Al Capone’s Missing $100 Million, and the TV Journalist Who Embarrassed Himself to Find It
On the night of April 21, 1986, an estimated 30 million Americans sat in front of their televisions waiting for a moment that almost no one alive had ever seen: a live, prime-time excavation of a gang...
28 Touko 52min
How the Dollar Created America (Part 2)
Part 2 of our exploration of how the U.S. dollar is older than the United States itself and has a level of power beyond the Federal Reserve and even beyond the U.S. government. We’re joined by guest B...
26 Touko 51min
How the Dollar Created America (Part 1)
The U.S. dollar's origin story begins not in Philadelphia or Washington, but in a half-frozen mining valley in 16th-century Bohemia, where Saxon miners accidentally named their town after a saint and ...
21 Touko 51min
From Patriot to Pirate: How Revolutionary War Hero Sam Mason Became a River Outlaw
One of the greatest threat to early America was piracy, but it wasn’t found in the Caribbean or Gulf Coast. It was pirates on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Samuel Mason fought bravely at the 1777 S...
19 Touko 48min
Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs
When Russia's Dowager Empress was pregnant with the future Tsar Nicholas II in 1868, she dreamed that a peasant would one day kill her son. The idea terrified her, and for the rest of her days she liv...
14 Touko 46min
The Revolutionary War’s Charlie Wilson: A Spanish Spy Chief Funded the Siege of Yorktown, Helping Washington Win
Everyone knows the American Revolution was won at Yorktown in 1781, when Cornwallis’s Army was trapped, but almost no one knows that victory depended on a Spanish intelligence operative who raised 500...
12 Touko 59min
Europe Dominated Because It Never Stopped Fighting Itself
Why did the West dominate all rivals on Earth? How did a group of states that were nearly wiped out in the late Middle Ages by enemies to the south and east grow to conquer the globe by the 16th centu...
7 Touko 54min
A Land Flowing with Pork and Beef: Colonial America’s Rise to the World’s Meat Consumption Capital
When European settlers arrived in North America, they enjoyed a level of meat consumption that was absolutely unimaginable in the Old World. An average European was lucky to see meat once a week while...
5 Touko 50min
