On a crisp January morning, in the forested foothills of the Sierra Nevada, part of the remote Mexican province of California, a frontier carpenter spotted a few shiny pebbles in a drainage ditch. Little did he know that at the same week he validated that his discovery involved real and unusually pure gold, the suddenly valuable territory had passed from Mexican possession to become the territory of the United States. The result: the most rapid mass migration in American history and an economic transformation that led the young nation to a fateful rise in economic power. As one observer noted at the time: "It had been so ordered by Providence that the gold might not be discovered until California should be in the hands of the Americans.

The peace treaty with Mexico that ended the Mexican War had been negotiated by one of the great unsung heroes of our history: Nicholas Trist: former aide to James Madison and Andrew Jackson, married to Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter, defied a president and risked arrest. As chief clerk of the State Department, with no official sanction, he broke every rule to make the monumental deal that changed the world..

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Within the span of fourteen faithful months in the early 1930s, two bloody American encounters nearly killed both the remarkable individuals most essential for Allied victory in World War II. As a pedestrian, Winston Churchill barely survived a life-threatening encounter with a speeding car on New York's fifth avenue while Franklin Roosevelt, as president-elect, came within inches of an assassin's bullets that came within inches of ending the FDR administration before it even began. Both of the survivors always acknowledged the providential nature of their escapes from doom, and leading historians and even acclaimed novelists have speculated about how shifts of literally inches might have altered the fate of all of humanity. This podcast provides the astonishing story of two close calls that saved the world. 

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At the height of the Civil War, a weary Union soldier picks up the three cigars in an open field. They turn out to be the most consequential cigars in the history of the world. and they give President Abraham Lincoln the sign that he has been waiting for to free 3,000,000 enslaved people.

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On The American Miracle, bestselling author and radio host Michael Medved recounts some of the most significant events in America’s rise to prosperity and power, from the writing of the Constitution to the Civil War. He reveals a record of improbabilities and amazements that demonstrate what the Founders always believed: that events unfolded according to a master plan, with destiny playing an unmistakable role in lifting the nation to greatness. The American Miracle debuts July 1, 2024. Please subscribe, rate, and review The American Miracle wherever you get your podcasts.

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