41 documentaries from this era
On March 10, 1957, the gates of The Dalles Dam closed on the Columbia River. Within hours the rising water covered Celilo Falls, where Native people had fished from wooden platforms for eleven thousand years, and tribal members stood on the banks weeping as the oldest continuously used fishing site in North America went silent.
Robert E. Lee's entire battle plan for the Confederate invasion of the North, Special Order 191, was found by a Union soldier lying in a Maryland field wrapped around three cigars, days before Antietam became the bloodiest single day in American military history.
For over a decade, Bed Bath and Beyond trained its own customers never to pay full price. The company's iconic big blue twenty-percent-off coupons were mailed out so relentlessly, and honored so unconditionally, that shoppers stopped buying anything without one in hand. When new executives finally cut back on the coupons in 2019 to protect margins, sales did not dip. They collapsed. The company had not built customer loyalty. It had built coupon dependency, and going through withdrawal turned out to be fatal.
In the 1880s, workers excavating the grounds of the Indiana Statehouse unearthed hundreds of ancient Mound Builder human remains -- a prehistoric burial ground beneath the seat of state government -- and construction simply continued over most of it.
Rocky Flats manufactured plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons 16 miles from downtown Denver for 37 years — most residents had no idea
Service Merchandise was the largest jewelry retailer in the United States before it closed
In 1953, Hooker Chemical sold the Love Canal site to the Niagara Falls school board for one dollar. The deed of sale contained a written warning about twenty-one thousand tons of buried toxic chemicals. The school board read the deed, accepted the dollar, and built an elementary school on the site anyway. Four hundred children enrolled in September 1955. Nobody told the parents about the warning in the deed.
Polaroid filed for bankruptcy twice and was bought and sold by private equity firms who stripped it for parts, yet the brand was so powerful it kept coming back from the dead.
The Bath School disaster of 1927 killed 44 people including 38 children and remains the deadliest school attack in American history.
PG&E was convicted of 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the Camp Fire. The company paid fines. Zero executives were charged.
Agents carved bones from the bodies of dead children in morgues worldwide, stitched the bodies back together to hide the theft, and shipped the samples on dry ice to secret laboratories. One third of the 21,830 bone specimens came from infants. Not a single parent was ever told.
George de Mestral spent fourteen years turning a burdock burr stuck to his dog's fur into a patented invention. Every fashion house rejected it as too ugly. Then NASA used it on the Apollo missions and the International Space Station. Today, over ten thousand Velcro strips hold the ISS together.
At its peak, Napster users were exchanging the equivalent of the entire annual CD market every twenty-eight days. For free.
London Bridge was shipped stone by stone from England to Lake Havasu City, Arizona in 1968.
Children played in blue asbestos tailings like snow. Three million tonnes remain in the gorge, uncovered and unsecured.
Over half of all UFO sightings between 1955 and 1969 were actually CIA spy planes flying at altitudes no one thought possible. The CIA preferred the alien rumors to the truth. In 2013, after sixty years, the government released 407 pages of classified documents admitting Area 51 existed — and that the UFO sightings were their own aircraft.
In March 2007, Circuit City fired 3,400 of its most experienced salespeople — the ones who earned the highest commissions — and replaced them with minimum wage workers who knew nothing about the products. The company saved $80 million. Eighteen months later, it was bankrupt.
After the storm, the bodies were too numerous to bury. Workers loaded them onto barges and dumped them in the Gulf. But the tide brought them back. Every morning for weeks, the dead washed back onto the beaches. The city built funeral pyres on every corner that burned for weeks.
While Bear Stearns was collapsing, CEO Jimmy Cayne was at a bridge tournament in Detroit, unreachable by phone
In 1906, U.S. Steel bought 9,000 acres of Lake Michigan sand dunes and built an entire city in 905 days. By 1960, 178,000 people lived there. By 2020, only 69,000 remained. City Methodist Church, which cost a million dollars to build and seated 3,500, was abandoned in 1997. Trees now grow through its roof.
On May 27, 1962, the Centralia volunteer fire department set a trash fire that ignited an exposed coal seam. The fire spread through underground mines beneath the town. Over sixty years later, it still burns today. The federal government spent over $42 million relocating residents. By 2010, only ten remained of the original fourteen hundred.
Borders outsourced their entire online business to Amazon in 2001 -- handing their competitor their customer data
In 1958, Wilson Greatbatch grabbed the wrong resistor while building a heart rhythm recorder. The circuit pulsed once per second -- a perfect electronic heartbeat. Within three weeks he built the first implantable pacemaker prototype in his garage. Today, over three million people are alive because of that accident.
At its peak, BlackBerry had 80 million subscribers and 50% of the US smartphone market. Obama and Congress were addicted to it. Five years after the iPhone launched, it was over.
From 1951 to 1963, Las Vegas hotels organized rooftop viewing parties with atomic cocktails and telescopes so tourists could watch nuclear bomb tests detonated just 65 miles away.
Eddie Lampert forced Sears divisions to compete against each other for resources, destroying the cooperation that made the company work
Russell Bliss was paid three cents a gallon to haul away chemical waste. He mixed it with motor oil and sprayed it on roads, parking lots, and horse arenas across Missouri. Dioxin levels were 300 times the safe limit.
In 1960, Richard James abandoned his wife Betty, their six children ages two through eighteen, and the company to join a religious cult in Bolivia. He donated the company's money to the organization and sent his wife accusatory letters demanding she repent. Betty rebuilt James Industries from nothing and ran it for nearly forty years, turning the Slinky into an American icon.
Tower Records had 214 stores in 15 countries and one billion dollars in revenue before Napster killed it
The bunker's broadcast studio had changeable seasonal window backdrops so Congressmen could pretend they were still in Washington.
In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence overthrew Iran's democratically elected prime minister to protect oil interests. Every chapter of hostility since traces back to that single decision.
The amusement park was scheduled to open on May 1, 1986 — five days after the disaster. It never welcomed a single child.
Toys R Us paid $400 million per year in interest on debt forced on them by the buyout firms
Pan Am pioneered the Boeing 707, the Boeing 747, computerized reservations, and the concept of economy class. Then deregulation turned every innovation into a commodity.
On February fourteenth, nineteen eighty-one, a twelve year old boy named Todd Domboski was walking through his grandmother's backyard when the ground opened beneath his feet. The sinkhole was four feet wide and one hundred fifty feet deep, filled with carbon monoxide and steam from the fire below. His fourteen year old cousin Eric Wolfgang grabbed his arms and pulled him out.
At its peak, 94% of Americans lived within 5 miles of a Radio Shack
Netflix offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for $50 million in 2000 and was laughed out of the room
16 of 17 Wall Street analysts rated Enron a buy while the company was collapsing
Steve Sasson built the first digital camera at Kodak in 1975 and his bosses told him to keep it quiet
Repo 105 accounting hid $50 billion in toxic debt from investors and regulators
NASA ran a classified nuclear rocket program in Florida that could reach Mars in months