Hometown History

Memphis, Tennessee. In 2015, musical artist Jack White paid $300,000 for a 78 RPM record at auction. The record was of Elvis Presley singing the songs My Happiness and That's When Your Heartache Begins. It was the first record Elvis ever made. That $300,000 price tag is a far cry from the $4 that Elvis originally paid to make the record at Sun Studio, a place I recently visited. Elvis wanted t...

Memphis, Tennessee. Well, currently we are sitting in the center of Sun Studio, where rock and roll was born, here in Memphis, Tennessee. You're hearing the song, Rocket 88, widely considered to be the first rock and roll song ever recorded. It was recorded here, at Sun Studio, by Jackie Brinston and his Delta Cats. The Delta Cats included Ike Turner, one of the many legendary musicians, to re...

Nashville, Tennessee. In December 1864, Confederate troops were moving toward Nashville with the plan. Union troops had occupied the southern city for the last two years, and Lieutenant General John Bell Hood wanted to take it back. Luckily, the Union Army had prepared for this very moment by building a 180,000 square foot fortress near downtown Nashville called Fort Negley. The Union garrison arm...

Memphis, Tennessee. You'll see pretty browns in beautiful gowns. You'll see tailor-made and hand-me-downs. You'll meet honest men and pickpocket skill. You'll find that business never closes till somebody gets killed. If Beale Street could talk, if Beale Street could talk, married men would have to take their beds in war. Except one or two who never drink booze and the blind man on...

Wabash, Indiana. It was raining on the day of the execution, as Fletcher described it. The rain during the forenoon had the effect of making the streets and almost every other place exceedingly sloppy and muddy. The ground having recently been frozen, the mud was not very deep, but every place was very slippery. While the crowd were assembled around the jail waiting, a rather green young man attem...

Wabash, Indiana. Before it was called Ridge Valley, the community the French family was living in was known as Keller Station. Isaac Keller and his brother own large tracts of land in this area, as well as a popular inn and tavern that was the social hub of the neighborhood. Isaac Keller actually owned the land that the French's, and now the Hubbards, have been living on. On their way to the c...

Wabash, Indiana. Aaron French moved in from Cincinnati. He had only been here approximately six months, so he himself was a transient character. He had attempted to be a businessman in Cincinnati, involved in the meatpacking industry, and went broke. And so he decided to maybe try his hand at farming. So he moves up here, gets a place as a tenant farmer, and does what he can with that, and apparen...

Wabash, Indiana. I remember the first time I tried to visit the French family grave, just outside of Wabash, Indiana. It was a Sunday, in the middle of winter, one day before the mini blizzard that closed county schools and buried every car on Market Street up to its door handles. I had just moved to town, and I was feeling the things you feel when you move someplace new. I was wondering if the pe...

The sky to the west of the small town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, glowed red before the sunrise, on the morning of October 8, 1871. It was Sunday, and when the local priest stepped out of his church to greet local parishioners, the air was smoky and white ash fell like snow. The priest, whose name was Peter Pernan, turned and went back into the church and ran to the front of the sanctuary. He grabbed...

The mineral-stained cliffs of Pictured Rocks rise 200 feet above Lake Superior in colors you wouldn't believe, iron oxide reds, copper greens, manganese browns, and limonite whites. But here's the twist: this remote corner of Michigan might be more than just beautiful. According to Science Digest, Sault Ste Marie in the Upper Peninsula is projected to be the best place to live in America b...

A tourist pays $700 for a fishing charter on Michigan's Torch Lake, catches an 8-pound beauty, and brings home dinner. There's just one problem: that fish is six pounds of meat and two pounds of tumor. The lake won't be safe to eat from for another 800 years. Welcome to Michigan's copper country, where the industry that supplied 90% of the Union's copper during the Civil War le...

The town of Gay, Michigan sits on Lake Superior with a 265-foot smokestack rising from apocalyptic black sand beaches that can't grow grass. This isn't a warzone, it's what's left after the Mohawk Mining Company extracted half a billion dollars in copper, then sold every house in town for three to seven dollars and vanished. The stamp sands here are so loaded with arsenic they'...

An 87-year-old woman sits in an easy chair by the window of a 148-year-old general store, scowling at passersby 411 hours a day. She's been called a bridge troll, a local legend, and Michigan's grumpiest shopkeeper. But when you treat her right, and maybe buy a $35 hoodie, Arbutus Peterson will surprise you with unexpected kindness in Phoenix, a dying mining town on the Keweenaw Peninsula....

In the heart of Michigan's Upper Peninsula lies Calumet, once the wealthiest town in Copper Country and nearly Michigan's capital city. Today, Shane explores the ghost towns and vanished communities of the Keweenaw Peninsula, where Finnish immigrants built an industrial empire that suddenly collapsed. From White City's abandoned amusement parks to Jacobsville's bronze cemetery mark...

Keweenaw, Michigan. The first mining boom in American history was not the California Gold Rush, the Klondike Gold Rush, or any other gold rush. The first mining boom in American history was the Copper Rush of the uppermost part of the Upper Peninsula, the Keweenaw Peninsula. And by the time it was over, this boom actually had a greater economic impact than either of those gold rushes. In fact, fro...

The distinctive sound of the Mackinac Bridge is due to the grating in the two center lanes, one going each way. This grating allows air to pass through the bridge, rather than pushing against it. Part of the reason for this technology was the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge years earlier in Washington State. There's footage of this. You see the entire bridge convulsing and rolling like a...

In the year 2100, Michigan's Upper Peninsula might be the best place to live in North America, if you can handle the isolation. Right now, it's the emptiest region in the eastern United States, with sprawling sugar sand beaches completely abandoned on 85-degree summer days. If it were its own state, the UP would be the least populated in America by 50%, despite being larger than Connecticu...

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. This episode is focused less on history than a hometown that specializes in history. Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is famous for tourist attractions and southern hospitality, but it's also a hotbed of local culture and storytelling. There are more than two dozen museums and galleries in the area, and whatever your interests happen to be, there is likely something that will a...

Asheville, North Carolina. This new year, why not let Audible expand your life by listening? Explore over 1 million audiobooks, podcasts, and exclusive Audible originals that'll inspire and motivate you. Tap into your well-being with advice and insight from leading professionals and experts on better health, relationships, career, finance, investing, and more. Maybe you want to kick a bad habi...

Only 150 speakers remain. The Cherokee language, once spoken across a million square miles of North America, is disappearing, and COVID just killed 25% of the remaining middle dialect speakers. At the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina, cultural liaison John John shares the devastating legacy of boarding schools, the "kill the Indian, save the man" policy that nearly...

The Cherokee don't believe in signatures. You'd understand why after 40 broken treaties with the U.S. government. In 1763, Britain promised no colonization west of the Appalachians, settlers came anyway. In 1785, the U.S. guaranteed Cherokee land protection, it was seized within years. By 1868, this once-mighty nation had walked the Trail of Tears and lost a million square miles of their h...

Oak Ridge, Tennessee. One of the most important cities in the history of civilization was founded on Oak Ridge when the world-altering Manhattan Project made this area its district headquarters. Alan and Ray take us a little deeper into the science of Oak Ridge. And I know that you said that initially they wanted a location and they wanted to keep it at least out of the press. So did the locals im...

On a warm summer day in 1900, the village idiot of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, laid on his back in the middle of the woods and heard the voice of God. Returning home, he told his wife, In the woods, as I lay on the ground and looked up into the sky, there came to me a voice as loud and as sharp as thunder. The voice told me to sleep with my head on the ground for forty nights, and I will be shown vision...

Wabash, Indiana. We've named this episode After the Hunt for the Red October, because it's like that, but instead of a Soviet submarine, the search is on for a powerful sleeper agent known to the U.S. government only as Dorothy. The year is 1981, and her network of associates has infiltrated the U.S. military to the extent that the Department of Defense has concerns over national security,...

Indianapolis, Indiana. The greatest author in the history of my home state of Indiana is by most counts the incomparable Kurt Vonnegut. Before I ever knew he was a fellow Hoosier, I had chewed through a dozen of his books in high school, in place of schoolwork, the Bible, and everything else. At some point, you've probably read him too. Classics like Mother Night, Slaughterhouse-Five, Dead Eye...