Diamonds Are Forever
For most of human history, diamonds were genuinely rare. Then in 1867, on a sheep farm near the Orange River in South Africa, a fifteen-year-old boy picked up a shiny pebble that turned out to be a 21...
29 Apr 1h 8min
Who Found America First: Columbus or the Vikings?
A thousand years before Christopher Columbus saw a light on a Bahamian beach, a small band of Norse settlers stood on the northern tip of Newfoundland, swinging iron axes against fir and juniper trees...
26 Apr 1h 3min
The American Gold Rush
Most of us learned a version of the Gold Rush that was cheerful, portable, and mostly wrong. In this episode we set that version aside and go looking for what actually happened — the history that didn...
25 Apr 1h 7min
The 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre
In September 1857, a wagon train of roughly one hundred and forty men, women, and children from Arkansas made camp in a remote valley in southwestern Utah Territory. They were headed to California. Th...
22 Apr 1h 19min
Eugenics in America
This episode traces the full history of eugenics in America from its origins in Francis Galton's Victorian-era theories through the establishment of Charles Davenport's Eugenics Record Office at Cold ...
17 Apr 1h 22min
The Battle of Blair Mountain
The Battle of Blair Mountain stands as the largest armed insurrection on American soil since the Civil War, yet for nearly a century it was virtually absent from the nation's textbooks and public memo...
10 Apr 1h 14min
The Horror of Holmesburg Prison
For more than two decades, incarcerated men inside Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as human test subjects in experiments that sound like something out of a dystopian novel. Beginning in 195...
8 Apr 1h 18min
