American History Tellers

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

In the early 1600s, an orphaned teenager named William Bradford joined a clandestine congregation of passionate Puritan worshipers in the village of Scrooby, England. Every Sunday, he met in secret wi...

"In the fall of 1620, the Mayflower embarked on a 3,000-mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Over the next nine weeks, its passengers and crew battled fierce storms and rampant illness. They had le...

"The winter of 1620-21 took a deadly toll on Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims had only just begun to construct their homes when illness began spreading through the settlement. Their flimsy shelters offer...