American History Tellers

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. When their demands for reform fell on deaf ears, the protesters grew more desperate. They took up muskets, swords, and clubs and formed blockades to s...

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 people around the world were already dying on an unprecedented scale due to World War I, Spanish flu devastated American cities, killing more than 675,000...

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 for years had asked the city to take similar steps but until now it hasn’t happened. On this episode we get an update on these developments from Hannibal B...

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! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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 Los Angeles. William Mulholland, the Los Angeles water department superintendent, could finally breathe a little easier. The city now had full control over its water supply for the foreseeable future.  But he would discover that some things can’t b...

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 would come to be known as California’s Civil War would mark the 1920s with a series of attacks and reprisals between the valley and the city two hundred miles south.  With Los Angeles sending agents north to buy more land and secure yet more wat...

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 conspiracy, fanned by socialist Job Harriman. With the formation of the Aqueduct Investigation Board, engineer William Mulholland found his methods and his purpose suddenly under a microscope. Land deals from nearly a decade ago would threaten to der...

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 source of water. Los Angeles Water Department superintendent William Mulholland set about constructing one of the largest public works projects the state of California has ever seen. But first, he would have to convince the voters of Los Angeles to approv...

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 was growing too fast. With no consistently reliable water source and a desert climate leading to a decade-long drought, the city would have to begin looking elsewhere. In the Owens River Valley, over two hundred miles north of the city, a vast, rush...

The Civil War forced the warring families of Clay County into an uneasy truce. The Garrards, Whites, Howards, and Bakers found themselves allied as they fought for the Union. But the war brought new challenges: the Northern army destroyed Clay County’s salt mines in order to keep them out of the hands of the South, and the Emancipation Proclamation brought an end to slavery, which had helped make...

The longest and bloodiest feud in American history erupted in the 1840s in Clay County, Kentucky — where it raged for nearly a century and ultimately claimed more than 150 lives. The Clay County War, also known as the Baker-Howard Feud, pitted four families against each other: the powerful Garrads and Whites, who assembled vast wealth mining salt, and the less influential Bakers and Howards. In ti...

In September 2019 Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren invoked the memory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire at a campaign rally just a few blocks from the site of fire in Manhattan. It was a powerful reminder of just how deep the legacy of the disaster runs. Organized labor and workplace safety have come a long way since the fire but after years of political opposit...

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 only watch from the sidelines as the case against the Triangle bosses went to trial. The 146 deaths resulting from the fire had been sifted through the state’s legal machine and condensed into a single woman: a 24-year-old sewing machine operator named...

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 a fire broke out near closing time on a Saturday afternoon, these same workers found themselves swept up in a catastrophe. Some would escape, but many would not.  In the weeks that followed, a city mourned and began to wrestle with questions of...

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 protest in late 1909. For the first time, an industry of women sought not to just halt production at one factory — they wanted to put the brakes on an entire trade.  With over four hundred garment factories shut down, factory owners banded toget...

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 girls. It was one of the deadliest workplace disasters in American history. Caused by a combination of carelessness and poor safety measures, the fire eventually set off a wave of workplace reforms that changed industry in America and sent New York party...

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 history was lost until the 1970s, when a renewed interest in the Dutch period led to the founding of the New Netherland Center. Here, thousands of previously untranslated records shed new light on this crucial moment in Gotham’s history. Our gue...

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 flourished. Even English residents of New England and Virginia sent their goods to Europe via the future New York Harbor, because the Dutch were so good at the business of shipping. Dutch features that would become part of American culture — from cookies...

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 to take charge of the unruly population of New Amsterdam. He soon clashed with Adrian Van der Donck, the leader of the opposition, who was secretly crafting a formal legal complaint that would compel the Dutch government to give the colony a form of...

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 Company, declared war on local tribes, sending soldiers to slaughter them in their villages. The tribes responded with waves of death and destruction that would set the European settlers back decades in their development.  A new colonist named A...

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 pirates, prostitutes and smugglers. That was because the West India Company, which ran New Amsterdam, insisted on controlling all trade — something it simply couldn't manage effectively. Finally, in 1640, the Company gave up its monopoly, and what had been...

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 between the English colonies in New England and Virginia. New Netherland began with tiny numbers of people from different backgrounds. They settled the entire region that Hudson had traveled, from Delaware to New York to Connecticut. But being spread...

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 promptly found himself and his crew stranded in icy waters off the coast of Norway. As supplies dwindled, Hudson announced to his frostbitten crew that the ship would change course. They set off across the Atlantic Ocean in search of an alternative rout...

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 significantly different than the narrative that emerged at the time. A new app developed by scholars at Florida State University now seeks to give a fuller picture of Till’s lynching by taking users on a GPS guided tour around the Mississippi Delta and...

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 down the Nazi atomic bomb, they would also need scientific expertise. For that, they turned to the Dutch-American physicist Samuel Goudsmit.  Goudsmit wasn’t the brigade’s first choice—far from it. He was considered weak and timid, and even Goud...