Disturbing History

The wealth divide in America did not settle the way sediment settles. It was built, revised, briefly reversed, and then rebuilt with better engineering, and nearly every stage of it can be traced to identifiable people making documented decisions in specific years. Brian follows the paper trail, because in sixteen years of police work he learned that the interview is where people tell you what they want you to believe and the paperwork is where you find out what actually happened.

This one is a paper case.It opens in New Orleans in 1839, in the rotunda of the...

For more than two thousand years, powerful institutions have understood something that gets rediscovered in every generation: an absorbed public is a manageable public. In this episode I follow that idea from the sands of the Roman arena all the way to the phone in your pocket, and I separate what's actually documented from the conspiracy version of the story, because the truth turns out to be stranger and better supported than the myth.

We start in ancient Rome, where the grain dole and the games were openly accounted for as instruments of rule, and where a courtier...

In June of 1816, snow fell on Vermont and killing frost swept through New England in the middle of what should have been the growing season. Frost returned in July and again in August, the corn crop collapsed across the northern states, and families who grew their own food watched a year's survival vanish from the fields. Nobody in America knew why.

In this episode I trace the answer back 14 months and 10,000 miles to Mount Tambora in the Indonesian archipelago, where the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history blew away the top mile of a mountain in April...

How many calls from unknown numbers did you get today? The one about your car's extended warranty, the text about a package that couldn't be delivered, the voice on the line claiming your grandson is in jail and needs bail money right now.

In this episode of Disturbing History, I trace how those strangers came to know so much about you, and the answer is a two-hundred-year story that starts long before the internet ever existed. We go back to the eighteen forties, when a sealed letter had stronger legal protection than your email does today and anonymity...

On the night of February twentieth, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower finished dinner at a private ranch in Palm Springs and vanished from public view. A wire service reportedly flashed that he was dead. The next morning he surfaced at church, and the White House explained everything with a chicken wing and a chipped tooth.

Seventy years later, that missing evening is still the foundation of the most durable presidential legend in American history: that Ike was driven into the Mojave Desert that night, walked into a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base, and negotiated a secret treaty with beings...

He was elected President of the United States 4 times, and a whole generation of Americans grew up unable to remember anyone else in the office. In this episode of Disturbing History, we pull apart the myth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and look at what the textbooks leave out.

For more than 2 decades, Roosevelt ran the most successful concealment operation in presidential history, hiding from the public the fact that he could not walk a single step unaided, with the full cooperation of a press corps that agreed never to photograph the wheelchair and Secret Service agents who ripped...

Taxes don't sound like Disturbing History territory, until you learn the trail of blood and power behind them. This episode traces the entire violent history of taxation in America, from the Stamp Act riots of 1765, when Boston mobs tore apart a rich man's home and tax collectors were tarred and feathered in the streets, through the Whiskey Rebellion, where George Washington personally led nearly 13,000 troops against American citizens, to the Supreme Court case where a lawyer called the income tax communism and won.

Then comes the great backfire of 1909, when Senate conservatives proposed the 16th Amendment believing it...

There's a building in Washington where, for the better part of a century, ordinary Americans mailed in the impossible. Flesh that fell from a clear sky onto a Kentucky farmwife making soap. A swarm of insects wide as the state of California. A booming like cannon fire off the Carolina coast with no ship and no storm anywhere in sight.

Somebody at the Smithsonian had to open those letters and decide which was a lie, which was an honest mistake, and which one needed a drawer. This episode is the story of what happened when serious, credentialed people...

Some nights the well runs dry, and I do what everybody does — I sink into the couch and let Netflix babysit me for a while. That's how I ended up watching The Worst Ex Ever, and that's how I ended up staring at the story of Wade Wilson, the so-called Deadpool Killer, a man who strangled two women to death in a single day in Cape Coral, Florida, and now sits on death row with two death sentences and a fan club.

Because that's the part that put my jaw on the floor. Not the murders. The love le...

He was the mouthpiece of God to ten thousand followers. To the FBI, he was a face on the Ten Most Wanted list. And to a Nevada state trooper working a dark stretch of Interstate Fifteen, he was just a nervous man in a red Escalade with a bad paper tag and a pulse he couldn't hide.

This week I'm taking you inside the rise and ruin of the FLDS church, from its roots in the polygamy crisis of the eighteen hundreds to the isolated fortress town of Short Creek, where one man came to control every marriage...

In the winter of nineteen fourteen, a five-year-old girl named May Pierstorff stood on a train platform in Grangeville, Idaho, with fifty-three cents in postage stamps pinned to her coat. Her parents had just mailed her to her grandmother.

In this episode, I dig into one of the strangest true stories in American history, the brief window between nineteen thirteen and nineteen fifteen when poor rural families discovered that the brand new parcel post service would accept a child at the counter, weigh her like a crate of apples, and deliver her, and the federal government had never...

Before the Food and Drug Administration, before warning labels, before anyone had to prove a medicine was safe or even admit what was inside it, America ran on the bottle.

This episode opens the cabinet on the patent medicine era, the long stretch of years when a quarter and a clipped newspaper advertisement could buy a family a cure-all that promised relief from nerves, weakness, pain, sleeplessness, women's complaints, and almost anything else a body could suffer, and then it asks the only question that matters, which is what those beautiful bottles actually held. We start in a...

The word propaganda began as something holy. In sixteen twenty-two a committee of cardinals in Rome coined it to mean the spreading of the faith, and in this episode I follow that single word as it curdles across the bloodiest century human beings have ever managed to produce.

This is the story of how mass persuasion got built, who built it, and the deeply uncomfortable truth that the most murderous propaganda machine in history did not invent its methods from nothing. It borrowed them, and some of what it borrowed, it borrowed from us.

We start...

On the night of June 9, 1912, in the small railroad town of Villisca, Iowa, someone walked into the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and killed all eight people sleeping inside. The parents. Their four children, ages 5 to 11. And two young sisters, Lena and Ina Stillinger, who had only come over after a church program for a sleepover that should have ended with them riding home.

The weapon was an axe taken from the family's own woodpile. The mirrors were covered, a lamp was left burning low with its chimney removed, a slab of bacon was found on the...

In the high desert of Nevada, about twenty miles south of the town of Lovelock, a dry limestone cave holds one of the richest archaeological records in the American West — and one of the most stubborn legends in American fringe history: red-haired, cannibal giants, supposedly eight to ten feet tall, dug out of its floor and then hidden away by the authorities.

In this episode I take a hard, evidence-first look at where that story actually comes from, and why the truth underneath it is more disturbing than any giant ever was.We trace the legend from Northern Pa...

What happens when the most powerful man in the world asks his own government a direct question and still can't get a straight answer? When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he wanted to know two things: who really killed John Kennedy, and whether the United States was sitting on proof that we aren't alone. He handed the assignment to his friend Webb Hubbell, the third-ranking official at the Justice Department, and Hubbell went looking with the access of a man who reported straight to the President. He came back with a wall.

This episode traces that wall across...

Walt Disney built the most trusted brand in the world, and he built it on top of a story the company has spent eighty years hoping you would never hear. Behind the castle, the cardigan, and the warm Missouri voice was a workplace that tore itself apart, a founder who treated a fair-pay dispute as a foreign conspiracy, and a man whose grudges ended up wired into the machinery of the Red Scare.

 This episode strips off the sanitized image and looks at the documented record of Walter Elias Disney as the complicated, contradictory figure he actually was.W...

The murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three remains the most contested crime in American history, and at the center of the contest stands the man who became president before Air Force One left Texas soil.

This episode of Disturbing History takes on the theory that refuses to die, the claim that Lyndon Baines Johnson helped engineer the assassination of the president he served. It is, by design, a different kind of episode. The show deals in facts, but this is one of those rare cases where documented fact and unproven conspiracy run...

Ulysses S. Grant left the White House without a fortune, never took a bribe, and never sold an office, yet his administration produced more documented corruption than any presidency of the nineteenth century.

This episode of Disturbing History continues our series on the dark history of presidential politics by walking straight into the Gilded Age and the Whiskey Ring, the federal liquor-tax fraud that siphoned millions of dollars out of the United States Treasury while a depression squeezed ordinary Americans, and traces how the trail of stolen tax money ran all the way to the desk of Grant's...

On New Year's Day 1927, New York City's medical examiner stood in front of reporters and accused the United States government of poisoning its own citizens. He could prove it, because the bodies were stacking up in his morgue. In this episode, we tear down the postcard version of Prohibition, the flappers and the jazz and the secret knock at the speakeasy door, and walk through what the thirteen-year war on alcohol actually cost. A federal denaturing program deliberately laced industrial alcohol with methanol and contributed to an estimated 10,000 American deaths, defended by the most powerful lobbyist in the country on...

On January 6, 1949, two starving Japanese machine gunners walked out of the caves on Iwo Jima and surrendered to American airmen who had no idea they were there. The war had been over for more than three years. They're where this episode ends, and they're the reason it exists. Before them came the battle. This one goes deep into the fight for a stinking scrap of volcanic ash 650 miles south of Tokyo, and the general who turned it into one of the worst killing grounds of the Pacific war. 

Tadamichi Kuribayashi knew Japan couldn't win, so he buried his g...

For weeks this show has lived in the corridors of power, among presidents and spies and the men who shaped the country from behind closed doors. This time we leave all of that behind and walk into a restaurant parking lot in suburban Detroit, where on a hot Wednesday afternoon in the summer of 1975, the most powerful labor leader in America climbed into a car and was never seen again. Jimmy Hoffa was a coal miner's son from Brazil, Indiana, who watched the company work his father to death and never forgot the lesson. 

He clawed his way o...

In this episode of the Disturbing History presidential series, we cross out of settled history and into living memory to examine the presidency of George W. Bush through the architecture of the War on Terror.

Beginning with the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the fear that reshaped American government overnight, we trace how that fear was translated into law, policy, and ultimately a global apparatus of detention, interrogation, surveillance, and war.

We walk through the legal scaffolding built inside the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, where attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee drafted the August 1, 2002 "torture...

The nation wept for Warren G. Harding in August 1923. The funeral train crawled home through crowds that stretched for miles, mourners singing hymns by the tracks, certain they were burying one of the most beloved men ever to hold the office. They had no idea what they were really putting in the ground. Within a year, the floorboards of that respectable house started to creak, and the bodies that had been piling up around the president began to make sense.

This episode walks you back into the White House and down into the rot. We start with Harding's...

This week we step away from the corridors of presidential power and head into the North Georgia mountains, to a hand-built stone castle on Taylor's Ridge and one of the most misunderstood crimes in the state's history. On December 12, 1982, Dr. Charles Scudder, a brilliant former Loyola University pharmacology professor, and his partner Joseph "Joey" Odom were robbed and shot to death inside Corpsewood Manor, the off-grid medieval-style home they had built brick by brick after leaving Chicago behind.

Their killers, 17-year-old Kenneth Avery Brock and 30-year-old Samuel Tony West, had convinced themselves the eccentric couple was hiding a...

Everyone knows George Washington was the first President of the United States. Technically true. But it's also a sleight of hand, because fourteen men held the title of President before him, and almost no American today can name a single one.

Tonight on Disturbing History, we walk through all fourteen, the men who chaired the Continental Congress and the Confederation Congress during the years the country was being fought into existence. This is not the marble version.

This is slave traders and Tower of London prisoners. This is the general who walked an American army into...

Dwight Eisenhower is the president most Americans remember as the calm grandfather of the nineteen fifties. The general who beat Hitler. The man who built the interstate highways.

The smile under the bald head. But underneath that famous reassurance, his administration ran something most Americans were never told about. A young intelligence agency, a brand-new doctrine called plausible deniability, and a willingness to overthrow elected governments halfway around the world if Washington decided they were a problem.

This episode takes you inside two of the operations that built the template. Iran in nineteen fifty-three, where a...

The story of the Foo Fighters of World War Two is one of the strangest, best-documented, and least-resolved cases in the history of military aviation. In the late autumn of nineteen forty-four, pilots of the United States Army Air Forces, flying night fighter and bomber missions over Europe, began returning to their bases with reports of glowing objects that paced their aircraft, performed seemingly impossible maneuvers, and then vanished into the dark.

The reports were taken seriously by intelligence officers. They were corroborated by multiple witnesses across multiple squadrons. They reached the press in early nineteen forty-five, when...

Most people think they know Watergate. They don't. They know the headline. The break-in, the tapes, the resignation, the wave from the helicopter on the South Lawn. They know the word. They've seen the photograph. What they don't know is that the burglary was never the story. It was the doorway.In this episode of Disturbing History, we walk back into the White House for another stop on our tour of presidential history you wish we'd forgotten.

onight, we open the door at 1:30 in the morning on 6/17/1972, where a young security guard named Frank Wills pulls a piece...

In the late afternoon of November twenty-first, 1986, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall stood inside an office a short walk from the Oval Office and fed classified documents into a shredder. They jammed the machine. They smuggled pages out in her boots. They were trying to outrun a federal investigation that was already moving down the hallway toward them.

What they were destroying was the paper trail of what investigators would later call a parallel government, a secret apparatus running an off-the-books foreign policy out of the Reagan White House, in defiance of an...

On the day after Christmas, 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged from a single scaffold in Mankato, Minnesota. It remains the largest mass execution in American history. The man who signed the order was Abraham Lincoln. He signed it the same month he was finalizing the Emancipation Proclamation.

This episode is the second in our presidential series, and it's about how mercy and brutality can run through the same hand on the same week.

 We go back to the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, to the broken treaties and stolen annuity money that drove the Dakota to starvation, t...

Andrew Jackson sold himself as the champion of the common man. His face has been on the twenty dollar bill since 1928. There are statues of him in city squares from Tennessee to Washington. He's been claimed, in successive eras, by Democrats and Republicans, by progressives and conservatives, by every politician who ever wanted to wrap himself in the language of populism without owning what that language actually delivered when Jackson was the one speaking it.

This episode is the other side of that mythology.We start in north Georgia in the spring of 1838, the morning soldiers arrive at...

This episode contains discussion of child abuse, physical and sexual violence against minors, and descriptions of deaths in state custody. Listener discretion is advised.

For more than a century, the state of Florida ran a place in the panhandle town of Marianna that called itself a school. It opened on January 1, 1900 and didn't close until June 30, 2011. In those one hundred and eleven years, it operated under four different names. The Florida State Reform School. The Florida Industrial School for Boys. The Florida School for Boys. And finally, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. S...

The Wild West most of us inherited is a marketing campaign. The cowboy in the lighter hat, the noble sheriff, the high-noon duel in a dusty street — those came out of dime novels, traveling shows, and ghostwritten biographies, often produced while the events themselves were still unfolding. The actual frontier was something else. It was a continent-sized arena of fraud, racial terror, corruption, hired killing, and government-protected theft, and the men we now call legends had a direct hand in selling us a version of it that left almost all of that out.In this episode we walk out into th...

For most of the nineteenth century, American medicine had a problem nobody wanted to talk about. The medical schools needed bodies. There was no legal way to get them. So a quiet trade grew up in the shadows of every major American city, and for nearly a hundred years, the foundation of American medical education was built on graves that had been emptied in the dark. This episode walks through the full arc of the Resurrection Men in America. 

We start in 1788, with the Doctors' Riot in New York City, where a careless medical student waving a severed a...

A man bought a piece of land in southern West Virginia in nineteen twenty-six and built an amusement park on it. He didn't know what was already there. He didn't know what was going to come. This episode tells the layered story of Lake Shawnee. It starts in the year 1282, with a wave of sickness that swept through a Fort Ancient village and killed too many of its children.

 It moves forward to 1775, when a colonial settler named Mitchell Clay brought his wife and fourteen children to a stretch of bottomland by the Bluestone River, where they became t...

What if Stranger Things wasn't science fiction?  What if the show that became one of the biggest cultural phenomena of the last decade started as a real story, set in a real place, about a real abandoned military base on the eastern tip of Long Island. In this episode, we walk the full length of one of the strangest legends in modern American folklore.

The Montauk Project. A claimed black operation hidden beneath a decommissioned Air Force radar station, involving mind control, time travel, psychic experimentation, kidnapped children, and a creature that supposedly tore through reality on August 12t...

For most of human history, diamonds were genuinely rare. Then in 1867, on a sheep farm near the Orange River in South Africa, a fifteen-year-old boy picked up a shiny pebble that turned out to be a 21-carat diamond. Within a few years, the world's diamond supply had multiplied beyond anything the markets had ever seen. By every law of supply and demand, the price should have collapsed.

It didn't. And the reason it didn't is one of the most successful, sustained, and openly documented market manipulations in modern history.In this episode, Brian traces the full arc, from...

A thousand years before Christopher Columbus saw a light on a Bahamian beach, a small band of Norse settlers stood on the northern tip of Newfoundland, swinging iron axes against fir and juniper trees, building sod houses that would still be visible in the grass nearly a thousand years later. We can name the year. We can name it down to a single twelve-month window.

The year was ten twenty-one, and we know it because of a solar storm that struck the sun in the year nine hundred and ninety-three, leaving an invisible fingerprint in every tree growing...

Most of us learned a version of the Gold Rush that was cheerful, portable, and mostly wrong. In this episode we set that version aside and go looking for what actually happened — the history that didn't make it onto the plaques.On 1/24/1848, James Marshall found gold at Sutter's Mill on the American River.

California was still technically Mexican territory at the time; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which formally transferred the region to the United States, wasn't signed until 2/2/1848 — nine days later. What followed was one of the most consequential and destructive episodes in American history, compressed into less...