All Episodes

How Firestone Tire & Rubber Company transformed Liberia into America's largest rubber plantation through a controversial 99-year lease, creating a corporate colony that exploited workers and shaped a nation's destiny during the global rubber wars.

How King Leopold II of Belgium orchestrated one of history's deadliest atrocities from his palace in Brussels, killing an estimated 10 million Congolese people in the pursuit of rubber wealth—a death toll comparable to the Holocaust. This is the story of a humanitarian facade that concealed industrial genocide, told through the voices of victims, missionaries who exposed the truth, and the monarch who never set foot in his empire of terror.

In 1927, Henry Ford tried to build an American utopia in the Brazilian Amazon. White picket fences, square dances, and fire hydrants from Michigan—all transplanted into the world's most untamed jungle. What he got was worker riots, ecological collapse, and a $20 million ghost town. This is the story of Fordlandia.

From biopiracy to the Death Railway: how a British rubber cartel stole seeds from Brazil, enslaved Tamil workers in Malaya, and orchestrated one of history's deadliest corporate conspiracies—with Winston Churchill at the helm.

On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River, killing 1,864 people—more than the Titanic. Most victims were Union POWs who had just survived Andersonville and Cahaba prison camps. This is the story of the deadliest maritime disaster in American history, buried by history because it happened the same day John Wilkes Booth was killed.