History Unplugged Podcast
Kanal Detayları
History Unplugged Podcast
For 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 (Scot...
Son Bölümler
1053 bölüm
The Sawmill – Along With Gunpowder and the Printing Press – Created the Modern World
The wind-powered sawmill was invented around 1592 in the Netherlands, immediately transforming the nature of labor and industry. This mechanical marve...
Gears, Gold, and Global Peace: A Steampunk Bitcoin Journey Through an Alternate 20th Century
We have paper money today because it functioned as an IOU, certifying that the holder could redeem it for an equivalent amount of physical gold or sil...
Before the Cold War, Russia and America Were the Closest of Distant Friends
Nearly a century of Cold War tensions between the United States and Russia hide the incredibly close friendship that the two nations enjoyed before th...
The Horrifying Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Titanic of the Great Lakes
One of the worst nautical disasters in recent American history is the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. On November 10, 1975, the “storm of the cen...
Inside the Deadly German U-Boats That Brought Britain to Its Knees (But Were Deadlier for Their Own Crews)
Over the course of World War II, Germany’s submariners sank over three thousand Allied ships, nearly three-quarters of Allied shipping losses in all t...
Manifest Destiny, Powered by Coal: How “Black Gold” Conquered the American Continent
America’s growth from a rugged frontier nation to the globe’s industrial superpower in the space of 100 years can be explained by one word: coal. Befo...
Ancient Athens Picked Its Leaders by Lottery for Over 200 Years. Some Think This System Should Replace Electoral Democracy
For almost two centuries, Ancient Athens—the most successful democracy in history—selected citizens by lottery to fill government positions. Athens ad...
How Would Nixon Have Handled the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The "Madman Theory" was Richard Nixon's foreign policy strategy during the Vietnam War era, where he deliberately cultivated an image of being unpredi...
Diogenes, the Father of Ancient Greek Stoicism, Loving Trolling His Audience and Could Out-Shock Borat
The famous street artist Banksy shocked the art world in 2018 when his painting, Girl with Balloon, partially shredded itself moments after selling it...
Blown Off Course: How History’s Windy Turning Points Sank the Armada and Saved Japan from the Mongols
The greatest energy source for civilization before the steam engine was wind. It powered the global economy in the Age of Sail. Wind-powered sail ship...
Maps Have Bigger Problems Than the Mercator Projection. They Invent Mountain Ranges and Usually Eliminate New Zealand
Maps have always had problems. Five hundred years ago, maps were wildly inaccurate simply because cartographers were drawing the edge of the known wor...
The Great Mathematicians of the Early 1900s Ran into an Unsolvable Problem. They Realized Math Made No Sense
In the 1800s, it seemed like mathematics was a solved problem. The paradoxes in the field were resolved, and even areas like advanced calculus could b...
The American Revolution was a World War in All but Name
The Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, known as the "shot heard round the world," marked the first military engagements of the American R...
How Napoleon and Churchill Used Neuroscience to Make a Better Soldier and More Loyal Public
The brain acts in strange ways during wartime. Even in active combat situations, when soldiers are one mistake away from death, many can’t fire on th...
William F. Buckley JR.'s Guide to Friendship in a Polarized Era
William F. Buckley Jr., the charismatic intellectual who defined modern American conservatism, was famously skilled at forging friendships across the...
What it Was Like Living Through the USSR’s Collapse
The Collapse of the Soviet Union was twice as devastating as the Great Depression for those who lived there. It immediately led to widespread economic...
The Battle of Agincourt, 1415: Longbowmen, Bands of Brothers, and Henry V’s Triumph
From Shakespeare's 'band of brothers' speech to its appearances in numerous films, Agincourt rightfully has a place among a handful of conflicts whose...
Clarence Dillon: The Roaring 20s Wall Street Baron Who Wrote the Rules for Corporate Takeovers, Junk Bonds, and Bankruptcy
J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles E. Mitchell are names that come to mind when thinking of the most prominent icons of wealth and influenc...
A Utah Indian Chief Controlled the 1800s Mountain West Through Slave Trading, Building Pioneer Trails, Horse Stealing, and Becoming Mormon
The American Indian leader Wakara was among the most influential and feared men in the nineteenth-century American West. He and his pan-tribal cavalry...
Why Did Rome Fall? Wrong Question. How Did it Last 2,000 Years Despite Changing its Religion, Language, and Government?
Rome began as a pagan, Latin-speaking city state in central Italy during the early Iron Age and ended as a Christian, Greek-speaking empire as the age...
The Real Deadwood: A Gold Rush Town Built in a War Zone but Obliterated in an Inferno
Gunslinging, gold-panning, stagecoach robbing, whiskey guzzling – the myth and infamy of the American West is synonymous with its most famous town: De...
America's Pacific Dawn: The Spanish-American War Ushered In Global Reach and Savage Conflict
Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, was in Havana in 1898, investigating the terrible conditions endured by Cubans whom the Spanish government...
The Unhealed Wounds of WW2 POWs and Combat Veterans
Nearly 16.4 million Americans served in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II, and for millions of survivors, the fighting left many of them physicall...
Robert McNamara Thought Enough Data Could Win Any War. Instead, It Led America to the Vietnam Quagmire
Robert S. McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense during JFK and LBJ’s administrations, and one of the chief architects of the Vietnam war, made a shoc...
The Philistine Connection: Do the Roots of October 7 Go Back 3,000 Years?
The October 7th attacks of Hamas on Israel were an unprecedented, surprise incursion by land, sea, and air that stunned the world and prompted Israel...
The Thucydides Trap: How A Rising Athens Made The Peloponnesian War Inevitable
The Peloponnesian War is considered one of the most famous wars of the ancient world not only because it was a massive and devastating conflict that r...
The Free French Army in North Africa, 1940-1945
One of the principal architects of Allied Victory in North Africa during World War Two was French General Louis Dio. His importance in North Africa li...
An Inventor’s Quest to Build a Pneumatic Subway System in 1870s New York
Alfred Beach built America’s first operational subway in secret beneath 1860s Manhattan, decades before the city’s official electric subway line in 19...
Spirited Rivalry: Did Ireland or Scotland Invent Whisky?
There’s a divide between Scotland and Ireland as fierce as the Protestant/Catholic split during the Thirty Years’ War or the battles between Sunnis an...
The Horse That Ate the Legion: Rome’s Cavalry's Triumph Over the Infantry
The cavalry 'wings' that probed ahead of the Roman Army played a key role in its campaigns of conquest, masking its marching flanks and seeking to enc...
Beyond Joan of Arc and Agincourt: How the 100 Years War Crushed Medieval Europe and Launched its Global Order
Modern France and Britain were forged in the fires of the Hundred Years War, a century-long conflict that produced deadly English longbowmen, Joan of...
Reverse Ellis Island: American Migrants Who Fought for Mussolini and Built Stalin’s USSR
America saw a significant reverse-migration in the 1800s and 1900s, with 20–50% of Italian immigrants returning to Italy as ritornati and tens of thou...
Don’t Use Rome as a Model of Why Societies Collapse; Use Crime Syndicates and Somalia Instead
12,000 years ago, human history changed forever when the egalitarian groups of hunter-gathering humans began to settle down and organize themselves in...
A Union General Found a Loophole in the Fugitive Slave Act, Causing 1 Million Slaves to Flee North
After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, enslaved people feared running away to the North, as their return was mandated, and they faced br...
The Civil War’s Brutal Finale: A War of Attrition as Terrible as WW2-Pacific and the Napoleonic Wars
In 1864, the American Civil War reached a critical juncture with Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, including the brutal battles of the Wilderness...
Camp David Looks Like a 1970s Lakeside Retreat. Why is it the Site of the World’s Biggest Political Summits?
Camp David, nestled in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, spans about 125 acres, making it significantly smaller than other presidential getaways like Lyn...
How British Scientists' Self-Experiments on Underwater Rebreathing Created D-Day Submarine Tech (And Nearly Killed Them in the Process)
In August 1942, over 7,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, in a largely forgotten landing, with only a small fraction surviving...
Over 200,000 Allied Troops Tried and Failed to Crush the Soviet Revolution After World War One
The Allied Intervention into the Russian Civil War remains one of the most ambitious yet least talked about military ventures of the 20th century. Coi...
How the U.S. Occupation of Japan After WW2 Forged the Most Durable Peace of the 20th Century
During World War II, the U.S. and Japan were locked in bitter hatred, fueled by propaganda portraying each other as ruthless enemies, exemplified by d...
Homer Couldn't Have Written the Iliad, But He Probably Dictated it Word for Word
The 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...