news to hear it their Atlanta reception, and to make matters worse, James Farmer, the leader of Core, gets word that his father has died and has to pull out for a few days to go home. Still though, May fourteen, Mother's Day, the leaderless writer set off from Atlanta to Brmingham, Alabama, on Greyhound and Trailways buses that are leaving one hour apart. And sure enough, shortly after crossing the Alabama state line, one of the buses runs into trouble. The Greyhound hits a crowd of about two hundred men in Anniston. Yeah, and it's all been planned. A klansman lies down in front of the bus so that the other members of the mob can slash the tires, and the bus maneuvers out of town, but it's followed and hounded by a car. Then finally the tires go flat. The driver gets out, checks them and walks away, just leaves the people on the bus. And there's this really harrowing scene in the documentary where passenger may Francis Moultrie. Here someone shouting where is the gas? Where is the gas? Yeah, I'd really recommend to that documentary for seeing some of these freedom writers reflect on it and and say what they heard and what they experienced. But the mob attacks the bus then and throws a firebomb in through the back window and then block the door to prevent the people from getting off. And also keep in mind there aren't just freedom writers on this bus. They're regular passengers to who are just trying to get to Birmingham or wherever and are caught up in this. Two things ultimately saved the riders and those unaffiliated bus passengers. The fuel tank explodes, which makes the mob back away from the bus, and then highway patrolman finally arrived, but not until the coughing, choking passengers who have just escaped from the bus are beaten by the crowd. There's one catch though with this, With this violent scene, photographs are taken and it becomes a major news story and they go worldwide, not just a national news story, becomes worldwide news something terrible happening in the United States. But meanwhile, that second bus is still chugging on toward Birmingham. Yeah where, Little did they know the city's Commissioner of Public Safety, Bowl Connor, has made a deal with the KKK. The deal is that when the bus comes to town, the clan will get fifteen minutes without police interference to do whatever they want. People on the bus, no arrests, no trouble at all. And there's another catch to this too. The FBI had an informant and the clan, and he knew the plan to attack the bus. Jed Grew Hoover didn't report the mob's plans to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The informant even participated when the mob attacked and beat the writers as they came into the station. And we're going to talk about that a little more in the part two of this episode, and and some of the legal battles that ensued. But just like an Aniston, photographers get pictures of this mob attacking the passengers coming from Atlanta, and this news makes international headlines too. It's very disturbing to people, and it's something that UM, the Federal administer ration, really can't ignore. So Jim Peck, who has been unofficially in charge since James Farmer left, makes the call to continue the ride from the hospital. He has been severely beaten. And it's worth noting here too that a lot of the white riders would be targeted initially sort of as betrayers to their race by the mobs. So Jim Peck was really really bad off. Pictures of him are disturbing to see, but he said that they felt, quote, they must not surrender to violence. So let's not stop here. There's a problem though, Like, I mean, that's a very noble, brave thing to do to try to continue the ride, but there's a problem. None of the drivers out of Birmingham are willing to take them. Nobody wants to risk it. Nobody wants to risk being on a firebomb bus or attacked by a mob and and dragged down with the rest of them. Yeah, I mean, you can hardly blame them. But they finally decide that the ride has to end. They'll fly to New Orleans instead, but even that proves to be quite difficult. The mob follows them, a bomb threat is called in on their plane, and it seems that they're stuck in Alabama and definitely can't get out of the Birmingham airport. So, like we said, by this point that Kennedy's really have to get involved with this story all over the world's papers, and the poor beaten freedom riders stuck in the airport. They can't let things get anywhere. So John Seigenthaler, who was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, arranges the rider's flight and escorts them to New Orleans. They're they're met by state police at the plane who protect them but also curse them as they walk to the terminal, and that ends the ride. It's over. The Kennedy think that hopefully it's all over, um they can get back to international pursuits, but it's not because there is another wave setting out from Nashville. The students in the Nashville Student Movement realized that they could let Cores attempt and there end in violence. And the leader of that movement, Diane Nash, who was a student in the Nashville movement, told of Birmingham reverend quote, if they stop us with violence, the movement is dead. So there a little cliffhanger for this episode. Yeah, and the next episode, we're gonna talk a little bit more about that Nashville movement as it picks up the baton and as riots continue in Alabama and Mississippi plays hardball with its state penitentiary, So just to give you a little teaser there, but we're done with us for today. If you have any ideas to send us for podcasts or any thoughts on this one that you want to share, where History Podcast at how stuff works dot com or you can look us up on Facebook or on Twitter at Myston History. And we also have an article about the civil rights movement. I bet we're going to be recommending this one quite a bit in the next few episodes on the freedom rights. But it is called how the Civil Rights Movement Worked, and even find it by searching for civil Rights on our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Staff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.

Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm doubling and chokoate boarding. And you could be forgiven for thinking it's nineteen sixty one again with all of the big civil rights anniversaries that have been in the news this year, fiftieth anniversaries, that's so true, um, most notably the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides this past May, when more than four hundred people of all ages, male, female, black, white, different religions from all over the country decided to challenge the racial segregation of interstate buses. Yeah, and the Freedom Rides have been really well covered this year. There have been articles, news stories, two reunions of riders, one in Jackson, Mississippi, one in Chicago. I think that one was hosted by Oprah herself. There was a fantastic American experience Dock and Entery based on the book on the Freedom Writers by Raymond Arsenal. There have been op eds and reflections from the writers and national papers. But we are not ones to let the May anniversary of the Freedom Ride stop us from doing a podcast on them in September, because September is also a really important date for the Freedom Rides. It's when change actually happened, when the Interstate Commerce Commission finally ruled that the sign segregating whites and blacks at bus and train facilities had to come down and actually backed up that ruling with a really hefty fine for offenders. So that ruling validated the Riders in their tactics, and that's worth pointing out before we get into this two part episode on the Freedom Rides, and before we get into how the ride started, because even though today the riders are clearly celebrated as civil rights heroes, at the time, what they were doing was extremely troversial, even within the civil rights movement itself. So they didn't know what they were what they were setting out to do. They just knew they had to do it. Yeah, But before we even get to the rides themselves, our story really starts in nineteen forty four with a woman named Irene Morgan. Now everyone knows Rosa Parks Right and her refusal to give up her bus seat in the nineteen fifties, but a decade earlier, Morgan refused to give up her seat on a Greyhound traveling through Virginia, and Morgan, who made World War Two bomber planes for a plant for a living, was coming home to Baltimore after visiting her mother. So after refusing to move, she kicked the sheriff's deputy who tried to take her off the bus. And later she said, quote, I started to bite him, but he looked dirty, so I couldn't bite him. So all I could do was claw and tear his clothes. Yeah, and that and other great quotes are from her New York Times obituary. But Morgan was arrested and went ahead paid that one hundred dollar fine for resisting arrest, but she refused to pay a the ten dollar fine for violating a Virginia law about segregated seating, So it was off to court she went, and eventually the n double a c p. Took up her case and appealed to the Supreme Court, and in ninety the court actually ruled in her favor in Morgan Versus Virginia, and um just the gist of the ruling here. Seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single uniform rule to promote and protect national travel. Sounds simple enough. Basically, you can't make African Americans sit in the back of the bus and white people sit in the front, and nobody should be giving up their seat unless just to an old person or something like that. So it sounds simple, but it wasn't because Southern states continued to flaunt the law with segregated seating, segregated waiting rooms, restrooms, water fountains. So eventually somebody decided that they needed to do something and actually test out this new law, and that was a group organized by the Congress of Racial Equality or CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. They decided to test the new ruling by staging the Journey of Reconciliation through the Upper South. The Upper South. Yeah, and that's important here, especially when we get into the later Freedom Rides where they head into Alabama in Mississippi and and things get a lot different. Back in nine seven, they knew that wasn't an option, right, So basically this is how it worked. Eight black men and eight white men would ride on interstate buses and trains and see if Morgan versus Virginia was a law in action or in name only. So there was a catch though it would be non violent. Even if they were faced with arrests or beatings, the writers would not react. So while Morgan had been the inspiration for this, she was obviously not their non violent role model, with her attempted bites and all of that. I think that makes Morgan such an interesting character in this whole thing, too, which such a famous non violent movement, that she is the inspiration for it. But for that non violent inspiration, leaders instead turned to Gandhi and he actually was the inspiration for Courts Founding back in nineteen two. But the Journey of Reconciliation, it sounds like it's gonna make waves. It sounds like a big deal, but it really didn't have that much of an impact. The writers did meet with violence, three of them spent a month on a North Carolina chain gang after violating segregation rules in Chapel Hill, but the story wasn't really picked up by national media, and folks just weren't that interested. So Arsenal writes that the ride ultimately quote brought about little change and was soon forgotten by all but a handful of non violent activists. So a decade goes by, and then in nineteen sixties, some important things start to happen to inspire a new wave of freedom rides. One of those things is that JFK is elected president. Another is that Nashville sit ins and segregation at city lunch counters there. And also the Supreme Court issues another decision related to interstate travel. This time it's a point in versus Virginia, which made any racial segregation illegal in interstate commerce. And that's anything. So not only should a black person be able to take any seat on the bus, he should also be able to use any waiting room, restroom, coffee counter, and so on. All Right, so there's a new Supreme Court decision and this momentum going from the Nashville sit ins, and Core and its director James Farmer decide, let's test this new ruling boy in versus Virginia. So this time, not only would the new writers keep that direct action movement of the Siddens going, they would help promote CORE too on this national scale, since it was, after all, less well known than the N double A c P or SNIC or the SCLC. And that's something, as we mentioned in the beginning, that this was kind of controversial within the movement that was something that added to the ambivalence or sometimes outright hostility directed at the initial ride by much of the movement um. But we've got to give you a sense of how these initial core riders were picked, because they weren't just willy nilly passengers on the bus. They all had to be trained, they all had to come with recommendations even and again they all kind of came from different sort of facets of life. One member, James Peck, was from Manhattan and he had participated in the nineteen forties Journey of Reconciliation, so he had some experience with this. The others were handpicked to maintain their non violent directive. So in addition to having to get recommendations, as Sarah said, the youngest of them also had to get parental permission. They also underwent careful training to resist that violent impulse, but really they only anticipated refusal of service and possibly maybe arrest. You can see videos though, of this training, and it's pretty fascinating to watch and really uncomfortable because you know, it is a simulated situation and these people actually all know each other. Well, there's the man playing the antagonizer, the woman playing the waitress, and it's it's strange to see. But as you mentioned, they were from all different walks of life. They were all ages, all professions, students, retirees, editors, was a folk singer, and most were from the North or the Midwest, with a few southern exceptions, including probably the most famous writer, John Lewis, who was from Alabama. UM. But that's something also to consider when we were mentioning earlier about the hostility or ambivalence within the movement, that these people were largely Northerners, were largely Midwesterners, and they were coming into the South to to test these segregated Jim Crow rules. So the first riders left May fourth, nineteen sixty one. They were departing from Washington, d C. And ultimately the final destination was going to be New Orleans, which it's above thride. That was going to take a while, and they didn't really know what they would encounter along the way. But the bus started out winding its way through Virginia and North Carolina. There were thirteen riders. They were taking Greyhound and Trailways buses, so two different lines, just testing out the whole range of the system. And at first they really saw what they expected stations would sort of reluctantly break from their segregationist policies just while the riders were there, So just go ahead and let them sit in the black sitting room or the white sitting room, whatever race they weren't, let them use the wrong restroom, whatever they were doing, and then just um let them be, Let them get on their bus and move on through town, get out of their hair, and presumably return to business as usual, which was full on segregation. But by Charlotte, North Carolina, that wasn't what was happening anymore. People weren't just letting it slide until they were gone. Troubles arted. There were arrests and beatings in rock Hill, South Carolina, and by May thirteenth, the writers finally made it to Atlanta, where they had this little get together sort of pause in the ride planned with Dr Martin Luther King. Yeah, and they were really hoping that when they got there he would join in become a freedom writer with them, but instead he took a very different attitude. He warned them, He told them that he had heard bad news coming out of Alabama and they should seriously reconsider continuing on and even questioning the wisdom of what they were doing in the first place, whether this was really helping the movement. So this is pretty discouraging news to hear it their Atlanta reception, and to make matters worse, James Farmer, the leader of Core, gets word that his father has died and has to pull out for a few days to go home. Still though, May fourteen, Mother's Day, the leaderless writer set off from Atlanta to Brmingham, Alabama, on Greyhound and Trailways buses that are leaving one hour apart. And sure enough, shortly after crossing the Alabama state line, one of the buses runs into trouble. The Greyhound hits a crowd of about two hundred men in Anniston. Yeah, and it's all been planned. A klansman lies down in front of the bus so that the other members of the mob can slash the tires, and the bus maneuvers out of town, but it's followed and hounded by a car. Then finally the tires go flat. The driver gets out, checks them and walks away, just leaves the people on the bus. And there's this really harrowing scene in the documentary where passenger may Francis Moultrie. Here someone shouting where is the gas? Where is the gas? Yeah, I'd really recommend to that documentary for seeing some of these freedom writers reflect on it and and say what they heard and what they experienced. But the mob attacks the bus then and throws a firebomb in through the back window and then block the door to prevent the people from getting off. And also keep in mind there aren't just freedom writers on this bus. They're regular passengers to who are just trying to get to Birmingham or wherever and are caught up in this. Two things ultimately saved the riders and those unaffiliated bus passengers. The fuel tank explodes, which makes the mob back away from the bus, and then highway patrolman finally arrived, but not until the coughing, choking passengers who have just escaped from the bus are beaten by the crowd. There's one catch though with this, With this violent scene, photographs are taken and it becomes a major news story and they go worldwide, not just a national news story, becomes worldwide news something terrible happening in the United States. But meanwhile, that second bus is still chugging on toward Birmingham. Yeah where, Little did they know the city's Commissioner of Public Safety, Bowl Connor, has made a deal with the KKK. The deal is that when the bus comes to town, the clan will get fifteen minutes without police interference to do whatever they want. People on the bus, no arrests, no trouble at all. And there's another catch to this too. The FBI had an informant and the clan, and he knew the plan to attack the bus. Jed Grew Hoover didn't report the mob's plans to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The informant even participated when the mob attacked and beat the writers as they came into the station. And we're going to talk about that a little more in the part two of this episode, and and some of the legal battles that ensued. But just like an Aniston, photographers get pictures of this mob attacking the passengers coming from Atlanta, and this news makes international headlines too. It's very disturbing to people, and it's something that UM, the Federal administer ration, really can't ignore. So Jim Peck, who has been unofficially in charge since James Farmer left, makes the call to continue the ride from the hospital. He has been severely beaten. And it's worth noting here too that a lot of the white riders would be targeted initially sort of as betrayers to their race by the mobs. So Jim Peck was really really bad off. Pictures of him are disturbing to see, but he said that they felt, quote, they must not surrender to violence. So let's not stop here. There's a problem though, Like, I mean, that's a very noble, brave thing to do to try to continue the ride, but there's a problem. None of the drivers out of Birmingham are willing to take them. Nobody wants to risk it. Nobody wants to risk being on a firebomb bus or attacked by a mob and and dragged down with the rest of them. Yeah, I mean, you can hardly blame them. But they finally decide that the ride has to end. They'll fly to New Orleans instead, but even that proves to be quite difficult. The mob follows them, a bomb threat is called in on their plane, and it seems that they're stuck in Alabama and definitely can't get out of the Birmingham airport. So, like we said, by this point that Kennedy's really have to get involved with this story all over the world's papers, and the poor beaten freedom riders stuck in the airport. They can't let things get anywhere. So John Seigenthaler, who was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, arranges the rider's flight and escorts them to New Orleans. They're they're met by state police at the plane who protect them but also curse them as they walk to the terminal, and that ends the ride. It's over. The Kennedy think that hopefully it's all over, um they can get back to international pursuits, but it's not because there is another wave setting out from Nashville. The students in the Nashville Student Movement realized that they could let Cores attempt and there end in violence. And the leader of that movement, Diane Nash, who was a student in the Nashville movement, told of Birmingham reverend quote, if they stop us with violence, the movement is dead. So there a little cliffhanger for this episode. Yeah, and the next episode, we're gonna talk a little bit more about that Nashville movement as it picks up the baton and as riots continue in Alabama and Mississippi plays hardball with its state penitentiary, So just to give you a little teaser there, but we're done with us for today. If you have any ideas to send us for podcasts or any thoughts on this one that you want to share, where History Podcast at how stuff works dot com or you can look us up on Facebook or on Twitter at Myston History. And we also have an article about the civil rights movement. I bet we're going to be recommending this one quite a bit in the next few episodes on the freedom rights. But it is called how the Civil Rights Movement Worked, and even find it by searching for civil Rights on our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Staff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.