American History Tellers

In the spring of 1865, with the Civil War finally over, American lawmakers began to debate whether Black soldiers would have a permanent place in the peacetime Army. Some 180,000 Black men had fought ...

In May 1870, James Webster Smith arrived in West Point, New York, in the hopes of becoming the first Black cadet to attend the U.S. Military Academy. While facing West Point’s famously difficult curri...

On an April morning in 1880, West Point cadet Johnson Chestnut Whittaker failed to appear at 6 a.m. roll call. He had endured continuous abuse from his white classmates and was found unconscious and b...

Between 1870 and 1899, only twelve Black cadets were admitted to the US military academy at West Point, and of those twelve, only three went on to graduate. Of the Black cadets who persevered, all fac...

February 10, 1972. When his music career begins to stagnate, David Bowie reinvents himself with an alien alter-ego he names Ziggy Stardust. You can listen ad-free in the Wondery or Amazon Music app. O...

February 24, 1739. The Persian leader Nader Shah wins a decisive victory in India at the Battle of Karnal. The fallout from the battle shatters the Mughal Empire, leaving the sub-continent vulnerable ...

In the winter of 1846, Irish immigrants in America began to hear troubling news from their home country: a potato famine was ravaging the countryside and driving desperate farmers and families into th...

In the late-1890s, two brothers from Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, became obsessed with what Wilbur described as “the problem of flight.” With no formal training or funding, they threw themselves i...

By 1903, inventors and adventurers in Britain and France were launching their own experimental aircraft skyward. In the U.S., crowds gathered outside Washington, D.C. to see Samuel Langley of the Smit...

In the summer of 1908, Wilbur Wright amazed crowds in France with his aerobatic flying demonstrations, and Orville made daring flights at a U.S. Army base in Virginia. The press in Europe and America ...