This week, how former US President George Bush Senior took on the all-powerful National Rifle Association; the murder of the campaigning Irish journalist, Veronica Guerin; and how a Soviet submarine got stuck on a Swedish rock during the Cold War. Plus, the Cockney pilot who became known as the "King of Lampedusa" during World War Two.
(Photo: President G ... Show More
Oct 2020
With the president on 9/11
On September 11 2001, President George W. Bush was visiting an elementary school in Florida as two planes hit the World Trade Center. In an image that would become iconic, the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, broke the news to the president by whispering in his ear as he ... Show More
10m 10s
Mar 2023
The Unlikely WWII B-24 Combat Pilot-Hero, George McGovern
On this episode of Our American Stories, here’s historian extraordinaire Stephen Ambrose to tell us a very unlikely World War II story about George McGovern, the liberal, antiwar Democratic presidential candidate from South Dakota who was soundly defeated by President Nixon in th ... Show More
10m 49s
Dec 2022
Wondery Presents American History Tellers: Presidential Assassinations
On April 26th, 1865, Union soldiers closed in on the barn where Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirator David Herold were hiding. When Booth refused to give himself up, soldiers lit the barn on fire to drive him out, then shot him dead. Herold surrendered and wa ... Show More
6m 6s
Mar 2023
312: Reagan, Iran-Contra and the Cold War (Part 3)
Warmonger or nuclear disarmer? Ronald Reagan’s presidency survived an assassination attempt, the AIDS epidemic and the Iranian hostage crisis. He powered through the 1980s, creating his own truth and narrative, in a series of events that read like a Hollywood screenplay.
Tom and ... Show More
1h 1m