How 10 Whalers Survived Three Years Shipwrecked in the South Pacific

In 1832, a New Bedford whaleship called the Mentor struck a reef in the remote Pacific archipelago of Palau. The tiny, 100-foot-long ship began sinking immediately, and the 22 men who made up its crew were thrown into one of the most extraordinary survival ordeals in American maritime history. Ten …

The Nobels Built Russia’s Oil Industry, Invented Dynamite and the Oil Tanker, But Were Still Crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution

The Nobel family (which are the namesake of the Nobel prize), had a rags-to-riches story bigger than the Rockefellers or Morgans. The Nobel patriarch Emanuel fled debtor’s prison  in 1837. He then travelled east and built a foundation for the largest oil empire in Russian history. Three generations…

The American Revolution Went Way Outside of America, Pulling in Caribbean Colonies, African Forts, and Chinese Trading Houses

The thirteen colonies that became the United States were just half of the British colonies that existed in the 18th century. The empire stretched from New England, south to Georgia and Florida and the islands of the West Indies, east to India, Scotland, and Ireland, and south again to British forts…

Ford’s Auto Domination Came From a 1909 Race Across America Through Mud-Choked Roads

In June 1909, five automobiles lined up in front of New York's City Hall to attempt something no car had ever done: drive all the way to Seattle. The Ocean-to-Ocean Race was supposed to be a publicity stunt for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, but it became something far more consequential,  a …

Al Capone’s Missing $100 Million, and the TV Journalist Who Embarrassed Himself to Find It

On the night of April 21, 1986, an estimated 30 million Americans sat in front of their televisions waiting for a moment that almost no one alive had ever seen: a live, prime-time excavation of a gangster's secret vault. Geraldo Rivera, recently fired from ABC News and hungry for a comeback, had co…

How the Dollar Created America (Part 2)

Part 2 of our exploration of how the U.S. dollar is older than the United States itself and has a level of power beyond the Federal Reserve and even beyond the U.S. government. We’re joined by guest Brendan Greeley, author of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money.

How the Dollar Created America (Part 1)

The U.S. dollar's origin story begins not in Philadelphia or Washington, but in a half-frozen mining valley in 16th-century Bohemia, where Saxon miners accidentally named their town after a saint and set the world's dominant currency in motion. That currency's history stretches from a 1518 christen…

From Patriot to Pirate: How Revolutionary War Hero Sam Mason Became a River Outlaw

One of the greatest threat to early America was piracy, but it wasn’t found in the Caribbean or Gulf Coast. It was pirates on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Samuel Mason fought bravely at the 1777 Siege of Fort Henry, became a Justice of the Peace in the Northwest Territory, then turned Cave-in-R…

Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs

When Russia's Dowager Empress was pregnant with the future Tsar Nicholas II in 1868, she dreamed that a peasant would one day kill her son. The idea terrified her, and for the rest of her days she lived under the fear of this prophecy. It may have come true with the arrival at court of a mysterious…

The Revolutionary War’s Charlie Wilson: A Spanish Spy Chief Funded the Siege of Yorktown, Helping Washington Win

Everyone knows the American Revolution was won at Yorktown in 1781, when Cornwallis’s Army was trapped, but almost no one knows that victory depended on a Spanish intelligence operative who raised 500,000 pieces of silver in Havana in just 24 hours, convincing Cuban residents to liquidate their jew…