Time Tellers

It was the start of a new decade. America, still reeling from the 1929 crash, passed a single law meant to save its farmers and manufacturers — and instead helped plunge the world into deeper economic ruin. In this episode of Time Tellers, Renee and Dan trace the rise of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act: from a farm-focused bill to a 20,000-item tariff behemoth, the political fights that carried it into law, and the swift global retaliation that collapsed trade and devastated communities.Through first-hand readings, lively banter, and expert context, the hosts take you behind the scenes of a legislative feeding frenzy, the economists who warned of disaster, and the international fallout that reshaped trade diplomacy for generations. By following the people caught in the policy — farmers, industrialists, presidents, and foreign leaders — the episode reveals how short-term protectionism can become long-term calamity, and how those choices still echo in today’s trade debates.

Step into the steeple and listen: this episode peels back the gleam to reveal the Liberty Bell's real life — a noisy workbell, a flawed casting, and a slow-creeping crack that history remade into meaning. From humble laborers and Quaker ideals to abolitionists, suffragists, and touring crowds, the bell's fracture becomes a story of contested liberty and hopeful reinvention.We follow the bell from London foundries to Philadelphia crowds, myth-making tales of July 4th, and the abolitionists who christened it the "Liberty Bell." Join Renee and Dan as they stitch together invention, protest, and preservation into a compact, human story about how an object becomes a voice for a nation's promises — and its contradictions.

It’s late, you’re tired, and the glowing drive‑thru menu promises salvation: melty, greasy, perfect. In this episode we follow that first bite back through time — from Hamburg steak to county fair tinkering, from a kid named Lionel’s bold slice of cheese to the diner counters of Erie where Greek sauce rules — and uncover the messy, delicious arguments over who really invented the cheeseburger.Along the way we trace how immigrants, entrepreneurs, and the fast‑food machine turned a simple idea into a global obsession: meat, melted dairy, and a bun as an American symbol. We meet claimants, chains, gourmet excess, and a small Pennsylvania town that keeps a regional tradition alive, using storytelling, flavor, and a little scandal to show how food maps identity and change.Listen as Time Tellers unspools the cheeseburger’s contested pedigree, its rise from practical street food to cultural icon, and the personal stories that stick to the bun. This podcast is a work of historical interpretation while we strive for accuracy some aspects of history are open to interpretation and debate thank you for listening.

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It’s not just silence — it’s something older than sound. Stand on the rim of a mile-deep canyon as sunlight crawls across stone that remembers a time before life had legs, and climb into cliff rooms where hands shaped a life that still speaks. In this final episode of our series, Renee and Dan follow rivers through red rock, explore Mesa Verde’s ancient masonry, and listen to the people who’ve lived these places long before they were parks.From Theodore Roosevelt’s proclamations to dam battles, from the removal and slow return of the Havasupai to the modern fights over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase, this episode traces how beauty and politics collide in the Southwest. It’s a story about scale — geological, spiritual, historical — and about who gets to tell the land’s story. Tune in to Time Tellers for a journey through cliffs, controversy, and the echoes that bind past and future.

October 26, 1825: a packet boat slides out of Buffalo, Governor DeWitt Clinton pours Lake Erie into the Atlantic, and a ribbon of water reshapes a continent. This episode sails the Erie Canal’s dramatic voyage — from the feverish hand‑digging and deadly swamps to the politics that branded it “Clinton’s Folly” and the jubilant Wedding of the Waters that proved its power.Along the towpath we meet the immigrants and farmers who dug the locks, hear the silenced voices of Indigenous nations whose lands were cut through, and follow the canal’s unintended legacy of disease, invasive species, and environmental upheaval. Two centuries on, the bicentennial voyage retraces that route, inviting listeners to witness how ingenuity and sacrifice can both forge and fracture a region — and why that living history still matters today.

Stand ankle-deep in a cypress swamp as mist rises and something moves in the reeds — this episode opens in the thick, humming heart of the Southeast and pulls you into a landscape that feels alive and full of secrets.We hike the Great Smoky Mountains at sunrise, paddle the Everglades’ river of grass, creep along Congaree’s cathedral of trees, and visit the isolated ruins of Fort Jefferson. Along the way we meet Cherokee and Seminole histories, New Deal builders, displaced families, and the conservationists who fought to save these places — each story layered into the land like rings in a tree.Listen as the parks reveal their contradictions: refuge and removal, healing and memory. By the episode’s end you won’t just know these places — you’ll feel their echoes, their resilience, and the quiet that keeps telling time.

Step into a vast, wind-carved landscape where geysers huff like old engines, glaciers whisper their slow retreat, and redwoods stand like stone columns holding fog in their branches. In Episode 3, hosts Renee and Dan lead you from Yellowstone’s boiling, bison-strewn plains through Glacier’s alpine drama and Olympic’s dripping rainforests to the cathedral hush of the redwoods, tracing each park’s breathtaking sights and the human stories tangled around them.Beyond the postcard views are layered histories of displacement and resilience: the Tukadika and Blackfeet whose lives were erased, the cavalry who once policed Yellowstone, and the railway and logging interests that shaped Glacier and Olympic. Hear how the return of wolves rewove whole ecosystems, how climate change is carving away glaciers before our eyes, and how tribes, scientists, and visitors are insisting these places tell truer stories.Listen for the textures of place — the snap of a glacier, the long shadow of a beeched fir, the distant howl that altered an ecosystem — and discover why wilderness is never just a backdrop but a living, contested, and evolving story of people and land.

Join Renee and Dan on a brisk, intimate tour through the Northeast’s packed pockets of history and wildness: Acadia’s granite coasts and carriage roads, Saratoga’s decisive fields where a young nation proved itself, and Gettysburg’s haunted ridges where Lincoln reshaped a country in two minutes. The episode moves like a walk through layered time, from Wabanaki canoes to Gilded Age benefactors, battlefield drama, and the quiet power of memory.With sharp storytelling and lived-in voices, the hosts reveal surprising twists — wealthy conservationists who saved the land, a hero who later became a traitor, and native stories finally being reclaimed — and ask what we choose to remember when we protect a place. Listen for sunrise on Cadillac Mountain, the creak of carriage roads, and the whispers that linger in fields where history was forged.

From horse-drawn carriages on Pennsylvania Avenue to locked museum gates in modern Washington, this episode traces the unlikely history of government shutdowns — a story that begins as procedural quibbles and becomes national crisis. We follow the 1884 Anti-Deficiency Act, the 1980 opinion that introduced “shutdowns,” and the dramatic standoffs of the 1990s, 2013, 2018–2019 and today, revealing how political brinkmanship turns into real hardship for federal workers, travelers, and small businesses.Through vivid scenes, firsthand accounts, and sharp historical turns, the hosts unpack how a technical budget fight morphs into headlines, furloughs, and stalled research — and why the public often pays the price. Tuned to the lives of a furloughed park ranger, an air traffic controller, and scientists mid-experiment, this episode turns legislative procedure into intimate human stories, showing how each shutdown reverberates far beyond the Capitol’s closed doors.