American History Tellers

By Wondery

Society & Culture History Kids & Family

What's American History Tellers about?

The words you speak. The ideas you share. The freedoms you defend. Every part of your life can be traced to our shared history, but how well do you really know the stories that made America? We’ll take you to the events, the times and the people that shaped our nation and Americans. And we’ll show you how our history affected them, their families and affects you today.

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America's Monuments | The T...

04.07.2021

In recent years, there’s been a movement to remove statues of Confederate leaders and other monuments that some see as celebrations of America’s racist history. But does taking down these statues help address the racial inequities that plague our nation ...

American History Tellers episodes:

04.07.2021 America's Monuments \| The Trouble With Confederate Statues \| 7 In recent years, there’s been a movement to remove statues of Confederate leaders and other monuments that some see as celebrations of America’s racist history. But does taking down these statues help address the racial inequities that plague our nation ...
03.31.2021 America's Monuments \| 58,000 Names \| 6 The Vietnam War was one of the most divisive conflicts in American history. Over 58,000 Americans died in the fighting; many more returned home with wounds both visible and hidden. When veterans lobbied for a memorial to honor American soldiers ...
03.29.2021 Wondery Presents: Spy Affair A charismatic Russian woman arrives in the US on a mission to improve relations between the two countries, and she soon makes some powerful friends. But who is Maria Butina? And who is she working for? As Maria gets closer ...
03.24.2021 America's Monuments \| The Mansion of the King \| 5 Few historic residences are more synonymous with their owners than Graceland. Purchased by Elvis Presley in 1957, the stately Memphis mansion was the heart of his private world and his most prized possession. He always swore he’d never sell it. ...
03.17.2021 America's Monuments \| The Longest Bridge \| 4 In the early 1920s, San Francisco was a picturesque city on a narrow, isolated peninsula. Known for its scenic, natural beauty, it had the potential to become one of America’s leading metropolises. But to fuel its economic growth, it needed ...
03.10.2021 America's Monuments \| Four Faces \| 3 In 1927, workers began blasting granite rock off a towering cliff in South Dakota’s Black Hills. It was the start of an arduous 14-year struggle to carve the portraits of four American presidents into Mount Rushmore. The feat required grueling ...
03.03.2021 America’s Monuments \| A Passage Through Panama \| 2 For centuries, sailors and merchants dreamed of finding a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the narrow isthmus of Central America. But no natural passage existed. To get ships across the fifty-mile stretch of land, someone would have ...
02.24.2021 America’s Monuments \| The Colossus of New York Harbor \| 1 It’s perhaps the most iconic of American monuments -- the Statue of Liberty. A towering 305-foot sculpture of copper and steel that is synonymous with American values of liberty, freedom and self-determination. But it began as a gift from France. ...
02.17.2021 Great Chicago Fire \| Out of the Ashes \| 4 After the 1871 fire destroyed a third of their city, Chicagoans wanted to do more than rebuild. They wanted to envision a new kind of American city. That included everything from changes to fire codes and labor laws to an ...
02.10.2021 Great Chicago Fire \| The Great Rebuilding \| 3 As dawn broke on October 10, 1871, the dazed survivors of the Great Chicago Fire stumbled through their burned and battered city. A 30-hour inferno had reduced Chicago to ashes. Homes and business were replaced by gaping holes and smoldering ...
02.03.2021 Great Chicago Fire \| Fleeing the Flames \| 2 Just before midnight on October 8, 1871, the inferno that had ravaged Chicago’s West Side leapt the Chicago River. A wall of flames surged toward downtown, threatening to devour Chicago’s most magnificent hotels, offices, and government buildings. Mayor Roswell B. ...
01.27.2021 Great Chicago Fire \| We Are Going to Have a Burn \| 1 In 1871, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the world. Built almost entirely of wood, it was also a tinderbox. That October, a severe drought ravaged the city. Fires ignited constantly, and Chicago’s firefighters were at their breaking point. ...
01.20.2021 Presidential Inaugurations: Traditions, Crisis, and Unity \| 1 As America prepares to swear in a new president, we’ll look back to the inaugurations of the past. Jim Bendat, author of Democracy's Big Day: The Inauguration of Our President, 1789-2013, joins us as we cover the friction between the ...
01.13.2021 Coal Wars \| Charles Keeney on Restoring His Great Grandfather’s Legacy \| 5 Once the coal miners lost the Battle of Blair Mountain, the story of their uprising was suppressed, and their leader Frank Keeney eventually faded into obscurity—even among members of his own family. But historian Charles Keeney, Frank Keeney’s great grandson, ...
01.06.2021 Coal Wars \| The Battle of Blair Mountain \| 4 The Coal Wars reached an explosive climax in August 1921, as thousands of miners furious over the death of their hero Sid Hatfield shouldered their weapons and marched south. Their destination was Mingo County, where they hoped to free their ...
12.30.2020 Coal Wars \| Bloody Mingo \| 3 In May 1920, Sheriff Sid Hatfield won the loyalty of Mingo County’s miners after a deadly gun battle that left seven Baldwin-Felts agents dead on the streets of Matewan, West Virginia. That summer, the coal companies brought in trainloads of ...
12.23.2020 Coal Wars \| The Matewan Massacre \| 2 In March 1913, famed labor activist Mother Jones was locked up in a shack in Pratt, West Virginia, suffering from pneumonia and a high fever as she awaited court martial. For a year, the striking miners she led endured hunger ...
12.16.2020 Coal Wars \| The Most Dangerous Woman in America \| 1 In the early 20th century, coal was the fuel that powered the nation. But the men who mined it in the rugged and remote hills of West Virginia endured harsh exploitation by the coal companies that controlled their lives. In ...
12.09.2020 Supreme Court Landmarks \| The Outsize Power of the Supreme Court Today \| 8 Throughout our series, we've seen how social movements and partisan politics helped influence the decisions of landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, and thus shape America itself. But how did the Supreme Court get so powerful when America's founders imagined a ...
12.02.2020 Supreme Court Landmarks \| Jane Roe \| 7 In 1970, a 22-year-old woman in Texas named Norma McCorvey tried and failed to get an abortion from her doctor. Abortion was illegal in Texas, just as it was in most states. Women hoping to terminate their pregnancies had few ...
11.25.2020 Supreme Court Landmarks \| A Recount in Florida \| 6 The morning of Nov. 8, 2000, Americans woke up to an undecided election. Pollsters had predicted a close race between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush, but no one knew just how narrow the margins would ...
11.18.2020 Supreme Court Landmarks \| The Warren Court \| 5 Before the 1950s, the Supreme Court was best known as an institution that adhered to the status quo. It often sought to protect the rights of property owners and businessmen, shying away from cases that took direct aim at controversial ...
11.11.2020 Supreme Court Landmarks \| Loaded Weapon \| 4 Through most of 1941, as fighting raged across Europe, the United States held back from entering the war. That all changed in December, when Japanese fighter planes bombed Pearl Harbor and the nation found itself mobilizing for World War II. ...
11.04.2020 Supreme Court Landmarks \| Separate and Unequal \| 3 After the Civil War, America began to rebuild a shattered nation. For the first time, the country could create a society without slavery, and a nation where Black people could forge their own path as independent citizens. But by the ...
10.28.2020 Supreme Court Landmarks \| The Cherokee Cases \| 2 In the early 1800s, the United States was growing rapidly, seeking land and resources for its expanding population. But the growth threatened Native American communities throughout the East. In the southern Appalachia region, the Cherokee Nation held millions of acres ...
10.21.2020 Supreme Court Landmarks \| The Predicament of John Marshall \| 1 After the War of Independence, the new American government created the Supreme Court to be have the final word on disputes that the states couldn’t settle. But at first, the Court was anything but Supreme. For nearly a decade, Congress ...
10.14.2020 Encore: Political Parties \| The Reagan Revolution \| 6 The year 1968 marked a watershed in American politics. Anti-war protests were roiling the country. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead in Memphis. Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s approval rating was plummeting. The assassination of Democratic presidential ...
10.07.2020 Encore: Political Parties \| The New Deal Coalition \| 5 The 1929 stock market crash saw 14 billion dollars vanish in a matter of hours — and with it, the Republican party’s decades-long grip on American politics. As Americans lost their livelihoods, they turned to President Herbert Hoover for relief. ...
09.30.2020 Encore: Political Parties \| The Golden Age of the GOP \| 4 As the Civil War came to a close, the government set its sights once again on the future of the United States. Working closely with a Republican President, the Republican Congress expected a swift and peaceful road to Reconstruction. But ...
09.23.2020 Encore: Political Parties \| The Turbulent 1850s \| 3 The United States won the The Mexican–American War in the 1840s, and with it vast new stretches of western land. But in the 1850s, the question of what to do with this land – and whether to allow slavery in ...
09.16.2020 Encore: Political Parties \| Jacksonian Democracy \| 2 Andrew Jackson lost the 1824 presidential election to John Quincy Adams through what some called a “corrupt bargain” in the House of Representatives. The maneuver was masterminded by hot-headed but politically savvy Henry Clay, who with Adams, announced their intent ...
09.09.2020 Encore: Political Parties \| A Tale of Two Parties \| 1 In the earliest days of the United States, there was no such thing as an organized political party. George Washington, elected twice to the presidency unanimously in the Electoral College, warned the new nation against political factions, writing that organized ...
09.02.2020 The Gilded Age \| What America Failed to Learn from the Gilded Age \| 7 Throughout our series, corporate giants and their exploitation of workers was disturbing evidence of capitalism run amok. That greed and disregard for the working class defined the Gilded Age. But the problems of that era haven’t disappeared. The economic disparities ...
08.26.2020 The Gilded Age \| Cross of Gold \| 6 In the spring of 1894, hundreds of unemployed workers trudged through rain and snow on a 400-mile trek from Ohio to the nation’s capital. They joined armies of jobless men from all across the country to march on Washington, fed ...
08.19.2020 The Gilded Age \| Workers Revolt! \| 5 As the century came to a close, labor unrest reached explosive new heights. Industrial expansion made businessmen and bankers rich. But workers faced low wages, long hours, and dangerous conditions. They sought strength in numbers, fighting for basic rights against ...
08.12.2020 The Gilded Age \| Exclusion \| 4 Amid the glamor and growth of the Gilded Age, racism and anti-immigrant hostility swept the nation. With the end of Reconstruction, white communities across the South stripped African Americans of their hard-won political rights and economic gains. But a new ...
08.05.2020 The Gilded Age \| How the Other Half Lives \| 3 In the spring of 1883, Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt threw the grandest party New York had ever seen, claiming her spot at the top of the city’s social hierarchy. The Gilded Age drove feverish growth in America’s cities. Populations swelled. Skyscrapers ...
07.29.2020 The Gilded Age \| Rise of the Robber Barons \| 2 In the 1870s and 1880s, businessmen clawed their way to the top of the new industrial economy, accumulating staggering fortunes. Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller ruthlessly eliminated his rivals one by one, seizing control over the nation’s refineries. Steel magnate ...
07.22.2020 The Gilded Age \| Carnival of Corruption \| 1 In 1869, America connected its vast, sprawling territory with its most ambitious project to date: the transcontinental railroad. The country had just emerged from the ashes of the Civil War, and the railroad galvanized people from coast to coast, offering ...
07.15.2020 Stonewall \| Eric Marcus Remembers the Voices of Stonewall \| 5 When the events of Stonewall happened in 1969, Eric Marcus was just a boy away at a New Jersey summer camp. Nearly 20 years later, he would document the voices of revolutionary LGBTQ activists like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera ...
07.08.2020 Stonewall \| Pride \| 4 After a late-night police raid on the Stonewall Inn in June 1969, the LGBTQ community fought back in the streets of Greenwich Village. Suddenly, the LGBTQ rights movement found itself catapulted onto the national stage. But questions of how radical ...
07.01.2020 Stonewall \| Why Don’t You Do Something? \| 3 Resistance at restaurants in San Francisco and Philadelphia showcased the building tension as trans activists challenged long-standing policies of discrimination. But leading gay rights groups continued to stress a calm, non-confrontational approach to reform. That all changed in the early ...
06.24.2020 Stonewall \| Turbulence \| 2 As the 1960s dawned, LGBTQ activists began to voice frustration with the gradual approach to civil rights advocated by groups like the Mattachine Society. If LGBTQ people wanted to make real progress, they concluded, they would need to take direct ...
06.17.2020 Stonewall \| Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary \| 1 In the summer of 1969, a police raid on the Stonewall Inn sparked a riot on the streets of Greenwich Village. The protest marked a turning point in the gay rights movement. But the famed resistance in New York capped ...
06.10.2020 Encore: The Space Race \| Photo Finish \| 4 JFK said that nothing in the 1960s was "...more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space..." than getting a man to the moon and back safely. As the Apollo 11 flight neared, the entire nation ...
06.03.2020 Encore: The Space Race \| Taking the Lead \| 3 In times of crisis, Americans had always put their confidence in their country’s superiority in power, technology and leadership. America had never failed them. And in 1961, hope and faith in their country burned brighter than ever as NASA prepared ...
05.27.2020 Encore: The Space Race \| Playing Catch Up \| 2 Information sharing was normal in the global scientific community, but when it came to rockets, normal rules didn’t apply. If the details got passed along to civilian scientists, there was no telling where that intel might end up… But for ...
05.20.2020 Encore: The Space Race \| Starting Gun \| 1 Remember Werner von Braun? We talked a little bit about him in our Cold War series. He was in charge of the German rocket program in World War II. First used to lob missiles and bombs all over Europe, von ...
05.13.2020 The WWII Home Front \| United We Win \| 2 As the nation’s factories and shipyards ramped up production for the war, the demand for labor exploded. Millions of women and minorities entered the workforce for the first time, finding a path to prosperity and opportunity. But as Americans joined ...
05.06.2020 The WWII Home Front - Arsenal of Democracy \| 1 On December 7, 1941, hundreds of Japanese warplanes rained death and destruction down on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor—shocking the nation and drawing it into World War II. The U.S. had been ravaged by the Great Depression. Mobilizing ...

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