America's Hidden Stories

This episode tells the true story of the Osage "Reign of Terror" in the 1920s and its enduring legacy. This account of the hundreds of murders and unexplained deaths occurred on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma after the discovery of oil made the residents the wealthiest people per capita in the world. An investigation into some of the murders led to the birth of the FBI. 

In 1980, after a rescue attempt of American hostages in Iran goes tragically wrong, President Carter secretly authorized a clandestine army intelligence unit. They were called the Field Operations Group (later renamed the Intelligence Support Activity), and though the unit existed for just a decade, they laid the foundation for some of America's greatest enemy takedowns, including Noriega, Hussein, and bin Laden. Now, through recently declassified documents and firsthand accounts, we reveal the origin story of this group of shadow warriors.

In 1977, a highway construction project in Maryland unearthed a cemetery dating back to pre-Civil War times. It contained the remains of more than 100 enslaved Black people who once worked at nearby Catoctin Iron Furnace. Who were they? And what happened to this vanished community? Join us as we pore over historical documents, examine bones, and use the latest scientific equipment to learn more about these forgotten workers and the uncredited role they played in helping to create and drive America's Industrial Revolution.

They were once considered the future of warfare: flying aircraft carriers the size of the Titanic, able to hold five fighter planes. In the 1920s and ‘30s, the U.S. military had high hopes for these zeppelins, but instead of carrying aviation forward, the airship era would be brief and tragic. Witness the rise and fall of this failed weapon of war and follow a team of scientists as they race to retrieve key artifacts from a recently discovered sunken airship in hopes of shedding new light on this lost chapter of history.