American History Tellers

On Easter Sunday, 1873, an armed white mob battled a Black militia over control of a courthouse in a rural Louisiana parish. In the end, as many as 150 Black citizens were massacred. It was one the de...

In 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden vied for the presidency. But when Election Day was over, no clear winner emerged. Amid reports of voter fraud, intimidation and viole...

After Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, Reconstruction officially came to an end, and the battle to control the narrative began. For the next century, white Southerners espoused the Lost...

In the 1940s and ‘50s, farm laborers in California, many of them Mexican and Filipino, faced low wages and brutal working conditions. Their demands for change were often met with harsh tactics from th...

In 1964, the United States finally ended the controversial Bracero Program, which had flooded American farms with millions of low-paid guest workers from Mexico who competed for jobs with resident lab...

By the early 1970s the United Farm Workers had won a series of successes in California and were attempting to extend their reach into other states. But soon, conservative politicians began to push bac...

On January 15, 1919 a giant storage tank holding more than two million gallons of molasses collapsed, sending a deadly wave crashing into the streets of Boston’s busy North End. The flood was over in ...

The 1919 Molasses Flood was a terrifying and telling moment in the history of Boston’s North End. It was also a snapshot of a developing city in the wake of the first World War. Jake Sconyers explored...

In 1893 the independent island kingdom of Hawaiʻi flourished under the leadership of its monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani. But as the leaders of Hawaiʻi’s lucrative sugar industry gained power, the Queen ...

In the early 1900s, an enterprising young American named James Dole introduced pineapples to a windy plateau in Central Oahu. He’d been warned that the crop was perishable and unprofitable and that hi...