American Rewind

Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak takes center stage, presented as a magical summer milestone that still ranks among sports' most unbreakable records. The narrator recounts how, on July 16, 1941, 67,000 fans packed...

He is John Wesley Powell; at 35, the one-armed naturalist who led ten men down the raging Green and Colorado rivers and emerged three months later having charted the last great unknown wilderness in America — the Grand...

Thousands of immigrant workers built the transcontinental railroad, and when the ceremonial moment arrived on May 10, 1869, it was a regular track worker — not the corporate leader — who hammered the final golden spike...

The Battle of Bunker Hill—mostly fought on nearby Breed's Hill—ended as a costly British victory despite American shortages of ammunition. He opens with "It's American rewind" and lays out how Americans were running low...

He leads with the main point: Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase had the nation’s faith stamped on its money, commissioning the motto "In God We Trust" during the Civil War. He recounts how, in the darkest months of the...

Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize and immediately pledged the $54,000 award to the civil rights movement. At 35, he lay in an Atlanta hospital bed, exhausted from months of nonviolent...

The show opens by recounting the first Monday Night Football broadcast in September 1970, when Joe Namath and the New York Jets played before 85,000 fans at Cleveland Municipal Stadium and roughly one-third of American...

Leo Fender created the iconic Telecaster guitar. He built it at a workbench in Fullerton in 1950, after hollow-body guitars screeched with uncomfortable feedback whenever players cranked up the volume. He was a radio...

He kicks off with the big takeaway right away: how the catcher's mask was invented and how that one simple idea reshaped safety in baseball. He recounts that in the 1870s catchers stood right behind the batter with no...

Harry Truman's improbable 1948 upset over Thomas Dewey — capped by the famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" newspaper blunder — is the episode's central beat. He (James A. Brown) narrates how pollsters, big-city papers, and...

How a single Monday night in September 1970 flipped the TV world on its head. He narrates the scene: 85,000 diehard fans roaring inside Cleveland Municipal Stadium while a nation of couch quarterbacks tuned their sets...

George Washington surprised everyone by stepping down after two terms, setting the crucial precedent of peacefully transferring power and warning the nation about the dangers of political parties, regional division, and...

He kicks off with the main point up front: Alexander Hamilton basically saved the fledgling nation’s finances by assuming state war debts, insisting on full repayment, founding the Bank of the United States, stabilizing...

The Washington Monument finally opened to the public on October 9, 1888, after a decades-long, drama-filled construction saga. He — James A. Brown — walks listeners through how tourists once stared at an embarrassing...

Google bought the tiny San Mateo video site for $1.65 billion in stock on October 9, 2006, a move Wall Street hated at the time. He walks listeners through how three young engineers, running a 20‑month‑old startup out...