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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Presidential Inaugurations:...

01.20.2021

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 ...

American History Tellers episodes:

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 ...
01.14.2021 Wondery Presents Business Movers In Wondery’s newest series, Business Movers, host Lindsay Graham dives deep into the inner workings of some of the most successful companies of all time. From the origin stories of their famed leaders to the million dollar idea that catapulted ...
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 ...
12.21.2020 Wondery Presents Business Wars: TikTok vs Instagram In the newest season of Wondery’s Business Wars, TikTok vs Instagram, they track the war between two social media giants. Within the last couple years, TikTok has become one of the most popular apps around the world. And despite political ...
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 ...
04.29.2020 Rebellion in the Early Republic - How Early American Revolts Shaped Today’s Protests \| 7 In 1799, the U.S. government imposed a new tax on houses, land, and slaves to fund an expanded military. A man named John Fries led Pennsylvania Dutch farmers in protest of the law. What became known as Fries’ Rebellion was ...
04.22.2020 Rebellion in the Early Republic - Nat Turner’s Rebellion \| 6 In February 1831, a solar eclipse caused the skies to darken over the isolated backwater of Southampton County, Virginia. An enslaved man and self-proclaimed prophet named Nat Turner saw it as a sign from God that it was time to ...
04.15.2020 Rebellion in the Early Republic - Gabriel’s Rebellion \| 5 As a new century dawned on the United States, an enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel began planning a bold plot to overthrow slavery in Virginia’s capital. The uprising would change the future of slavery in the South. In the spring and ...
04.08.2020 Rebellion in the Early Republic - Crisis in the West \| 4 In 1794, anti-government protests grew into an all-out rebellion, and President Washington faced his first major test of federal authority. Some 7,000 armed Westerners marched on Pittsburgh and threatened its residents. Violent resistance to the whiskey tax soon spread from ...
04.01.2020 Rebellion in the Early Republic - The Whiskey Rebellion \| 3 Only a few years after Shays’ Rebellion was suppressed, a new revolt broke out in western Pennsylvania. Anti-government resentment had been growing on the frontier for years. Then in 1791, the U.S. government handed down a tax on domestic spirits. ...
03.25.2020 Rebellion in the Early Republic - A Constitution Shaped by Revolt \| 2 Tensions reached a climax in the freezing winter of 1787, as Daniel Shays and 1,500 rebel soldiers stormed the federal arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts. The rebels hoped to seize arms and ammunition and burn Boston to the ground. What they ...
03.18.2020 Rebellion in the Early Republic - Farmer Uprising \| 1 The dust had barely settled on the American Revolution when new unrest erupted in western Massachusetts. Thousands of farmers and laborers rose up in protest against unjust taxes and a state government that seemed as oppressive as the British Crown. ...
03.11.2020 Encore: What We Learned from Fighting the Spanish Flu \| 1 In light of growing concerns about the coronavirus, we’re revisiting an episode we ran last spring. One hundred years ago, the Spanish flu pandemic forever reshaped the way the United States responds to public health crises. At a time when ...
03.04.2020 Tulsa Race Massacre Update: Excavating Mass Graves \| 7 New archaeological evidence suggests mass graves holding the remains of victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre may exist on two sites in Tulsa. And now scientists plan to excavate portions of those sites to try and uncover the truth. Residents ...
02.26.2020 California Water Wars - Los Angeles and the Future of Water \| 6 UCLA environmental historian Jon Christensen discusses Los Angeles, its never-quenched thirst for water, and what that means for the future. Support us by supporting our sponsors!

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