Episode 21: Just Little Bits of History Repeating

We love saying that history repeats itself. Usually when things start looking a little too familiar and we’d really like the past to tell us how this mess ends. Unfortunately, history is terrible at spoilers. In the Season One finale of The Persistence, host Angélica Cordero returns to the question that started the show: what does it actually mean to persist? Through ACT UP, the 1968 Columbia student protests, and the ideas, tactics, and knowledge people carry forward, this episode looks beyond what happened to what people learned while trying to change it. Because the past leaves us more than victories and defeats. It leaves attempts. Warnings. Revisions. Possibilities. Things worth preserving, things worth changing, and things somebody else may finally know what to do with. History cannot tell us which future is coming. But it can remind us the future has never been limited to the world as it already exists. Maybe persistence is not only what survives. Sometimes, it is what survives through us. This episode asks what history gives us if it cannot predict the future, and reframes persistence as more than endurance: the transmission of knowledge, strategy, memory, failure, revision, and possibility from one attempt to the next. 🎧 Listen if you’re interested in: ACT UP · Treatment Action Group · AIDS activism · 1968 Columbia protests · Black student organizing · social movements · movement strategy · historical memory · inherited knowledge · adaptation · revision · political organizing · public memory · Enheduanna · historical transmission · precedent · unfinished work · hope and history · history and the future Season 1 Unofficial Soundtrack Support It’s free, it’s fast, and it tells the algorithm overlords this work matters. Supporting The Persistence means supporting all of it: the podcast, the posts, the zine, the whole enchilada. Send a post or an episode to a friend, a professor, or that cousin who loves debating politics at dinner. One quick Apple Podcasts review does more than any marketing budget I don’t have. Every coffee, every donation (and paid subscription) literally keeps the mic on and the stories flowing. Collaborate (let’s dream bigger): Educators? Creative? Filmmaker/Podcaster? Org with a mission? Let’s talk. Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and share your thoughts with Angélica by emailing [email protected]. Don’t forget to sign up for host Angélica Cordero’s newsletter, Obsessively Curious!! It includes short insights that connect unlikely histories, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Get full access to Obsessively Curious at obsessivelycurious.substack.com/subscribe