Covering every hamlet and precinct in America, big and small, the stories span arts and sports, business and history, innovation and adventure, generosity and courage, resilience and redemption, faith and love, past and present. In short, Our American Stories tells the story of America to Americans.
About Lee Habeeb
Lee Habeeb co-founded Laura Ingraham’s national radio show in 2001, moved to Salem Media Group in 2008 as Vice President of Content overseeing their nationally syndicated lineup, and launched Our American Stories in 2016. He is a University of Virginia School of Law graduate, and writes a weekly column for Newsweek.
For more information, please visit ouramericanstories.com.
What Buck O'Neil Did After Missing the Hall of Fame by One Vote
Hollywood Goes to War: George O'Brien, Star of Three Wars
On this episode of Our American Stories, George O'Brien became one of Hollywood's biggest leading men after starring in John Ford's 1924 silent epic The Iron Horse. But long before Hollywood made him famous, O'Brien had already served in the Navy during World War I, and when Pearl Harbor brought America into World War II, the 41-year-old husband and father volunteered to serve again.
As part of our ongoing Hollywood Goes to War series, Roger McGrath, author of Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier, shares the astonishing story of how O'Brien went from silent-film star to Navy beachmaster, serving under fire at Attu, Saipan, and Leyte before returning once more to uniform during the Korean War.
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Beating the Soviets: Mike Eruzione on the 1980 Olympic Upset
On this episode of Our American Stories, it was the Cold War on ice, and no one expected Team USA to win. But in 1980, a ragtag group of college kids stunned the world when they beat the seemingly unbeatable Soviet Union at the Lake Placid Winter Olympics.
Our own Greg Hengler and Mike Eruzione himself, captain of the U.S. men’s hockey team and the man who scored the game-winning goal, share the inside story of one of the greatest upsets in sports history.
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How Three Escaped Slaves Changed America Forever
On this episode of Our American Stories, in May 1861, three enslaved men, Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory, and James Townsend, escaped from Confederate labor at Sewell's Point, Virginia, and crossed to Union-held Fort Monroe. When their enslaver demanded their return, General Benjamin Butler faced a problem. Sending them back would mean returning three men to work on Confederate defenses aimed at his own fort.
Our regular contributor Jon Elfner and historian Kate Masur, author of Until Justice Be Done, share the story of how Butler's decision to hold the men as "contraband of war" helped open Union lines to hundreds, then thousands, of freedom seekers and pushed Congress, Abraham Lincoln, and the Union Army toward a new policy on slavery: ending it entirely.
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Randall Wallace on the Greatest Man He Ever Knew: His Father
On this episode of Our American Stories, before Randall Wallace wrote Braveheart and directed We Were Soldiers, his father, Thurman Wallace, taught him what it meant to keep your word, work hard, and treat everyone with dignity. Thurman had grown up without a father, went to work at 14, and spent his career as a traveling candy salesman who seemed to know everyone he met.
Randall remembers the man he calls "the greatest man I ever knew," from his father's early doubts about a career in writing to his pride after Braveheart. He also shares the final days they spent together on the set of We Were Soldiers and the encounter after his father's death that showed Randall just how deeply his dad had touched the lives of others.
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"I Came to New York City Dead": Sarah Gonzalez's Faith Story
On this episode of Our American Stories, Sarah Gonzalez was six years old when her father, a former gang member and addict who became a jail chaplain, suddenly died. His death shattered the joyful childhood she had known and eventually led Sarah to reject the Christian faith in which she had been raised. By her teenage and college years, she was using drugs, drinking heavily, and practicing witchcraft.
Then, during a trip to New York City in 2016, she reached a breaking point. Sarah shares her deeply personal story of how she returned to the faith she had rejected and, years later, found herself continuing the prison ministry her father had begun at Chicago's Cook County Jail.
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The Magna Carta at Fort Knox: A Forgotten WWII Story
On this episode of Our American Stories, during World War II, U.S. leaders feared German bombers could strike American soil. To protect the nation’s most important treasures, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and the Magna Carta, Britain’s most important document, which was on loan at the time, were secretly moved to Fort Knox.
Steve Puleo, author of American Treasures, shares the remarkable story of how the documents that shaped freedom in both England and America were safeguarded during one of history’s darkest hours. We'd like to thank the U.S. National Archives for allowing us access to this audio.
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Steve Jobs and the iPhone That Almost Wasn't
On this episode of Our American Stories, on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs stepped onto the stage at Macworld and unveiled a device that would forever change the way we communicate. To the audience, it looked like a flawless presentation. Behind the scenes, however, Apple engineers were bracing for disaster. The iPhone prototype was so fragile that Jobs had to follow a carefully rehearsed sequence of demonstrations, secretly switching between multiple devices to keep the presentation from crashing.
Our own Greg Hengler shares the remarkable story behind one of the greatest product launches in business history.
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A Life at NASA From the Lunar Rover to the Space Shuttle
On this episode of Our American Stories, when Apollo astronauts drove across the Moon, Craig Sumner had already spent years helping make that possible. As a young engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, he worked on the Lunar Roving Vehicle, solving the kinds of problems that come with designing a car for a place where no one had ever driven before. He later left NASA to become a military pilot, then returned for Skylab and the Space Shuttle program, eventually serving as deputy project manager for the Shuttle's External Tank.
Sumner shares his personal story of what it was like to build America's space program alongside astronauts such as John Young, Fred Haise, and Alan Shepard.
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The 5-Foot Bookshelf That Changed How America Thinks About Education
On this episode of Our American Stories, in the early 1900s, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot made a remarkable claim: with just 15 minutes of reading a day, a person could give himself the equivalent of a liberal education from a shelf of books only five feet long. Publisher P. F. Collier challenged him to prove it.
Our American Stories regular contributor John Elfner and historian Robert Johnston tell how Eliot's idea became the Harvard Classics, a 50-volume collection that brought Plato, Shakespeare, Saint Augustine, and other great writers into hundreds of thousands of American homes at a time when few Americans could attend college.
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