American History Tellers

Growing up in the Salinas Valley of Northern California, John Steinbeck dreamed of becoming a professional writer. In his youth he took on odd jobs and worked amongst ranch hands and migrant workers, ...

Born into poverty in Harlem in 1924, James Baldwin rose to become a celebrated novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, and a leading voice in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. In his debut nov...

In 1949, aspiring writer Nelle Harper Lee moved from her home in small-town Alabama to New York City. She was following in the footsteps of her childhood friend, author Truman Capote. Within a few yea...

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...

On Valentine’s Day 1929, seven men were gunned down in a Chicago garage in an attack that stunned the nation. Photographs of the bloody scene appeared on front pages across the country, and the public...

In the aftermath of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, authorities faced mounting pressure to clean up Chicago and take down the violent mobsters who overran the city – most notoriously, Al Capone. The...

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...

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...