American History Tellers
Episodes
Encore: Tulsa Race Massacre | Bearing Witness | 5
23 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 gra...
Encore: Tulsa Race Massacre | Rebirth | 4
16 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Encore: Tulsa Race Massacre | The Invasion | 3
09 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 pr...
Encore: Tulsa Race Massacre | The Powder Keg | 2
02 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 alle...
Encore: Tulsa Race Massacre | The Promised Land | 1
26 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma boasted one of the nation’s most prosperous African-American communities. Greenwood was home to 108 Black-owned businesses,...
The Mystery of D.B. Cooper | The Man in Row 18 | 1
19 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 kne...
Bleeding Kansas | The Man Who Sparked the Civil War | 5
12 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
John Brown has been called many things: fanatic, hero, terrorist, martyr, zealot. Some of his contemporaries, including Frederick Douglass, believed t...
Bleeding Kansas | His Soul Goes Marching On | 4
05 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On October 17th, 1859, John Brown was barricaded inside the federal armory at Harpers Ferry with his hostages and his remaining followers. His attempt...
Bleeding Kansas | The Raid on Harpers Ferry | 3
28 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In December 1858, John Brown was back in Kansas and Missouri, making headlines for dramatic and deadly raids on plantations. He and his followers free...
Bleeding Kansas | The Pottawatomie Massacre | 2
21 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Bleeding Kansas | John Brown's Crusade | 1
14 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
America's Monuments | The Trouble With Confederate Statues | 7
07 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 r...
America's Monuments | 58,000 Names | 6
31 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
America's Monuments | The Mansion of the King | 5
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Few historic residences are more synonymous with their owners than Graceland. Purchased by Elvis Presley in 1957, the stately Memphis mansion was the ...
America's Monuments | The Longest Bridge | 4
17 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
America's Monuments | Four Faces | 3
10 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
America’s Monuments | A Passage Through Panama | 2
03 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, sailors and merchants dreamed of finding a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the narrow isthmus of Central America...
America’s Monuments | The Colossus of New York Harbor | 1
24 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 wi...
Great Chicago Fire | Out of the Ashes | 4
17 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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. T...
Great Chicago Fire | The Great Rebuilding | 3
10 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ha...
Great Chicago Fire | Fleeing the Flames | 2
03 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 do...
Great Chicago Fire | We Are Going to Have a Burn | 1
27 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 rav...
Presidential Inaugurations: Traditions, Crisis, and Unity | 1
20 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 In...
Coal Wars | Charles Keeney on Restoring His Great Grandfather’s Legacy | 5
13 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Once the coal miners lost the Battle of Blair Mountain, the story of their uprising was suppressed, and their leader Frank Keeney eventually faded int...
Coal Wars | The Battle of Blair Mountain | 4
06 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 we...
Coal Wars | Bloody Mingo | 3
30 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 th...
Coal Wars | The Matewan Massacre | 2
23 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 aw...
Coal Wars | The Most Dangerous Woman in America | 1
16 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Supreme Court Landmarks | The Outsize Power of the Supreme Court Today | 8
09 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout our series, we've seen how social movements and partisan politics helped influence the decisions of landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, and ...
Supreme Court Landmarks | Jane Roe | 7
02 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Supreme Court Landmarks | A Recount in Florida | 6
25 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Supreme Court Landmarks | The Warren Court | 5
18 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Supreme Court Landmarks | Loaded Weapon | 4
11 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Supreme Court Landmarks | Separate and Unequal | 3
04 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Supreme Court Landmarks | The Cherokee Cases | 2
28 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1800s, the United States was growing rapidly, seeking land and resources for its expanding population. But the growth threatened Native A...
Supreme Court Landmarks | The Predicament of John Marshall | 1
21 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Encore: Political Parties | The Reagan Revolution | 6
14 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Encore: Political Parties | The New Deal Coalition | 5
07 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Encore: Political Parties | The Golden Age of the GOP | 4
30 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 Presi...
Encore: Political Parties | The Turbulent 1850s | 3
23 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
Encore: Political Parties | Jacksonian Democracy | 2
16 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Jackson lost the 1824 presidential election to John Quincy Adams through what some called a “corrupt bargain” in the House of Representativ...
Encore: Political Parties | A Tale of Two Parties | 1
09 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
The Gilded Age | What America Failed to Learn from the Gilded Age | 7
02 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout our series, corporate giants and their exploitation of workers was disturbing evidence of capitalism run amok. That greed and disregard for...
The Gilded Age | Cross of Gold | 6
26 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 joine...
The Gilded Age | Workers Revolt! | 5
19 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As the century came to a close, labor unrest reached explosive new heights. Industrial expansion made businessmen and bankers rich. But workers faced ...
The Gilded Age | Exclusion | 4
12 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Amid the glamor and growth of the Gilded Age, racism and anti-immigrant hostility swept the nation. With the end of Reconstruction, white communities ...
The Gilded Age | How the Other Half Lives | 3
05 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 hiera...
The Gilded Age | Rise of the Robber Barons | 2
29 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1870s and 1880s, businessmen clawed their way to the top of the new industrial economy, accumulating staggering fortunes. Oil tycoon John D. Ro...
The Gilded Age | Carnival of Corruption | 1
22 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1869, America connected its vast, sprawling territory with its most ambitious project to date: the transcontinental railroad. The country had just ...
Stonewall | Eric Marcus Remembers the Voices of Stonewall | 5
15 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Stonewall | Pride | 4
08 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 L...
Stonewall | Why Don’t You Do Something? | 3
01 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Resistance at restaurants in San Francisco and Philadelphia showcased the building tension as trans activists challenged long-standing policies of dis...
Stonewall | Turbulence | 2
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As the 1960s dawned, LGBTQ activists began to voice frustration with the gradual approach to civil rights advocated by groups like the Mattachine Soci...
Stonewall | Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary | 1
17 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 th...
Encore: The Space Race | Photo Finish | 4
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 ma...
Encore: The Space Race | Taking the Lead | 3
03 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In times of crisis, Americans had always put their confidence in their country’s superiority in power, technology and leadership. America had never ...
Encore: The Space Race | Playing Catch Up | 2
27 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Encore: The Space Race | Starting Gun | 1
20 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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. Fir...
The WWII Home Front | United We Win | 2
13 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As the nation’s factories and shipyards ramped up production for the war, the demand for labor exploded. Millions of women and minorities entered th...
The WWII Home Front - Arsenal of Democracy | 1
06 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Rebellion in the Early Republic - How Early American Revolts Shaped Today’s Protests | 7
29 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Rebellion in the Early Republic - Nat Turner’s Rebellion | 6
22 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In February 1831, a solar eclipse caused the skies to darken over the isolated backwater of Southampton County, Virginia. An enslaved man and self-pro...
Rebellion in the Early Republic - Gabriel’s Rebellion | 5
15 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 cap...
Rebellion in the Early Republic - Crisis in the West | 4
08 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Rebellion in the Early Republic - The Whiskey Rebellion | 3
01 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Only a few years after Shays’ Rebellion was suppressed, a new revolt broke out in western Pennsylvania. Anti-government resentment had been growing ...
Rebellion in the Early Republic - A Constitution Shaped by Revolt | 2
25 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Tensions reached a climax in the freezing winter of 1787, as Daniel Shays and 1,500 rebel soldiers stormed the federal arsenal in Springfield, Massach...
Rebellion in the Early Republic - Farmer Uprising | 1
18 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The dust had barely settled on the American Revolution when new unrest erupted in western Massachusetts. Thousands of farmers and laborers rose up in ...
Encore: What We Learned from Fighting the Spanish Flu | 1
11 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In light of growing concerns about the coronavirus, we’re revisiting an episode we ran last spring. One hundred years ago, the Spanish flu pand...
Tulsa Race Massacre Update: Excavating Mass Graves | 7
04 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 sc...
California Water Wars - Los Angeles and the Future of Water | 6
26 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
UCLA environmental historian Jon Christensen discusses Los Angeles, its never-quenched thirst for water, and what that means for the future.Support us...
California Water Wars - Collapse | 5
19 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With the failure of the Watterson brothers’ banks, the Owens Valley community was forced to abandon its fight for water rights against the city of L...
California Water Wars - We Who Are About to Die Salute You | 4
12 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
After years of letting their water be used by the city of Los Angeles, the farmers and ranchers of the Owens River Valley decided to fight back. What ...
California Water Wars - “There It Is—Take It” | 3
05 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
By 1912, the Los Angeles aqueduct project was nearing completion. But as it approached the finish line, fears were growing among the public of a vast ...
California Water Wars - Building the Dream | 2
29 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
By 1907, the city of Los Angeles had found a solution to its water problem. Two hundred miles north in the Owens River Valley was a never-ending sourc...
California Water Wars - A River in the Desert | 1
22 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
By the turn of the twentieth century, Los Angeles had grown from a dusty, crime-ridden pueblo into a thriving metropolis. The only problem was that it...
Kentucky Blood Feud - The Revenge of Bad Tom Baker | 2
18 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Civil War forced the warring families of Clay County into an uneasy truce. The Garrards, Whites, Howards, and Bakers found themselves allied as th...
Kentucky Blood Feud - The Murder of Daniel Bates | 1
11 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The longest and bloodiest feud in American history erupted in the 1840s in Clay County, Kentucky — where it raged for nearly a century and ultimatel...
The Legacy of The Triangle Fire | 5
20 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In September 2019 Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren invoked the memory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire at a campa...
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire - In America They Don’t Let You Burn | 4
13 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of the biggest workplace catastrophe in the city of New York, the survivors of the Triangle fire and the families of the victims could onl...
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire - Sixteen Minutes | 3
06 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Two years after the labor strikes that shook the city of New York, the workers of Triangle factory returned to better wages and lower hours. But when ...
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire - Revolt of the Girls | 2
30 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Inspired by the labor strikes at Triangle and other factories in Lower Manhattan, more than 30,000 garment workers took to the streets of New York in ...
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire - Wildcat | 1
23 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan, claiming the lives of 146 garment workers — mostly women and gi...
Dutch Manhattan - The Dutch Influence Today | 7
16 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
New York City was founded on the Dutch principles of tolerance and capitalism, both of which were new ideas at the time. But much of the city's early ...
Dutch Manhattan - New York | 6
09 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the years after Adrian Van der Donck won a municipal charter for New Amsterdam, and under Peter Stuyvesant's stern but capable rule, the city flour...
Dutch Manhattan - The One-Legged Soldier | 5
02 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Peter Stuyvesant was fresh from losing a leg in battle against the Spanish when he arrived in Manhattan in 1647. He was a tough soldier who was ready ...
Dutch Manhattan - The Sheriff Comes to Town | 4
25 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Just as it was becoming a New World success story, disaster came to New Amsterdam. Willem Kieft, the Dutch leader appointed by the West India Trading ...
Dutch Manhattan - Pirates and Prostitutes | 3
18 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
New Amsterdam was a desperate place. For the first decade of its existence, the Dutch city on the tip of Manhattan Island served as a haven for pirate...
Dutch Manhattan - Buying Manhattan | 2
11 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Twelve years after Henry Hudson's 1609 trip charting the Hudson River, the Dutch used his voyage as the basis for a new colony, which would be wedged ...
Dutch Manhattan - Henry Hudson’s Big Mistake | 1
04 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1609, a headstrong English sea captain named Henry Hudson set out on behalf of the Dutch East India Company to find a trade route to Asia — and p...
Remembering Emmett Till | 7
28 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The murder of Emmett Till galvanized the nascent civil rights movement. But the full story of what happened in Money, Miss., on August 28, 1955, is si...
The Bastard Brigade - Showdown in the Alps | 6
21 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Alsos mission had a hard-charging leader in Boris Pash and an eccentric band of recruits. But if the so-called Bastard Brigade was going to track ...
The Bastard Brigade - The Most Wanted Men | 5
14 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As the Nazis inched closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon, panic grew among the Allied forces. The Alsos Mission — otherwise known as the Bastard Bri...
The Bastard Brigade - The Strangest Man | 4
07 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
By mid-1944, the Allies’ fight to track down and stop the Nazi atomic program had met with failure and disappointment. And so the Manhattan Project ...
The Bastard Brigade - The Kennedy Curse | 3
31 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In early 1944, the Allies developed a desperate plan to destroy several massive bunkers in Nazi-controlled France—bunkers that reportedly housed ato...
The Bastard Brigade - The Juice | 2
24 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The discovery of uranium fission in Nazi Germany in 1938 terrified Allied nuclear scientists—especially since the Nazi atomic bomb project, the drea...
The Bastard Brigade - The Accidental A-Bomb | 1
17 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Second World War ended with two black mushroom clouds rising over the scorched remains of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But most people don’t realize ...
The Statue of Liberty | 6
03 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Statue of Liberty is one of America’s most iconic monuments to freedom. As we head into the Fourth of July holiday, we’ll look back on the ama...
Tulsa Race Massacre - Legacy and Lessons | 5
26 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Nearly a century after a white mob leveled the affluent Tulsa district known as Black Wall Street, how is Greenwood faring? Mechelle Brown is the...
Tulsa Race Massacre - Rebirth | 4
19 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Tulsa Race Massacre - The Invasion | 3
12 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
By midnight on Tuesday, May 31, 1921, some Greenwood residents assumed the riot was calming down. Many families, far away from the action at the court...