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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Encore: National Parks | Pl...

09.15.2021

In 1914, America’s National Parks had a problem: no one was using them. And those few that were faced unmaintained roads, trails strewn with garbage, and a lack of amenities that made it hard for the average American to enjoy ...

American History Tellers episodes:

09.15.2021 Encore: National Parks \| Playgrounds of the People \| 5 In 1914, America’s National Parks had a problem: no one was using them. And those few that were faced unmaintained roads, trails strewn with garbage, and a lack of amenities that made it hard for the average American to enjoy ...
09.09.2021 Introducing: 9/12 How did 9/11 the day become 9/11 the idea? That question drives award-winning host Dan Taberski (Missing Richard Simmons, Running From COPS, The Line) to shift his focus to what happened on 9/12, and every day after that. 9/12 is ...
09.08.2021 Encore: National Parks \| The Great Disaster \| 4 In the early morning hours of Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the city of San Francisco was torn apart by a huge earthquake and devastating fire. As the city rebuilt, it also sought to ensure that if fire were to strike ...
09.01.2021 Encore: National Parks \| Rough Rider \| 3 Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was atop a mountain when he heard the news: an assassin’s bullet would likely take President McKinley’s life, and make Roosevelt president. Upon his inauguration shortly thereafter, Roosevelt brought his lifelong love of the natural world ...
08.25.2021 Encore: National Parks \| Calling in the Cavalry \| 2 Yellowstone was our nation’s first national park. Its strange, wondrous landscapes were perfect for exploration - and exploitation. Upon Yellowstone’s discovery by white Americans, two races began: one to build a railroad to the park to capture its commercial potential, ...
08.18.2021 Encore: National Parks \| The Business of Nature \| 1 America's national parks are truly among our country's greatest treasures. But many of these beautiful landmarks have ugly pasts. On this series, we’ll explore the often forgotten histories of some of America’s most breathtaking natural wonders, starting with the park ...
08.16.2021 Wondery Presents - Dr. Death: Miracle Man Paolo is a smart and handsome surgeon, renowned for his ability to perform surgeries that transform his patients’ lives. When television producer Benita covers him for a story, he’ll transform her life too, but not in the ways she expects. ...
08.11.2021 The Fight for the First U.S. Olympics \| Passing the Torch \| 4 The 1904 St. Louis Olympics were marred by controversy and poorly organized events like the marathon. But at least they took place as scheduled. In 1916, after the outbreak of World War I, they were canceled entirely. A century later, ...
08.04.2021 The Fight for the First U.S. Olympics \| The Home Stretch \| 3 In the summer of 1904, the young women of the Fort Shaw Indian School basketball team took the St. Louis Olympics and the World’s Fair by storm with their fast-paced, dynamic play. But could they keep their undefeated record and ...
07.28.2021 The Fight for the First U.S. Olympics \| Let the Games Begin \| 2 In 1904, St. Louis was thrust into the national spotlight, as it played host to both the World’s Fair and America’s first Olympic Games. After a bitter fight over which American city would host, Olympic founder Pierre De Coubertin had ...
07.21.2021 The Fight for the First U.S. Olympics \| A Tale of Two Cities \| 1 In the late 1800s, European fascination with the culture of ancient Greece, and a growing interest in physical education and fitness, led to the idea of resurrecting the Olympic Games of antiquity. A French nobleman named Pierre de Coubertin took ...
07.14.2021 Lost Colony of Roanoke \| Searching for Traces \| 3 The mystery of what became of the first English colonists has baffled historians for centuries. But over the past decade, archaeologists have uncovered some compelling clues, including parts of a 16th century gun, and fragments of English pottery at a ...
07.07.2021 Lost Colony of Roanoke \| The Vanishing \| 2 On April 26, 1587, 117 colonists sailed from England to establish a permanent settlement on the east coast of North America. After a long voyage fraught with storms and spoiled food, they landed on the island of Roanoke, in the ...
06.30.2021 Lost Colony of Roanoke \| In the Name of the Queen \| 1 In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth the First of England was locked in a battle for global dominance with Spain. She picked her favorite advisor, Walter Raleigh, to claim land in North America. In the coming years, Raleigh’s men made ...
06.25.2021 The Walker Affair \| The Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny \| 1 In the mid-1800s, the United States was a young nation awash with mercenaries, adventurers, and entrepreneurs looking to take advantage of the country’s ever-expanding boundaries. Into this chaotic atmosphere stepped a young lawyer and newspaper editor from Tennessee named William ...
06.23.2021 Encore: Tulsa Race Massacre \| Bearing Witness \| 5 Like many Americans, Anneliese Bruner didn’t hear about the Tulsa Race Massacre growing up. But what made it surprising in her case was that her grandmother and great-grandmother were survivors of the massacre. Still, a conspiracy of silence surrounded the ...
06.16.2021 Encore: Tulsa Race Massacre \| Rebirth \| 4 On June 2, 1921, thousands of black Tulsans interned at the Tulsa Fairgrounds woke under armed guard. Many had no idea where their loved ones were or if they were still alive; they didn’t know whether their homes were still ...
06.09.2021 Encore: Tulsa Race Massacre \| The Invasion \| 3 On the night of Tuesday, May 31, 1921, a violent white mob attacked the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As the night progressed, the disorganized mob transformed into something even more deadly: a highly organized force led ...
06.02.2021 Encore: Tulsa Race Massacre \| The Powder Keg \| 2 As Black teenager Dick Rowland sat in a jail cell at the Tulsa courthouse, news of his arrest flew through the town. Egged on by rumors about his alleged rape of white teenager Sarah Page, a white mob bent on ...
05.26.2021 Encore: Tulsa Race Massacre \| The Promised Land \| 1 In 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma boasted one of the nation’s most prosperous African-American communities. Greenwood was home to 108 Black-owned businesses, two theaters, 15 physicians, two newspapers, and a luxury hotel. It was nicknamed “the Black Wall Street.” Then, on May ...
05.19.2021 The Mystery of D.B. Cooper \| The Man in Row 18 \| 1 On November 24th, 1971, a man on a Boeing 727 bound for Seattle handed a flight attendant a note that read, “Miss, I have a bomb here.” No one knew the man’s real name. But soon, the press was calling ...
05.12.2021 Bleeding Kansas \| The Man Who Sparked the Civil War \| 5 John Brown has been called many things: fanatic, hero, terrorist, martyr, zealot. Some of his contemporaries, including Frederick Douglass, believed that were it not for his raid on Harpers Ferry, the Civil War would never have started. But did Brown’s ...
05.05.2021 Bleeding Kansas \| His Soul Goes Marching On \| 4 On October 17th, 1859, John Brown was barricaded inside the federal armory at Harpers Ferry with his hostages and his remaining followers. His attempt to lead an antislavery insurrection had failed. A detachment of U.S. Marines led by Colonel Robert ...
04.28.2021 Bleeding Kansas \| The Raid on Harpers Ferry \| 3 In December 1858, John Brown was back in Kansas and Missouri, making headlines for dramatic and deadly raids on plantations. He and his followers freed 11 enslaved men and women and led them on an 1,100-mile journey to freedom in ...
04.21.2021 Bleeding Kansas \| The Pottawatomie Massacre \| 2 On the night of May 24th, 1856, radical abolitionist John Brown and seven of his followers crept along the banks of Kansas’s Pottawatomie Creek and stormed a proslavery settlement. They dragged five men from their cabins and killed them in ...
04.14.2021 Bleeding Kansas \| John Brown's Crusade \| 1 In the 1850s, the United States was lurching toward a crisis over slavery -- and abolitionist John Brown stepped into the fray. Brown believed it was his God-given destiny to destroy slavery. His crusade took him from abolitionist meetings in ...
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 ...
03.24.2021 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 ...

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