American History Tellers

In April 1954, a group of first graders lined up in the gymnasium of an elementary school in McLean, Virginia for the start of the Salk polio vaccine trials. In an era before widespread federal govern...

21 Tammi 36min

By the late 1940s, the National Institute of Infantile Paralysis had raised millions of dollars to pay for patient care and laboratory research. But polio cases were reaching record levels, and scient...

14 Tammi 39min

After two turbulent decades in the ice trade, Frederic Tudor had finally made it. Expanding into the American South had paid off, with cities like New Orleans delivering steady profit. But Tudor’s ins...

7 Tammi 36min

In the summer of 1921, 39-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt was on vacation with his family when he developed a fever, muscle aches, and chills. Pain spread to his legs, and soon, he was paralyzed fr...

7 Tammi 40min

By 1816, Frederic Tudor had spent a decade shipping New England ice to Cuba—with little to show for it. Setbacks and vanished profits nearly ruined him, and a gamble on shipping tropical fruit had lef...

24 Joulu 202533min

In 1806, Frederic Tudor set out to build a fortune by shipping ice from his family’s pond near Boston to the tropical Caribbean—an audacious idea no one believed in. But turning frozen water into prof...

17 Joulu 202534min

In 1801, a young Boston merchant named Frederic Tudor made a life-changing visit to Cuba. There he had a wildly ambitious idea: he would ship New England ice to the sweltering Caribbean, where no one ...

10 Joulu 202535min

In 1620 the Pilgrims arrived in a land already shaped by centuries of Native history. For the people who lived there, the Wampanoag, it was Patuxet—a place with its own stories, its own politics, and,...

3 Joulu 202539min