Anonymous America

 It’s the most iconic candy of the season — and it has almost nothing to do with Halloween. Candy corn was dreamed up in a Philadelphia candy shop back in the 1880s by a confectioner named George Renninger, molding a chewy “butter cream” into little farm shapes. Because 1880s America thought of corn as livestock feed, it was sold under names like “Chicken Feed,” complete with a rooster on the box....

 Nearly 3,500 Americans have received the Medal of Honor. Exactly one was a woman — and she’s still the only one. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker earned her medical degree in 1855, then showed up to serve as a Civil War surgeon and was told a woman couldn’t. She volunteered unpaid until the Army finally relented and appointed her a surgeon in 1863; she crossed enemy lines to treat civilians, was captured...

Lewis Latimer was born in 1848 to a father who’d escaped slavery in a case that became a national cause. With only a few years of schooling and a stint in the Union Navy behind him, he taught himself mechanical drafting from the ground up while working as an office boy at a patent firm — and became good enough to prepare the patent drawings for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. He then patented a...

Born Elizabeth Cochran, “Nellie Bly” muscled her way into journalism and landed at Pulitzer’s New York World — which handed her a terrifying assignment: fake insanity, get committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, and report what really went on. She found rancid food, freezing baths, cruelty, and women no more insane than she was, trapped with no way to prove their sanity. Her...

A Florida sixth-grader sees the USS Indianapolis mentioned in Jaws and turns it into a history-fair project — then into a crusade. The Indianapolis had just delivered the components of the atomic bomb when a Japanese submarine sank her; roughly 900 men went into the open Pacific, and after four to five days of thirst, exposure, and the worst shark attack in recorded history, only 316 survived. The...

In 1765, dockworkers in colonial Virginia found a small boy, alone and crying, speaking a language none of them understood. No parents, no papers — just a name he kept repeating. That abandoned child grew into a giant, and became one of the most legendary soldiers of the entire American Revolution — a man some called George Washington’s one-man army. This is the story of Peter Francisco, where his...

The Gestapo called her “the most dangerous of all Allied spies” and sent their cruelest officers to hunt her down. What they didn’t know was that their most-wanted agent was an American woman — running circles around them on a wooden leg. Rejected by her own government for being female, then for being an amputee, Virginia Hall went to work for the enemy of her enemy and became one of the most effe...

Open your refrigerator and look inside. Almost everything in there crossed hundreds of miles in a cold truck to reach you — and that was impossible until one man made it possible. He was orphaned young, left school around the eighth grade, and taught himself engineering out of books. Then he invented the thing that keeps the whole world’s food from spoiling. This is the story of the self-taught ge...

The Golden Hour — Jonathan Letterman | Anonymous America Every time an ambulance races to the scene, a nurse sorts the wounded by urgency, and a patient moves from first responder to ER to recovery — you’re watching a system that one Civil War surgeon invented from scratch in a matter of weeks. In 1862, wounded men were left to die in the open for days because no one had built a way to go get them...

 A hundred years ago, Halloween wasn't candy and costumes — it was a night of broken gates, tipped outhouses, and ruined gardens. One woman in a small Kansas town got tired of finding her prize flowerbeds destroyed every November first, and she fought back in the most unexpected way imaginable: she threw a party. In doing so, she quietly helped reinvent how an entire nation celebrates the last nig...

 When the Montana blizzards buried the roads and the stagecoach couldn't get through, the mail still came — carried on foot, through the storm, on snowshoes, by a cigar-smoking, six-foot woman in her sixties who was born into slavery. She became the first Black woman to carry the United States mail on a star route, and she never missed a day. This is the story of a legend the history books nearly...

 In September 1975, an ex-Marine in a San Francisco crowd saw a woman raise a pistol at President Gerald Ford — and lunged, grabbing her arm as the shot went wide. Overnight he was a national hero. Within days, the press had exposed the most private corner of his life, his family had turned away, and the man who saved a president began to lose everything. This is the story of a good deed that cost...

 In a freezing shed behind a Vermont farmhouse, a self-taught farm boy spent two years trying to photograph something that vanishes the instant you touch it: a single snowflake. When he finally succeeded, he gave the world one of its most beautiful sights — and one of its most repeated truths, that no two are ever alike. He asked for no fame, made almost no money, and in the end the snow he loved...

 During the American Revolution, a wounded soldier slipped out of a field hospital and dug a musket ball out of his own thigh with a penknife — rather than let a doctor discover the secret. Because that soldier was a woman, fighting a war her country wouldn't let her join. She carried that lead in her leg for the rest of her life, then had to battle her own government just to be paid for it. 

Maurice Hilleman was a quest to rid the world of disease.  All he needed was a few samples and a couple of chickens.

A melted candy bar sends a young scientist's mind racing.  When he was done thinkingm,  the way we cook was changed forever.

It's WWII, and tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers were rushing their camp.  And every American in that camp would have died had it not been for a machine gun and a dentist...

 He imagined the modern world before the world was ready for it — alternating current, the electric motor, wireless power, ideas so far ahead they read like prophecy. He lit up cities and dreamed of free energy for everyone. And then he died alone in a New York hotel room, broke, feeding pigeons, his name fading while lesser men took the credit. This is the genius who powered the future and was le...

 In 1951, a young mother from Baltimore walked into Johns Hopkins for cancer treatment and never walked back out. But a piece of her did — and it's still alive today. Her cells built the polio vaccine, launched IVF, mapped the human genome, and rode into space, all while her own family couldn't afford a doctor. This is the story of the woman science never asked, but never forgot to profit from. 

Annie Taylor felt invisibile, and she didn't like it. So she decided to do something that would force the world to pay attention to her.  She was going to get in a barrel, and ride it over Niagra Falls. The trick was staying alive to tell about it....

 During the American Revolution, a slave named James is recruited by the Marquis De Lafayette to become a spy for the Americans. The information he provided would ultimately lead to Cornwallis' defeat at Yorktown, and the end of the war. America got her Independence. It would be years before she returned the favor to James. 

 On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we found a couple of stories you may have never heard. Stories that occurred inside the Twin Towers on that horrible morning. But these are different. These will, as they should, put a lump in your throat as we all remember one of the worst days  in our country's history, but they will aso make you smile. It's a tale of two....dogs.* This episode is dedicated to t...

 She may very well be the most successful code-breaker in American History. She literally wrote the handbook on the subject. And through a strange string of events, she became one of the founding members of what would eventually become the NSA, an organization that can trace its roots to the home of a Chicago millionaire who was convinced that William Shakespeare left coded messages in all his pla...

A young man gets a B- on a history project.  Before he's done, it will be the most famous B- in history. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts, and if you enjoy this episode, leave us a rating and a review. And share, share, share! Subscribe and never miss an episode! Questions, comments, ideas, recipes? Email us at jerrybway@gmail.com @2026 Hey Dad Productions/Anonymous America All right...

He stole her idea.  When she sued him over it, his defense was that there was just no conceivable way that she had invented the thing he stole from her was (wait for it) "This thing is so complicated and intricate, there is no way a woman could've invented it". Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts, and if you enjoy this episode, leave us a rating and a review. And share, share, share! Su...