American History Tellers

In 1920, a young Al Capone arrived in Chicago looking for a fresh start, and his timing couldn’t have been better. That same year, Prohibition outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol, turning Ame...

4 Feb 39min

In the early 1950s, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin were in a race to develop a vaccine against polio. While Salk’s killed-virus vaccine was the first to be distributed, Sabin continued working to perfect...

28 Jan 36min

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 Jan 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 Jan 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 Jan 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 Jan 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 Dec 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 Dec 202534min