Let's ReThink History

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Channel • 7 Shows

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Society & Culture

Society & Culture

Updated Jun 15
Education

Education

Series
Education

Education

Updated Jun 11

Education

Education

Updated Jun 11
Society & Culture

Society & Culture

Updated Jun 15
Education

Education

Series
Education

Education

Series
Education

Education

Series
Education

Education

Series
Education

Education

Series

Episode 1

Why Iran Once Trusted America: Oil, Empire & Mosaddegh's Rise

In 1945, many Iranians saw the United States as the friend who helped push the old empires out. How did that trust begin — and why did it start to crack over oil? This first episode of Iran & America: A Century and Counting sets the stage. We trace the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company's lopsided grip on Iran's oil, the WWII occupation that forced Reza Shah out, and the 1945–46 crisis when U.S. pressure helped expel Soviet troops from the north. Then nationalism collides with empire: in 1951 Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalizes the oil industry, Britain answers with the crippling Abadan embargo, and President Truman — wary of a coup — keeps pressing for mediation. It's the road not yet taken, and the question the next administration would answer differently.

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Jun 14

How Copper Sparked the Chilean Coup

Chile sits on the richest copper on earth, and for most of the twentieth century two American companies owned it. This episode of Backyard Empire — the first of a three-part 'The Mines' arc — traces what happened when Salvador Allende was elected in 1970 promising to nationalize Anaconda's and Kennecott's mines. After the 1971 nationalization, Washington answered on two tracks the Church Committee later documented: 'Track I,' the economic squeeze Nixon summed up as 'make the economy scream,' and 'Track II,' the secret CIA push for a military coup that led to the killing of the army's constitutionalist commander, General Rene Schneider. We carry it through the credit and copper embargo, the 1973 coup, and the compensation the Pinochet dictatorship then paid the companies — while copper itself stayed nationalized as Codelco. We work from the Church Committee report, declassified FRUS records, and the National Security Archive, and keep the hardest question open: how much did U.S. covert action — versus Chile's own economic crisis — actually bring Allende down? Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

Jun 14

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1 hr
Episode 1

The Land Before the Cross: Panama Before Columbus — The Bridge That Changed the World

Three million years ago a strip of jungle rose from the sea, rerouted the planet's oceans, and became both a bridge and a wall between two continents. Who lived on the Isthmus of Panama before Europe ever saw it — and why was this the most strategic land on Earth long before the canal? Episode 1 of Crossroads of the World opens with the land itself: the contested geological birth of the isthmus, the "biological firewall" that let some animals cross (the camels that became llamas) while stopping others — and that kept yellow fever and malaria out of the Americas until ships brought them after 1492. Then the people: the Cueva, annihilated within decades of contact; the Guna with their island democracy and mola textiles; and the Ngäbe-Buglé, who used the mountains as a fortress. Their gold and Colombian emeralds prove Panama was a trade crossroads two thousand years before the canal. We flag what scientists still debate — the exact closure date and the Gulf Stream link — and correct some popular myths along the way.

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Jun 14

The Mining Empire That Poisoned a Town for a Century

High in the Peruvian Andes, an American company spent the twentieth century turning a landscape and its people into inputs. This episode of Backyard Empire — part two of 'The Mines' — follows the Cerro de Pasco Corporation's mechanism: the La Oroya smelter's smoke ruined the surrounding farmland, the company bought the dead fields cheaply and fenced the rest, and self-sufficient Andean communities were pushed into the mines as wage labor (the land fight at Rancas became Manuel Scorza's novel Drums for Rancas). The human cost concentrated in La Oroya, for years one of the most lead-contaminated towns on earth, where nearly all the children carried elevated blood-lead levels. We carry it through the 1974 nationalization into Centromin, the American firm Doe Run's troubled years after 1997, and the landmark 2023 Inter-American Court ruling that held the Peruvian state responsible. We keep the responsibility precise and note where the figures and the cleanup remain contested. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

Jun 14

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34 min
Jun 13

Standard Oil's Secret Cartel With Nazi Germany

After the Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil trust in 1911, the largest piece — Standard Oil of New Jersey — didn't shrink. It went south, and then it went global. This episode of Backyard Empire follows the oil giant across Latin America and into one of the most disquieting corporate stories of the twentieth century. First, the resource wars: how Standard Oil bought concessions from strongmen and effectively wrote the petroleum laws of sovereign nations — and how those nations fought back, from Bolivia's 1937 nationalization after the Chaco War to Mexico's 1938 expropriation under Lazaro Cardenas (which created Pemex), to Venezuela's fifty-fifty bargain of 1943. Then the gravest chapter: Standard Oil's 1929 cartel with Germany's chemical giant I.G. Farben. We lay out carefully what the record establishes — the patent pool, the synthetic-rubber delay the 1942 Truman Committee found 'did hamper' America's war effort, and the tetraethyl-lead transfers that reached the Luftwaffe — and we are just as careful to flag what is NOT supported by credible history, including the myth that Standard Oil tankers refueled German U-boats at sea. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

Jun 13

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58 min
Episode 2

Balboa and the Pacific: How a Stowaway Conquistador Redrew the Map of the World (1513)

In 1510 a bankrupt adventurer escaped his creditors hidden aboard a ship — and three years later he stood on a mountain in Panama and became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean. How did Vasco Núñez de Balboa's single glimpse of a "South Sea" prove the Americas were a new continent, not the edge of Asia? Episode 2 of Crossroads of the World runs on the toxic rivalry between Balboa — the rough, pragmatic survivor — and Pedrarias Dávila, the paranoid aristocrat known as the "Wrath of God" who was sent to replace him and ultimately had him beheaded in 1519. We trace Bastidas's first maps, Columbus's failed last voyage, the founding of the first lasting European town on the American mainland, and the brutal 1513 crossing to the Pacific. We don't romanticize it: Balboa was a conquistador who massacred indigenous people, including the war-dog killings at Quarequá, and we flag that our sources — the chroniclers Oviedo and Anghiera — had their own agendas. Plus the famous Keats line that names the wrong conquistador.

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Jun 12

How a Fruit Company Toppled a Government

For most of the twentieth century, one American company decided who governed, who worked, and who ate across much of Central America and the Caribbean. It grew bananas — but it also owned the railroads, the ports, and the politics. Latin Americans called it El Pulpo: the Octopus. This episode of Backyard Empire traces the United Fruit Company from an 1899 Boston merger to a hemispheric empire — and to the courtroom: the enclave economy of company towns and company scrip, the 1928 Banana Massacre at Cienaga (where the death toll is still contested), the 1954 CIA coup against Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Arbenz, the rebrands into United Brands and Chiquita, and the modern reckoning — Chiquita's 2007 guilty plea for paying Colombian paramilitaries and the landmark 2024 jury verdict. Threaded through it is a first-person vantage: the host visited two of United Fruit's own enclaves as a boy, at Golfito, Costa Rica in 1963 and Puerto Barrios, Guatemala in 1965. We work from declassified records, court filings, and peer-reviewed scholarship, and keep the contested parts contested. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

Jun 12

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41 min
Jun 11

How American Doctors Defeated Che Guevara

In the remote lowlands of 1960s Bolivia, American doctors raced to stop a lethal hemorrhagic fever the locals called "Black Typhus" — and a few years later, U.S.-trained Bolivian Rangers cornered and killed Che Guevara not far away. Did mousetraps and medicine help defeat a revolution? This episode of MARU & the Hunt for Che follows two threads of U.S. activity in eastern Bolivia. First, the Middle America Research Unit (MARU) — Dr. Ronald B. MacKenzie, Dr. Karl M. Johnson, Dr. Patricia Webb, and Merle Kuns — who isolated a brand-new pathogen, Machupo virus, traced it to a jungle mouse (Calomys callosus) whose numbers had exploded after DDT spraying killed the village cats, and broke the San Joaquín epidemic with a controlled experiment that cleared the rodents from half the town. Several of them caught the disease; Johnson and Webb nearly died, and the same Karl Johnson would later found the CDC's Special Pathogens Branch and help name Ebola. Second, the 1967 manhunt: the 8th Special Forces team that trained the 2nd Ranger Battalion at La Esperanza, the capture at the Quebrada del Yuro, and the execution at La Higuera with CIA officer Félix Rodríguez present. The provocative question tying them together — whether American goodwill in the east made Che's revolutionary pitch harder to land — is presented as one contested interpretation among several, not a settled fact.

Jun 11

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Episode 1

How Alaska Natives Turned Missionary Assimilation Against Itself

In 1880 a handful of Protestant leaders met in New York and divided the entire territory of Alaska into denominational "spheres of influence" — then ran federally funded schools to erase Native languages and ceremonies. This is the story of how that system worked, the harm it did, and how Alaska Native people turned the missionaries' own schools into the launchpad for a civil-rights movement. This first episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia traces the full arc: the Russian Orthodox arrival in 1794 and its very different, language-preserving approach; Sheldon Jackson's 1880 Comity Agreement and the English-only "contract schools"; the boarding-school era and the suppression of the potlatch; and the boomerang — Tlingit graduates of the Sitka mission school who founded the Alaska Native Brotherhood, won the first anti-discrimination law in the United States (Elizabeth Peratrovich, 1945), and produced leaders like Rev. Dr. Walter Soboleff. It ends with today's reckoning: the Presbyterian Church's apology and reparations for the 1962 closure of Juneau's Memorial Presbyterian Church (now Ḵunéix̱ Hídi, "the people's house of healing"), Indigenous-led seminaries, and a rural mental-health workforce crisis. We present good-faith motive and real harm side by side, and we flag what's contested — including the exact 1962/63 date and the reparations figures.

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Episode 4

Pirates, Plunder, and the Scottish Fiasco: How Panama Burned a City and Broke a Kingdom

Twice in thirty years, the Isthmus of Panama destroyed those who reached for it. In 1671 the buccaneer Henry Morgan marched a starving army across the jungle and burned Panama City to ash. A generation later, Scotland bet a fifth of its entire wealth on a colony in the Darién — and roughly two thousand settlers died of fever. How did a pirate and an investment scheme both break themselves against this thin strip of land, and reshape two empires doing it? Episode 4 of Crossroads of the World is a measured account of two catastrophes: Morgan's sack of Panamá Viejo (and the still-disputed question of who set the fire, and whether he knew a peace treaty had just been signed), the rebuilding behind the walls of Casco Viejo, the slow death of the Portobelo silver fairs, and the Darien Scheme of 1698–1700 — Scotland's doomed "New Caledonia," whose collapse helped push the nation into the 1707 Act of Union that created Great Britain. Death tolls and capital figures are presented as the contested estimates they are.

E4

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History, researched deeply — and honest about what's still contested. Let's ReThink History is a network of documentary podcast series built from sourced, human-reviewed research: the constitutional standoffs of the American West, the 2,000-year story of the Panama Canal, the 1953 Iran coup and the century of U.S.–Iran relations that followed, missionaries and indigenous resistance across the Americas, sovereign citizens in the courtroom, and the long reach of U.S. power in Latin America — sometimes told with a firsthand vantage, from a host who grew up inside the Panama Canal Zone in the 1960s. Every series works from primary documents, declassified records, court opinions, and peer-reviewed scholarship. We present contested history as contested rather than settled — these aren't verdicts, they're invitations to look again. Free for classrooms: teachers, librarians, and museums can use every episode under our educational license at history.selwaysolutions.io. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research. New series added regularly.

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