How Soccer Created African and Latin American...

The wind-powered sawmill was invented around 1592 in the Netherlands, immediately transforming the nature of labor and industry. This mechanical marvel replaced slow, muscle-powered sawyers, allowing timber to be cut for shipbuilding and construction up to 30 times faster than ma ...  Show more

We have paper money today because it functioned as an IOU, certifying that the holder could redeem it for an equivalent amount of physical gold or silver from the bank's vault. That’s where the English pound got its name as it matched a specific weight of gold (or silver). This w ...  Show more

July 1, 1863. Confederate troops engage with Union troops outside of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, setting off one of the bloodiest and most important battles of the American Civil War. This episode originally aired in 2022. Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening a ...  Show more

How do you justify a war you lost, and that destroyed countless homes, businesses, towns and families? This was a question facing the southern states after the Civil War.

Their answer? The myth of the Lost Cause.

In this final episode of our series on the C ...

May 22, 1856. Charles Sumner isn’t worried about making friends in the Senate. His rhetoric is inflammatory, almost intentionally. He’s an ardent abolitionist in a time when people are still enslaved throughout the South. In his most recent speech, Sumner attacked his colleagues ...  Show more

On this episode of Our American Stories, the Mason-Dixon Line defined the American "house divided" between antislavery and pro-slavery. Yet this border war was pre-dated by another battle—a colonial-era quarrel that ended only when the area separating Pennsylvania and Maryland’s ...  Show more