History Unplugged Podcast
894 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 21 hours ago - ★★★★ - 3.5K ratingsFor history lovers who listen to podcasts, History Unplugged is the most comprehensive show of its kind. It's the only show that dedicates episodes to both interviewing experts and answering questions from its audience. First, it features a call-in show where you can ask our resident historian (Scott Rank, PhD) absolutely anything (What was it like to be a Turkish sultan with four wives and twelve concubines? If you were sent back in time, how would you kill Hitler?). Second, it features long-form interviews with best-selling authors who have written about everything. Topics include gruff World War II generals who flew with airmen on bombing raids, a war horse who gained the rank of sergeant, and presidents who gave their best speeches while drunk.
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Episodes
Modern Black Ops Warfare Began with a British WW2 Operation to Steal Boats Off Africa’s Coast
June 13, 2024 11:00 - 52 minutes - 48.3 MBWhen France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Churchill declared that Britain would resist the advance of the German army--alone if necessary. Churchill commanded the Special Operations Executive to secretly develop of a very special kind of military unit that would operate on their own initiative deep behind enemy lines. The units would be licensed to kill, fully deniable by the British government, and a ruthless force to meet the advancing Germans. The very first of these "butcher-and-bolt" units...
The 7 Wonders of the Ancient World Were Colossal, Prone to Destruction, and Not All May Have Existed
June 11, 2024 11:00 - 46 minutes - 42.8 MBFor millennia, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have been known for their aesthetic sublimity, ingenious engineering, and sheer, audacious magnitude: The Great Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis, the Statue of Zeus, the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse at Alexandria. Echoing down time, each of these persists in our imagination as an emblem of the glory of antiquity, but beneath the familiar images is a surprising...
Being the Ultimate Constitutional Originalist in 2024 Means Donning a Tricorn Hat and Applying to Practice Piracy
June 06, 2024 11:00 - 46 minutes - 42.5 MBMany decisions impacting the lives of Americans today adhere to a set of rules established over 200 years ago. The Constitution is in the news more than ever as politicians and Supreme Court justices battle over how literally it should be taken. Did the framers intend for Americans to follow their instructions as written for eternity? Or did they want to offer a set of guidelines that would evolve as time marched on? These are the questions today’s guest, A.J. Jacobs, author of the Year of...
The Last Time Humanity Believed in Unstoppable Progress: Paris in the Belle Époque (1871-1914)
June 04, 2024 11:00 - 46 minutes - 42.8 MBMany of the specific features we associate with Paris today – impressive sites like the Eiffel Tower and Sacré Coeur, French cinemas, and even the distinguished Art Nouveau Metro entrances – were born out the period of the Belle Époque. This era, which lasted from the later 19th century up to the beginning of World War I, is oft characterized as one of pleasure, wealth, and beauty. But it was also an era riven by political unrest, plagued by many of the issues the contemporary world contends...
The Silk Road Travel Adventures of a 16th Century Mughal Princess and Her Massive Royal Retinue
May 30, 2024 11:00 - 41 minutes - 38.1 MBTo most Westerners, the Mughal Empire is a forgotten stepchild of world history. Even though it produced the Taj Mahal and controlled nearly all modern-day India, the Mughal Dynasty’s accomplishments are crowded out by those of the Romans, Chinese, and British. Nevertheless, it was a great Asian power from the 16th-19th centuries, comparable to the Ming Dynasty in wealth, population, and military strength, dwarfing its European contemporaries. And one of the greatest figures in that empire wa...
The Months Leading up to the Civil War That Inflamed North-South Tensions from Animosity to Murderous Hatred
May 28, 2024 11:00 - 36 minutes - 33.5 MBOn November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern radicals were moving ever closer to dividing the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. In today’s episode I’m speaking to Erik Larson, author of “The Demon of Unrest: ...
LSD’s Origins in Nazi Germany Brain-Washing Experiments, the CIA’s MKUltra Program, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age
May 23, 2024 11:00 - 43 minutes - 40 MBLSD has been banned in the United States for decades and became a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance in 1970, but it has experienced a resurgence among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to overcome mental roadblocks and psychiatrists running tests to use it as a treatment for addiction, PTSD, and other mental illnesses. But what few know is that LSD has its origins in Nazi Germany. The drug was developed in Switzerland in 1943 and quickly acquired and militarized by the Third Reich. The Nazis coopte...
How Duke Ellington and Other Jazzmen Became America’s First Globally Famous Musicians
May 21, 2024 11:00 - 42 minutes - 39 MBThe first globally famous American musicians weren’t part of the 50s rock wave that included Elvis Pressly or Chuck Berry. They were three 3 jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America: Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie. While their music is well-known, their background stories aren’t. Duke Ellington was the grandson of slaves whose composing, piano playing, and band leading transcended category. Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a ...
Why America Could Have a Presidential Succession Crisis
May 17, 2024 13:39 - 20 minutes - 18.8 MBAmerica has an unmatched record when it comes to the peaceful transfer of power. According to legal scholar Roy E. Brownell II, however, our country is not that far off from a presidential succession crisis. In this preview of an episode of "This American President," hosted by Richard Lim, Brownell covers the history of presidential succession and the flaws in the current system.
Dunkirk from the German Perspective
May 16, 2024 11:00 - 39 minutes - 35.8 MBThe British evacuation from the beaches of the small French port town of Dunkirk is one of the iconic moments of military history. The battle has captured the popular imagination through LIFE magazine photo spreads, the fiction of Ian McEwan and, of course, Christopher Nolan's hugely successful Hollywood blockbuster. But what is the German view of this stunning Allied escape? We are exploring that with today’s guest, Robert Kershaw, author of Dünkirchen 1940: The German View of Dunkirk. We lo...
The Global Manhunt For The Confederate Ship That Sunk Union Supply Vessels, From the Caribbean to the South Pacific
May 14, 2024 11:00 - 39 minutes - 35.9 MBNaval warfare is an overlooked factor of the Civil War, but it was a vitally important part of overall strategy for North and South, especially from the perspective of the Union, which used naval blockages from the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi River to deny critical resources to the Confederacy, forcing them the ultimately surrender. But the naval war was about much more than blockages. One Confederate ship managed to harass Union supply lines around the globe and sink dozens of merchant v...
Which Statues Should We Take Down? How To Fairly Judge Historical Figures by Today’s Standards
May 09, 2024 11:00 - 39 minutes - 35.7 MBIn the United States, questions of how we celebrate – or condemn – leaders in the past have never been more contentious. In 2017, a statue of Robert E. Lee was removed – leading to a race riot and terrorist attack. But in 2020, statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, and even Ulysses S. Grant were defaced or toppled. All of this comes to the question of how we judge the past. When are the morals and ethics of people born centuries earlier excusable for the condit...
The 160-Minute Race to Save the Titanic
May 07, 2024 11:00 - 49 minutes - 44.9 MBOne hundred and sixty minutes. That is all the time rescuers would have before the largest ship in the world slipped beneath the icy Atlantic. There was amazing heroism and astounding incompetence against the backdrop of the most advanced ship in history sinking by inches with luminaries from all over the world. It is a story of a network of wireless operators on land and sea who desperately sent messages back and forth across the dark frozen North Atlantic to mount a rescue mission. More tha...
Vikings Went Everywhere in the Middle Ages, From Baghdad to Constantinople to….. Oklahoma?
May 02, 2024 11:00 - 42 minutes - 39.2 MBScandinavia has always been a world apart. For millennia Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Swedes lived a remote and rugged existence among the fjords and peaks of the land of the midnight sun. But when they finally left their homeland in search of opportunity, these wanderers—including the most famous, the Vikings—would reshape Europe and beyond. Their ingenuity, daring, resiliency, and loyalty to family and community would propel them to the gates of Rome, the steppes of Russia, the courts of C...
The 15-Hour Work Week Was Standard For Nearly All of History. What Happened?
April 30, 2024 11:00 - 34 minutes - 31.9 MBThere’s nothing in human DNA that makes the 40-hour workweek a biological necessity. In fact, for much of human history, 15 hours of work a week was the standard, followed by leisure time with family and fellow tribe members, telling stories, painting, dancing, and everything else. Work was a means to an end, and nothing else. So what happened? Why does work today define who we are? It determines our status, and dictates how, where, and with whom we spend most of our time. It mediates our se...
Pancho Villa’s 1916 Raid on New Mexico: The Pearl Harbor Bombing of Its Time
April 25, 2024 11:00 - 51 minutes - 46.7 MBBefore 9/11, before Pearl Harbor, another unsuspected foreign attack on the United States shocked the nation and forever altered the course of history. In 1916, Pancho Villa, a guerrilla fighter who commanded an ever-changing force of conscripts in northern Mexico, attached a border town in New Mexico. It was a raid that angered Americans, and President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Punitive Expedition in which the US Army invaded Mexico and defeated General Villa's troops, but failed to capture...
A Radical Abolitionist Youth Movement Consumed America in 1860, Elected Lincoln, Then Disappeared Completely
April 23, 2024 11:00 - 43 minutes - 40.1 MBAt the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young white and black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes—mostly working-class Americans in their twenties—became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most in...
Socrates May Have Been Executed For Revealing Secrets of Athens’ Religious Rituals
April 18, 2024 11:00 - 43 minutes - 39.6 MBThe influence of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates has been profound. Even today, over two thousand years after his death, he remains one of the most renowned humans to have ever lived—and his death remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries. There is another side to this story: impiety, lack of reverence for the gods, was a religious crime. From the perspective of the religious authorities of the time, the charge of impiety against Socrates was warranted. The priests did not tole...
The Age of Discovery Through American-Indian Eyes
April 16, 2024 11:00 - 44 minutes - 40.5 MBA millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. So, when Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand, having developed differently from their own, and whose power they often underestimated. And no civilization came to a halt when a few wandering explorers arrived, even when the strangers came well-armed. To explore this overlooked history is today’s guest, Kathleen DuVal, author of “Native Nations.” Fo...
A Short History of the Sioux Wars (1862-1890)
April 12, 2024 19:54 - 25 minutes - 23.2 MBWar, Conflict, Victory & Defeat. These are all aspects of life that some may have to face. This was true for the various groups of the Sioux Tribes. On today's bonus episode from "Key Battles of American History" join host James Early as he discusses the multiple wars that took place between 1862-1890, collectively known as "The Sioux Wars"
The Deerfield Massacre: The Infamous 1704 Indian Raid That Left Hundreds Dead and More Captured
April 11, 2024 11:00 - 38 minutes - 35.5 MBIn an obscure village in western Massachusetts, there lies what once was the most revered but now totally forgotten relic from the history of early New England—the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre. This impregnable barricade—known to early Americans as “The Old Indian Door”—constructed from double-thick planks of Massachusetts oak and studded with hand-wrought iron nails to repel the flailing tomahawk blades of several attacking native tri...
The Dangerous and Thrilling Life of a 19th-Century Whaler
April 09, 2024 11:00 - 46 minutes - 42.9 MBIn mid-nineteenth century New England, Robert Armstrong was a young man with the world at his feet. His family was wealthy and gave him the opportunity to attend the nation’s first dental school. But Armstrong threw his future away, drinking himself into oblivion. Devoured by guilt and shame, in December 1849 he sold his dental instruments, his watch, and everything he possessed, and signed on for a whaling voyage leaving New Bedford for the South Pacific. His story was re-discovered when hi...
Fiorello LaGuardia: Immigrant Son and Ellis Island Interpreter Who Became America’s Mayor
April 04, 2024 11:00 - 41 minutes - 37.6 MBFiorello LaGuardia was one of the twentieth century’s most colorful politicians―a 5’2’’ ball of energy who led New York as major during the Depression and World War Two, charming the media during press conference and fighting the dirty machine politics of the city. He was also quintessentially American: the son of Italian immigrants, who rose in society through sheer will and chutzpah. La Guardia made an unsuccessful attempt to enlist during the Spanish-American War. Following that, he serve...
How the West Tried and Failed to Stop the Russian Revolution
April 02, 2024 11:00 - 41 minutes - 38 MBThe Allied Intervention into the Russian Civil War remains one of the most ambitious yet least talked about military ventures of the 20th century. Coinciding with the end of the first World War, some 180,000 troops from several countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Italy, Greece, Poland, and Romania, among others, were sent to fight alongside Russian “Whites” against the Red Army. Despite one victory for the Allied troops – independence for the Latvians an...
Kings Were Inevitable and Untouchable Until They Suddenly Weren’t After a Few 1700s Revolutions
March 28, 2024 11:00 - 42 minutes - 39.2 MBAt the turn of the nineteenth century, two waves of revolutions swept the Atlantic world, disrupting the social order and ushering in a new democratic-republican experiment whose effects rippled across continents and centuries. The first wave of revolutions in the late 1700s (which included the much-celebrated American and French Revolutions and the revolt against slavery in Saint Domingue/Haiti) succeeded in disrupting existing political structures. But it wasn’t until the second wave of rev...
The Fall Of Japanese-held Hong Kong in January 1945
March 26, 2024 11:00 - 38 minutes - 35.6 MBCommander John Lamade started the war in 1941 a nervous pilot of an antiquated biplane. Just over three years later he was in the cockpit of a cutting-edge Hellcat about to lead a strike force of 80 aircraft through the turbulent skies above the South China Sea. His target: Hong Kong. As a storm of antiaircraft fire darkened the sky, watching from below was POW Ray Jones. For three long years he and his fellow prisoners had endured near starvation conditions in a Japanese internment camp. Did...
WW1 German Spies Infiltrated America and Attempted to Start a Race War
March 21, 2024 11:00 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MBOn January 30, 1918, a young man “with the appearance of a well-educated, debonair foreigner” arrived at the U.S. customs station in Nogales, Arizona, located on the border with Mexico. After politely informing the customs inspector that he had come to complete his draft registration questionnaire and meet a friend in San Francisco, he was approved to cross the border into the United States. Lothar Witzke, the most dangerous German agent in the western hemisphere had reached his destination. ...
The Air Battles of the 1945 Eastern Front Forged Air Force Doctrines of the Cold War
March 19, 2024 11:00 - 38 minutes - 34.9 MBThe last months of World War II on the Eastern Front saw a ferocious fight between two very different air forces. Soviet Air Force (VVS) Commander-in-Chief Alexander Novikov assembled 7,500 aircraft in three powerful air armies to support the final assault on Berlin. The Luftwaffe employed some of its most advanced weapons including the Me 262 jet and Mistel remotely guided bomb aircraft. To discuss this overlooked part of World War 2 is today’s guest William Hiestand, author of “Eastern Fro...
The First Pre-Columbian Explorers to Reach North America
March 15, 2024 10:55 - 10 minutes - 9.95 MBHave you ever wondered if there was a group to reach North America before Christopher Columbus? Find out more in today's bonus episode from another Parthenon podcast "History of North America." Join host Mark Vinet as he discusses the search for the first non-indigenous explorers to reach the North American continent prior to Christopher Columbus’ 1492 voyage. If you like what you hear, subscribe to "History of North America" on Apple or Spotify and look for it on Parthenonpodcast.com
A Classicist Believes that Homer Directly Dictated the Iliad, and Was Also an Excellent Horseman
March 14, 2024 11:00 - 53 minutes - 48.8 MBThe Iliad is the world’s greatest epic poem—heroic battle and divine fate set against the Trojan War. Its beauty and profound bleakness are intensely moving, but great questions remain: Where, how, and when was it composed and why does it endure? To explore these questions is today’s guest, Robin Lane Fox, a scholar and teacher of Homer for over 40 years. He’s the author of “Homer and His Iliad” and he addresses these questions, drawing on a lifelong love and engagement with the poem. He ar...
In 1860, Damascus Nearly Committed Genocide Against Christians. How Did it Pull Back?
March 12, 2024 11:00 - 53 minutes - 48.7 MBOn July 9, 1860, a violent mob swept through the Christian quarters of Damascus. For eight days, violence raged, leaving 5,000 Christians dead, thousands of shops looted, and churches, houses, and monasteries razed. The sudden and ferocious outbreak shocked the world, leaving Syrian Christians vulnerable and fearing renewed violence. Rogan is today’s guest, and author of “The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” Drawn from never-before-seen eyewitnes...
Silk: The History of a Fabric That Was Civilization’s First Burial Cloth, Body Armor, and Much More
March 07, 2024 11:00 - 41 minutes - 38.2 MBSilk—prized for its lightness, luminosity, and beauty—is also one of the strongest biological materials ever known. More than a century ago, it was used to make the first bulletproof vest, and yet science has barely even begun to tap its potential. As the technologies it has inspired—from sutures to pharmaceuticals, replacement body parts to holograms—continue to be developed in laboratories around the world, they are now also beginning to offer an alternative to such modern materials as plas...
Frank Lloyd Wrong – When America’s Greatest Architect Created His Masterpiece While Written-Off as a Has-Been
March 05, 2024 11:00 - 46 minutes - 42.9 MBNobody blossomed late in life like Frank Lloyd Wright. He was written off as a has-been by middle age after a promising start. Between 1909 and 1929, Wright’s career was marked by personal turmoil and a roller coaster of career-related ups and downs. In these years, before he completed the buildings, we know him for today, Wright’s career was so far gone that most critics had written him off as a product of the 19th century. But to everyone’s surprise, after the Great Depression, Wright, now...
Frederick Rutland, Britain’s Most Beloved WW1 Pilot, Became a Spy for Imperial Japan
February 29, 2024 11:00 - 36 minutes - 33.6 MBFrederick Rutland was an accomplished aviator, British WWI war hero, and real-life James Bond. He was the first pilot to take off and land a plane on a ship, a decorated warrior for his feats of bravery and rescue, was trusted by the admirals of the Royal Navy, had a succession of aeronautical inventions, and designed the first modern aircraft carrier. He was perhaps the most famous early twentieth-century naval aviator. Despite all of this, and due mostly to class politics, Rutland was not ...
The Rise and Fall of the Global Age of Piracy (17-19th Centuries)
February 27, 2024 11:00 - 44 minutes - 40.3 MBPiracy didn’t spring into existence in the 18th century Caribbean. It has existed as long as there has been commercial shipping and people to steal the goods. There were medieval pirates. Vikings loved robbing ships in the Baltic and North Seas. The Romans dealt with pirates in the Mediterranean, and the Greeks and Carthaginians before them. Pirates are as much part of history as armies, taxes, and temples. Why do we associate pirates with one specific time and place in the 18th century Carib...
A WW2 Polish Diplomat Forged Thousands of Paraguayan Passports to Save Jews from the Holocaust
February 22, 2024 11:00 - 48 minutes - 44 MBBetween 1940 and 1943, Polish diplomats based in Bern, Switzerland, engaged in a remarkable – and until now, almost completely untold – humanitarian operation. This operation was one of the largest actions to aid Jews of the entire war and far eclipsed the better-known efforts of Oskar Schindler. In concert with two Jewish activists, these diplomats masterminded a systematic program of forging documents for Latin American countries that were smuggled into occupied Europe, in an attempt to sav...
Stories From Captives on The Last Slave Ship to America
February 20, 2024 11:00 - 29 minutes - 27.2 MBThe Clotilda was the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century after the passage of a federal law banning the importation of slaves, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. Five of its passengers, ranging in age from two to nineteen when kidnapped, died between 1922 and 1940. Today’s guest is Hannah Durkin, author of “Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade...
Was Union Support in the Confederacy Actually Widespread? The Alabamans Who Fought for Sherman Say 'Yes'
February 15, 2024 11:00 - 49 minutes - 45.2 MBAs the popular narrative goes, the Civil War was won when courageous Yankees triumphed over the South. But an aspect of the war that has remained little-known for 160 years is the Alabamian Union soldiers who played a decisive role in the Civil War, only to be scrubbed from the history books. One such group was the First Alabama Calvary, formed in 1862. It went on raids that destroyed Confederate communications and also marched with Sherman’s forces across the South. They aided the fall of Vi...
The Heroes, Legends, and Liars Who Fought in WW2
February 13, 2024 11:00 - 35 minutes - 32.6 MBVeterans of World War 2 are called the Greatest Generation for their uncommon courage and self-determination. Whether this descriptor is true or part of America’s self-mythologizing during the 20th century is a challenging question, one that Andrew Biggio, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, worked to answer. Biggio found that many were brave, but they were all ordinary men who also shared in humanity’s weaknesses and flaws while responding to the call of duty. Biggio is today’s g...
Turning Okies Into New Dealers: How 1930s Technocrats Pushed Progressivism on Dust Bowl Refugees in Federal Farm Camps
February 08, 2024 11:00 - 38 minutes - 35.5 MBIn the midst of the Great Depression, punished by crippling drought and deepening poverty, hundreds of thousands of families left the Great Plains and the Southwest to look for work in California’s rich agricultural valleys. In response to the scene of destitute white families living in filthy shelters built of cardboard, twigs, and refuse, reform-minded New Deal officials built a series of camps to provide them with shelter and community. Today’s guest is Jonathan Ebel, author of “From Dust...
Whistle-Stop Tours: When Trains Ruled American Presidential Elections
February 06, 2024 11:00 - 36 minutes - 33.6 MBFor nearly two centuries, the beating heart of electoral politics was on the back of a train. William Jennings Bryan spoke to an estimated 5 million people from a train car in his 1896 presidential campaign. Yet memories of the pivotal role campaign trains played in American elections fade with the passing of each generation. Also forgotten are the stories documented by the reporters who traveled with hundreds of whistle-stopping politicians including Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight ...
The Jewish Bankers Who Built Wall Street, Financed the American Century, and Spawned Countless Conspiracy Theories
February 01, 2024 11:00 - 42 minutes - 39.2 MBJoseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind were Solomon Loeb and Marcus Goldman, among the “Forty-Eighters” fleeing a Germany that had relegated Jews to an underclass. These industrious immigrants would soon go from peddling trinkets and buying up shopkeepers’ IOUs to forming what would become some of the largest invest...
The Ghost Army of World War 2
January 30, 2024 11:00 - 41 minutes - 38.1 MBIn the summer of 1944, a handpicked group of young GIs—including such future luminaries such as Bill Blass, Ellsworth Kelly, Arthur Singer, Victor Dowd, Art Kane, and Jack Masey—landed in France to conduct a secret mission. From Normandy to the Rhine, the 1,100 men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known as the Ghost Army, conjured up phony convoys, phantom divisions, and make-believe headquarters to fool the enemy about the strength and location of American units. Every move they made...
How Free Time Transformed From Strolls Through Aristocratic Gardens to Doomscrolling on TikTok
January 25, 2024 11:00 - 31 minutes - 28.8 MBFree time, one of life’s most important commodities, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty minutes? Despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it. Here to explain why this is today’s guest Gary Cross, author of “Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal.” We discuss a broad historical expla...
Everyday Life In a War Zone: How To Live For Years With Air Raid Sirens and Tanks in the Street
January 23, 2024 11:00 - 35 minutes - 32.7 MBWhat goes through the mind of a mother who must send her child to school across a minefield or the men who belong to groups of volunteer body collectors? When living in a warzone, such questions become part of the daily calculus of life. This is an everyday form of war that included provisioning fighters with military equipment they purchased themselves, smuggling insulin, and cutting ties to former friends. Today’s guest is Greta Uehling, author of “Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, U...
Behind the Bulldog: Winston Churchill's Public Image vs. Private Reality, Based on Those Who Knew Him
January 18, 2024 11:00 - 37 minutes - 34.6 MBWinston Churchill remains one of the most revered figures of the twentieth century, his name a byword for courageous leadership. But the Churchill we know today is a mixture of history and myth, authored by the man himself. Today’s guest, David Reynolds, author of “Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him,” re-evaluates Churchill’s life by viewing it through the eyes of his allies and adversaries, even his own family, revealing Churchill’s lifelong struggle to overcome h...
American Anarchy of the Early 1900s and The First U.S. War Against Domestic Extremists
January 16, 2024 11:00 - 40 minutes - 37.5 MBIn the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were heroes to many working-class immigrants. But to many others, anarchism was a terrifyingly foreign ideology. Determined to crush it, government officials launched a decades-long “war on anarchy,” a brutal program of spying, censorship, and deportation that set the foundations of the m...
Why Armies Stopped Burning Libraries and Weaponized Them Instead
January 11, 2024 11:00 - 40 minutes - 36.7 MBBooks are often seen as “victims” of combat. When the flames of warfare turn libraries to ashes, we grieve this loss as an immense human and cultural tragedy. But that’s not the complete picture. Books were used in war across the twentieth century—both as agents for peace and as weapons. On one hand, books represent solace and solidarity for troops and prisoners of war desperate for reading materials. On the other hand, books have also been engines of warfare, mobilizing troops, spreading ide...
Shining Light on the British Dark Ages: Anglo-Saxon Warfare, 400-1070
January 09, 2024 11:00 - 42 minutes - 38.5 MBIn a country fragmented by Roman withdrawal during the 5th century, the employment of Germanic mercenaries by local rulers in Anglo-Saxon Britain was commonplace. These mercenaries became settlers, forcing Romano-British communities into Wales and the West Country. Against a background of spreading Christianity, the struggles of rival British and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were exploited by the Vikings, but eventually contained by the Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred of Wessex. His descendants unified the ...
The Last Ship From Hamburg: How Russian Jews Escaped Death on the Eve of World War I
January 04, 2024 11:00 - 47 minutes - 43.9 MBFor a 30-year period, from the 1880s to World War I, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States. Many sailed on steamships from Hamburg. This mass exodus was facilitated by three businessmen whose involvement in the Jewish-American narrative has been largely forgotten: Jacob Schiff, the managing partner of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company, who used his immense wealth to help Jews to leave Europe; Albert Ball...