The Italian Hall Disaster

On Christmas Eve, 1913, nearly 700 striking miners and their families packed into the Italian Hall in Calumet, Michigan, for a children’s holiday party. It was meant to be a moment of joy during a season of hunger and fear.

Then someone shouted a single word: Fire.

What followed was one of the most horrifying tragedies in Michigan’s history. Seventy-three people died, fifty-nine of them children. And over a century later, we still don’t know who was responsible.

In this episode, we travel to the copper mines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, trace the rise of Calumet, and examine the brutal strike that set the stage for a massacre. We follow the grief, the cover-up, and the generations-long fight for truth.

Because the fire was a lie.But the cost was real.

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