American History Tellers

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...

In May 1622, the Pilgrims were still reeling from Squanto’s betrayal when a ship appeared in Plymouth Harbor, carrying an advance party for a rival English colony. Governor William Bradford reluctantl...

In 1620 the Pilgrims arrived in a land already shaped by centuries of Native history. For the people who lived there, the Wampanoag, it was Patuxet—a place with its own stories, its own politics, and,...

November 24, 1859. Charles Darwin sparks a scientific revolution by introducing the theory of evolution in his book On the Origin of Species. You can listen ad-free in the Wondery or Amazon Music app...