History Unplugged Podcast

Since the dawn of the Greek Classical Era up to World War II, thousands have lost their lives fighting over the pass at Thermopylae.. The epic events of 480 BC when 300 Spartans attempted to hold the pass has been immortalized in poetry, art, literature and film. But that is not the only battle fought there. Twenty-six other battles and holding actions took place, and they were fought by Romans, Byzantines, Huns and Ottomans during the early and late medieval periods and finally the two desperate struggles against German occupying forces during World War II.To discuss it is today’s guest, Michael Livingston, author of “The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae” The Killing Ground details the background and history of each conflict, the personalities and decision making of the commanders, the arms and tactics of the troops, and how each battle played out.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1864, a young Austrian archduke by the name of Maximilian crossed the Atlantic to assume a faraway throne. He had been lured into the voyage by a duplicitous Napoleon III (the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte). Keen to spread his own interests abroad, the French emperor had promised Maximilian a hero's welcome. Instead, he walked into a bloody guerrilla war. With a head full of impractical ideals - and a penchant for pomp and butterflies - the new 'emperor' was singularly ill-equipped for what lay in store. In this episode we are looking at this barely known, barely believable episode - a bloody tragedy of operatic proportions, the effects of which would be felt into the twentieth century and beyond. To discuss his life is today’s guest, Edward Shawcross, author of “The Last Emperor of Mexico: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New WorldSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Over the past few years, much has been written and created around Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, but little attention is paid to those whose lives were ended or forever changed when the bombs dropped in Japan.In this episode, we delve into the experiences of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. On that day the Enola Gay released its devastating payload, ushering in the nuclear age. The survivors, now with an average age of over 90, provide some of the last living testimonies of the horrors that unfolded in the seconds, minutes, and hours following the explosion.Today’s guest is M.G. Sheftall, author of The Stories of Hibakusha. Sheftall has spent years interviewing those who were young adolescents at the time of the bombing, now elderly but still haunted by their memories.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The original Harlem Globetrotters weren’t from Harlem, and they didn’t start out as globetrotters. The talented team, started by Jewish immigrant Abe Saperstein, was from Chicago’s South Side and toured the Midwest in Saperstein’s model-T. But with Saperstein’s savvy and the players’ skills, the Globetrotters would become a worldwide sensationAt 5’3”, Saperstein is not who we might imagine would bring the sport of basketball to the entire world, pioneer the three-point shot, or to befriend the likes of Jesse Owens, Satchel Paige, and Wilt Chamberlain to name a few. Born in 1902 in London’s Whitechapel slum neighborhood to parents who had immigrated from Poland, Saperstein and his family then immigrated to America in 1906. He founded the team in the 1920s, steadily building a reputation for talent and comedy until their footprint covered the entire world.Abe Saperstein’s impact went well beyond the Harlem Globetrotters. He helped keep baseball’s Negro Leagues alive, was a force in getting pitching great Satchel Paige his shot at the majors, and befriended Olympic star Jesse Owens when he fell on hard times. When Saperstein started the American Basketball League, he pioneered the three-point shot, which has dramatically changed the sport. Today’s guests, Mark Jacob and Matthew Jacob, authors of “Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports” piece together the of his life.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Was Harry Truman really our poorest president or simply a man up at 2 a.m. struggling with financial anxiety? Did Calvin Coolidge get bad advice from his stockbroker to buy stocks in 1930 as the market continued to crash? Is it true George Washington enhanced his net worth by marrying up?We often think of the US presidents as being above the fray. But the truth is, the presidents are just like us—worried about money, trying to keep a budget, and chasing the American financial dream. While some presidents like Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford became wildly successful with money, others like Thomas Jefferson and Joe Biden struggled to sustain their lifestyle. The ability to win the presidency is no guarantee of financial security, although today it’s a much easier path to monetize.Today’s guest is Megan Gorman, author of “All the Presidents’ Money.” We look at the different personal money stories of the presidents. Grit, education, and risk are just some of the different ways that the presidents over the last 250 years have made (or lost) money.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From the taking of the holy city of Jerusalem in the 7th century AD by Caliph Umar, to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I, Christian popes, emperors and kings, and Muslim caliphs and sultans were locked in a 1300-year battle for political, military, ideological, economic and religious supremacy.Some of the most significant clashes of arms in human history include the taking and retaking of Jerusalem and the collapse of the Crusader states; the fall of Constantinople; the sieges of Rhodes and Malta; the assault on Vienna and the 'high-water mark' of Ottoman advance into Europe; culminating in the Allied capture of Jerusalem in World War I, the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the dissolution of the sultanate and the caliphate, and the formation of modern Europe and the modern Middle East.To explore this history is today’s guest, Simon Mayall, author of “The House of War: The Struggle between Christendom and the Caliphate.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

More Americans have peanut allergies today than at any point in history. Why? In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a strict recommendation that parents avoid giving their children peanut products until they're three years old. Getting the science perfectly backward, triggering intolerance with lack of early exposure, the US now leads the world in peanut allergies-and this misinformation is still rearing its head today.How could the experts have gotten it so wrong? Could it be that many modern-day health crises have been caused by the hubris of the medical establishment? Experts said for decades that opioids were not addictive, igniting the opioid crisis. They demonized natural fat in foods, driving Americans to processed carbohydrates as obesity rates soared.These failures of medical groupthink have been seen throughout history. Philosophers of the 16th century who claimed that blood circulated throughout the body (instead of resting in a layer below the epidermis) faced capital punishment. James Lind, who discovered that Vitamin C prevented scurvy, was ignored for 40 years. Ignaz Semmelweis was rejected by the medical community for suggesting that doctors should perhaps wash their hands before operating on patients.Today’s guest is Marty Makary, author of “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What it Means for Our Health.” We see how when modern medicine issues recommendations based on good scientific studies, it shines. Conversely, when medicine is interpreted through the harsh lens of opinion and edict, it can mold beliefs that harm patients and stunt research for decades.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Appleton Oaksmith was a swashbuckling Civil War-era sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-19th century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering schemes in Nicaragua, Cuban liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. But in his life we also see the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln Administration went to destroy the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade. That’s because he spent years working as an outlaw mariner for the Confederacy and later against the Klan.Oaksmith lived in the murky underworld of New York City, where federal marshals plied the docks in lower Manhattan in search of evidence of slave trading. Once they suspected Oaksmith, federal authorities had him arrested and convicted, but in 1862 he escaped from jail and became a Confederate blockade-runner in Havana. The Lincoln Administration tried to have him kidnapped in violation of international law, but the attempt was foiled. Always claiming innocence, Oaksmith spent the next decade in exile until he received a presidential pardon from U.S. Grant, at which point he moved to North Carolina and became an anti-Klan politician.To look at this story is today’s guest, Jonathan White, author of “Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. But it has been received by different cultures and language groups in (sometimes) radically different ways. Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, and every community it has encountered has read, heard, and seen the Bible through its own language and culture. It was spread by merchants, missionaries, and colonizers Asia, Africa, and to the Americas. Local communities adapted the "alien" book through a blend of cultural integration and reinterpretation. For instance, 20th-century Chinese theologians described similarities between Confucianism and biblical texts, while Native Americans placed themselves directly into biblical narratives—a group of 18th-century Mohican converts renamed themselves Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, proclaiming themselves "patriarchs of a new nation of believers."Today’s guest is Bruce Gordon, author of “The Bible: A Global History.” We discuss the story of the Bible’s journey around the globe and across more than two thousand years, showing how it has shaped and been shaped by changing beliefs and believers’ different needs. The people who received it interpreted it in radically different ways, from desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In World War II, there were no C-130s or large cargo aircraft that could deliver heavy equipment– such as a truck or artillery piece – in advance of an airborne invasion. For that, you needed to put that equipment, along with its crew, in a glider. These were unpowered boxes of plywood, pulled by a towing plane into enemy territory by a single cable wrapped with telephone wire.The men who flew on gliders were all volunteers, for a specialized duty that their own government projected would have a 50 percent casualty rate. In every major European invasion of the war they led the way. They landed their gliders ahead of the troops who stormed Omaha Beach, and sometimes miles ahead of the paratroopers bound for the far side of the Rhine River in Germany itself. From there, they had to hold their positions. They delivered medical teams, supplies and gasoline to troops surrounded in the Battle of the Bulge, ahead even of Patton's famous supply truck convoy. These all-volunteer glider pilots played a pivotal role from the day the Allies invaded Occupied Europe to the day Germany finally surrendered. Yet the story of these anonymous heroes is virtually unknown.To explore these stories with us is today’s guest, Scott McGaugh, author of “Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin: The Glider Pilots of World War II.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From George Washington’s powdered pigtail to John Quincy Adams’ bushy side-whiskers and from James Polk’s masterful mullet to John F. Kennedy’s refined Ivy League coif, the tresses of American leaders have long conveyed important political and symbolic messages.There are surprising, and multi-dimensional ways that hair has influenced the personalities, public and private lives, personal scandals, and tragedies of the men and women who have occupied the White House and influenced the nation at large.To explore this unconventional aspect of American history is today’s guest, Ted Pappas, author of “Combing Through the White House: Hair and Its Shocking Impact on the Politics, Private Lives, and Legacies of the Presidents.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the question that historians have argued since the end of World War Two. How much did an average person know, and, more importantly, how responsible were they? What made people “perpetrators,” “bystanders,” and “victims” within a wider context of coercion and consent?To explore this question is today’s guest, Richard Evans, author of “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich.” We look at a connected series of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership. This includes personal lives of figures whose names appear in nearly all Nazi biographies, like Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels (“The Policeman” and “The Propagandist”), as well as professionals with skills deemed advantageous to the Nazi agenda, including Julius Streicher (“The Schoolmaster”) and the eugenicist Karl Brandt (“The Professional”), and some of the women in Hitler’s orbit such as Ilse Koch (“The Witch”) and Leni Riefenstahl (“The Star”).Through these biographies, one of our greatest historians explores the enduring and unnerving questions: How could human beings carry out such terrible and murderous atrocities? Were they degenerate, deranged psychopaths, or were they ordinary men doing their jobs? How can examining individual personalities help us reach an understanding of the evil and immorality that sustained the Nazi regime?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Iberia was one of three crucial theatres of the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome. Hannibal of Carthage’s siege of Saguntum in 219 BC triggered a conflict that led to immense human and material losses on both sides, pitting his brother Hasdrubal against the Republican Roman armies seeking to gain control of the peninsula. Then, in 208 BC, the famous Roman general Scipio Africanus defeated Hasdrubal at Baecula, forcing Hasdrubal’s army out of Iberia and on to its eventual annihilation at the Metaurus.Today’s guest, Mir Bahmanyar, author of “Second Punic War in Iberia: 220-206 BC” brings to life the key personalities and events of this important theatre of the war, and explains why the Roman victory at Baecula led to a strategic shift and Carthage’s eventual defeat. It covers Scipio Africanus’ brilliant victory at Ilipa in 206 BC, where he crushed the army of Mago Barca and Hasdrubal Gisco.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Contrary to popular belief, Robin Hood may not have been the merry medieval outlaw of Sherwood Forest. Rather, a look at real historical figures who inspired the legend are narrowed down to the most unlikely suspect: an Anglo-Saxon hitman who may have assassinated the King of England.Today’s guest, Peter Staveley, proposes that Robin Hood lived during the time of William II (near the time of the Norman conquest of England in 1066), rather than Richard I and Prince John of the late 1100s. He argues that Robin was responsible for the death of William II, also known as Rufus, in what was long considered a hunting accident in the New Forest in 1100. This act conveniently paved the way for William’s brother to ascend the throne as Henry I. Staveley places Robin deep within the geography of South Yorkshire, with strong ties to historic Hallamshire, Loxley, Bradfield, and Ecclesfield, challenging the traditional narrative and the long-held association with Nottingham.We explore how Yorkshire, particularly Sheffield, might reclaim the legacy of Robin Hood from Nottingham and reveal the true, rougher man behind the legend.Staveley is author of “Robin Unhooded, And the Death of a King.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The use of horses by humans began roughly 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Pontic- Caspian Steppe when a daring man (or a woman – we have no way of knowing) jumped on the back of a docile mare. Thus began the horse’s unrivalled historical influence across millennia to the present day.The horse dominated every facet of humanity—as a mode of transportation, a vehicle of trade, an essential farming tool, a status symbol, a formidable weapon of war, a source of energy, an agent of both lethal disease and lifesaving medicine, a participant in sport, and, of course, a steadfast and loyal companion.For most of us, horses are not part of our everyday, practical lives, and are instead relegated to entertainment and recreation through racing, rodeos, and equestrian or television shows and movies depicting bygone eras. But this is a relatively recent development as cars “unseated” the horse as the primary method of transportation a mere one hundred years ago. To demonstrate the profound historical impact of the horse on our global civilization, we are joined by Timothy Winegard, author of “The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Charles Cowlam’s career as a convict, spy, detective, congressional candidate, adventurer, and con artist spanned the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age. His life touched many of the most prominent figures of the era, including Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant. One contemporary newspaper reported that Cowlam “has as many aliases as there are letters in the alphabet.” He was a chameleon in a world of strangers, and scholars have overlooked him due to his elusive nature. Reconstruction offered additional opportunities for Cowlam to repackage his identity. He convinced Ulysses S. Grant to appoint him U.S. marshal and persuaded Republicans in Florida to allow him to run for Congress. After losing the election, Cowlam moved to New York, where he became a serial bigamist and started a fake secret society inspired by the burgeoning Granger movement. When the newspapers exposed his lies, he disappeared and spent the next decade living under an assumed name. He resurfaced in Dayton, Ohio, claiming to be a Union colonel suffering from dementia to gain admittance into the National Soldiers’ Home. Today’s guest, Frank Garmom, author of A Wonderful Career in Crime, Cowlam’s stunning machinationsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Soviet espionage existed in the United States since the U.S.S.R.’s founding and continued until its dissolution in the 1990s. It reached its height in World War 2 and the early Cold War, especially to steam atomic weapon’s technology (revealed to the public with the trials and executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two Americans who fed intelligence back to the Soviets).The funnel for Americans into Soviet espionage was the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), a movement that attracted egalitarian idealists and bred authoritarian zealots. Throughout its history, the American Communist Party attracted a variety of seemingly contradictory people. Democratic, reform-minded individuals who wanted to end inequality worked alongside authoritarians and ideologues who espoused Soviet propaganda. These factions reached loggerheads following Nikita Khrushchev’s revelation of Joseph Stalin’s crimes, leading to the organization’s decline into political irrelevance. To look at this history is today’s guest, Maurice Isserman, author of “Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth?In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime,” she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country.But Mandelbaum wasn’t just a successful crook: She was a business visionary—one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters, she handled logistics and organized supply chains—turning theft into a viable, scalable business.To discuss this story is today’s guest, Margalit Fox, author of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. We look at a colorful fixture of Gilded Age New York—a city teeming with nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and “legitimate” commerce.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Beneath the trench warfare of World War One existed an entirely separate war underground: battles in the mines and dugouts between the Great Powers. In 1914–17, the underground war was a product of static trench warfare, essential to survive it and part of both sides' attempts to overcome it.In the stagnant, troglodyte existence of trench warfare, military mining was a hidden world of heroism and terror in which hours of suspenseful listening were spent monitoring the steady picking of unseen opponents, edging quietly towards the enemy, and judging when to fire a charge. Break-ins to enemy mine galleries resulted in hand-to-hand fighting in the darkness. We are joined by Simon Jones to discuss the ingenuity, claustrophobia and tactical importance of the underground war. He is the author of “The War Underground, 1914-1918: Tactics and Equipment.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the months leading up to D-Day, Eisenhower’s attention was in relentless demand, whether he was negotiating, rallying troops, or solving crises from his headquarters in Bushy Park, London. He projected optimism outwardly but resisted it inwardly. The day of the invasion, he gave the most rousing speech of his life, exhorting the tens of thousands of young men of the “Great Crusade” ahead of them. Then in a fleeting moment of quiet, he wrote out a draft of a resignation letter in case the invasion failed.Outwardly, Eisenhower was a genial cypher. He was liked by all and seemed to make success inevitable. Inwardly, he was near constantly abuzz with brilliance, exhaustion, will, frustration, and the acute awareness that failure was always a possibility. The D-Day landing sees him at this unique, extraordinarily consequential moment, for D-Day would not only go down as one of the most important military successes in history but would also forge a modern George Washington.To explore this story, we are joined with today’s guest, Michel Paradis, author of “The Light of Battle.” We see how Ike masterminded D-Day, wielding his unique leadership skills to save Europe and shape the course of history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On August 20, 1942, twelve Marine dive-bombers and nineteen Marine fighters landed at Guadalcanal. Their mission: defeat the Japanese navy and prevent it from sending more men and supplies to "Starvation Island," as Guadalcanal was nicknamed. The Japanese were turning the remote, jungle-covered mountain in the south Solomon Islands into an air base from which they could attack the supply lines between the U.S. and Australia. The night after the Marines landed and captured the partially completed airfield, the Imperial Navy launched a surprise night attack on the Allied fleet offshore, resulting in the worst defeat the U.S. Navy suffered in the 20th century, which prompted the abandonment of the Marines on Guadalcanal.The Marines dug in, and waited for help, as those thirty-one pilots and twelve gunners flew against the Japanese, shooting down eighty-three planes in less than two months, while the dive bombers, carried out over thirty attacks on the Japanese fleet. The attacks were led by such figures as Major John L. Smith, a magnetic leader who became America’s top fighter ace for the time; Captain Marion Carl, the Marine Corps’ first ace, and one of the few survivors of his squadron at the Battle of Midway (he would be shot down and forced to make his way back to base through twenty-five miles of Japanese-held jungle; and Major Richard Mangrum, the lawyer-turned-dive-bomber commander whose inexperienced men wrought havoc on the Japanese Navy.To discuss these stories is today’s guest, John Bruning, author of Fifty-Three Days on Starvation Island.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When global supply chains were shut down in 2020 and messily rebooted after COVID lockdowns ceased, one island nation emerged as the most important player in getting critical components to factories around the world. That was Taiwan, which produces 90 percent of the world’s advanced semiconductors. Without this island nation of 23 million, there are no smart phones, new cars, or any advanced consumer electronics.Things were no less dull on the foreign policy side, as US-Chinese relations deteriorated. When Nancy Pelosi declared her intent to visit Taiwan in 2022, it sparked frenzied discussions across the United States, China, and Taiwan—a discourse that was characterized by amnesia and half-truths about the history of this pivotal island nation. Today, as relations between Washington and Beijing deteriorate and as tensions over Taiwan reach a boiling point, its survival as an independent democracy is precarious indeed. Any attempt to resolve the impasse and avert a devastating war demands that we understand how it all began. To explore Taiwan’s modern history is toda’s guest Sulmaan Wasif Khan, author of “The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between.’ The story begins in 1943, when the Allies declared that Japanese-held Taiwan would return to China at the conclusion of World War II. When the Communist Party came to power in China, the defeated Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan, where he was afforded US protection despite establishing a brutal police state. From the White Terror to the Taiwan Straits Crises, from the normalization of Sino-American relations to the tensions of the Trump-era, we look at the tortuous paths that led to our present predicament. War is not inevitable, Khan shows, but to avoid it, decision-makers must heed the lessons of the past.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, the words “federalism” and “originalism” are bandied about in the news almost daily, but to get at the underpinnings of these modern interpretations of constitutional law, it is essential to look at how the Constitution was being interpreted and applied during the crucial period of 1815-1861, between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the Civil War.Early nineteenth-century Americans found themselves consumed by arguments about concurrent power—the areas in which the Constitution had left the line between federal and state authority unclear. The scope of specific concurrent powers became increasingly important, and controversial, in the early nineteenth century. In 1815, the most pressing political and legal issues increasingly concerned situations in which multiple layers of governmental power overlapped—and the Constitution provided no clear delineation. Moreover, the choice of which level of government regulated each subject had dramatic consequences for the policy that resulted.To explore this topic is today’s guest, Alison LaCroix, author of “The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms.” We see just how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Every citizen of every state for the last two thousand years has compared his nation to Rome at some point. Americans considered Geroge Washington their Cincinnatus for taking on supreme power and giving it up once his work was done. Inflation hawks call for a Diocletian to end the debasing of national currency. Upset citizens call their leader a Nero for ignoring a conflagration in favor of musical composition. Americans can’t help but do the same now, especially when 2024 gives so much reason for pessimism and feelings that we are experiencing a late Roman moment of our own.To discuss this, we are joined by Jeremy Slate, a historian of the Roman Empire (and host of Create Your Life podcast). We delve into the parallels between ancient propaganda (think Virgil's book, The Aeneid, paid for by a Roman Emperor) and the modern echo chamber of 2024's media frenzy.Drawing inspiration from Diocletian's reforms in Rome's third century, after which Rome lasted nearly 200 years, we discuss whether a contemporary reformer could reshape our tumultuous 2024 landscape and restore stability. In an era of rampant inflation, immigration, and crumbling power structures, the parallels are uncanny.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Charles H. Barnard, captain of the American sealing brig Nanina, had only the best of intentions. His aim was to ensure the survival of the people under his care. On June 11, 1813, Barnard and four other volunteers disembarked the anchored Nanina, climbed into a small boat, and sailed about 10 miles from New Island to Beaver Island, both part of the Falkland Islands archipelago in the South Atlantic. Armed with knives, clubs, lances, and guns, and with the assistance of Barnard’s trusty dog, Cent, the five men planned to kill birds and hogs and take them back to the Americans and British who remained on the Nanina and were fast running out of fresh provisions. It was a mission of mercy.The hunt went well, and within a few days the boat was filled to the gunwales with the bloody carcasses of slain animals. But when the men sailed back to New Island late on June 14, they were greeted with an alarming sight. The Nanina was gone. Stunned, confused, and angry, the men hauled the boat up onto the beach and, according to Barnard, “awaited the approach of daylight in the most impatient and tormenting anxiety.” Sleeping fitfully in the cold night air, they hoped that in the morning light they would find a letter telling them why the Nanina had left, and when it was coming back.A frantic search at dawn turned up nothing: no note either in a bottle or hung conspicuously from a piece of wood or a boulder. They saw only sand, rocks, scrubby vegetation, and birds in the distance, walking on the beach or flying overhead.The events leading up to this abandonment, and what happened afterward, produce a story with so many unlikely threads, and a cast including such exceptionally colorful characters, that one might think that it sprang from the pen of a fiction writer with an overactive imagination. And yet, the story is true. It is a tale involving a shipwreck, British and Americans meeting under the most stressful circumstances in a time of war, kindness and compassion, drunkenness, the birth of a child, treachery, greed, lying, a hostile takeover, stellar leadership, ingenuity, severe privation, the great value of a good dog, perseverance, endurance, threats, bullying, banishment, a perilous thousand-mile open-ocean journey in a 17.5-foot boat, an improbable rescue mission in a rickety ship, and legal battles over a dubious and disgraceful wartime prize. And it all started with two ships—one American, the other British—sailing to the Falklands from different directions.To explore this story is today’s guest, Eric Dolan, author of Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If Gothic cathedrals, troubadours, and the Crusades evoke a certain picture of medieval Europe, you might be surprised that these foundations of a shared French culture continue to shape European society, all beginning with a single dynasty. Reigning from 987 to 1328, the Capetians transformed an insecure foothold around Paris into the most powerful European monarchy of the Middle Ages.Today’s guest is Justine Firnhaber-Baker, author of “House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France.” She tells the epic story of the Capetian dynasty, showing how their ideas about power, religion, and identity are all-too-relevant to the Europe we know today. The Capetians were the first royal house to adopt the iconic fleur-de-lys, displaying this lily emblem to signify the belief that their nation was chosen by God to fulfill a great destiny. By 1250, Capetian France stood as the richest and most prestigious kingdom in Europe, with Paris lauded as a new Rome, a new Athens, and—due to a tradition of both profound piety and violent persecution of religious minorities—even a new Jerusalem.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Even in our increasingly digitized world, the print book endures as a technology at the heart of human culture. Throughout its 550-yearhistory, the book has transformed at the hands of countless printers, bookbinders, typographers, and illustrators who have yet to see their own stories of innovation on the printed page.In “The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives,” today’s guest Adam Smyth demonstrates the role of human agency in the evolution of technology, from binding to paper-making, typography to illustrations, and libraries to small presses. Beginning with the early printed books made by Dutch immigrant Wynkyn de Worde in 1490s London and ending with the zines in 2023 New York City, we look at the evolution of the print book through eighteen biographical portraits of bookbinders, typographers, illustrators, and more.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most people know at least 50,000 words and speak around 16,000 per day. We speak between 120 and 200 words per minute and read them at twice that speed. We invent word games like crosswords, Scrabble, and Wordle, and we are constantly adding new terminology and slang to our dictionaries. Our love of words is no secret, but how we evolved to acquire so many words and manipulate them into complex thoughts is one of science’s greatest unsolved mysteries.Today’s guest is Steven Mithen, author of “The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved. “ He explores evidence from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, genetics, and archaeology to unearth new theories about the origins of language. Beginning with an overview of human evolution during which language evolved, The Language Puzzle looks to our distant ape and monkey relatives to see what their vocalizations can tell us about the foundations of language in our earliest ancestors. Mithen analyzes fossil evidence to explain what we can glean from changes in humans’ vocal tracts over time, and the linguistic implications from how our ancestors made stone tools.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

America in the early twentieth century was rife with threats. Organized crime groups like the Mafia, German spies embedded behind enemy lines ahead of World War I, package bombs sent throughout the country, and the 1920 Wall Street bombing dominated headlines. And one man was tasked with combating these threats.Born to working-class parents in 1867, Willaim Flynn launched the first antiterrorist program, unraveled a German spy network, and took on the Mob. Dubbed “the bulldog” for his tenacity, Flynn earned a high-profile reputation as one of the most respected, incorruptible, and storied law enforcement officials in the country.To explore these issues is today’s guest is Jeffrey Simon, author of "The Bulldog Detective: William J. Flynn and America's First War Against the Mafia, Spies, and Terrorists." He takes us back to an era when counterfeiters plagued butcher shops, German spies rode the subway, and anarchists bombed targets across the country, including using a horse-drawn wagon to set off an explosion on Wall Street that, at the time, was the worst terrorist attack ever to occur in America.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nineteen months after Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor and forced the United States to enter World War II, boats carrying the 7th US Army landed on the shores of southern Sicily. Dubbed Operation Husky, the campaign to establish an Allied foothold in Sicily was led by two of the most noted American tacticians of the twentieth century: George S. Patton Jr. and Geoffrey Keyes. While Patton is the subject of numerous books and films, Keyes's life and achievements have gone unrecognized, but his anonymity is by no means an accurate reflection of the value of his contributions and dedicated service in World War II and the succeeding cold war. To look at this lacuna is today’s guest, James Holsinger, author of Patton's Tactician: The War Diary of Lieutenant General Geoffrey Keyes. His account begins in October 1942, prior to the invasion of French Morocco and Keyes's engagement in World War II and the Cold War. Holsinger has integrated a variety of related sources, including correspondence between Keyes, Patton, and Eisenhower. A day-to-day chronicle of Keyes's experiences in the World War II Mediterranean Theater and the early days of the Cold War in occupied Germany and Austria, Patton's Tactician is an invaluable primary source that offers readers a glimpse into the mind of one of America's most important World War II corps commanders.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Behind the legendary, singular figure of Cleopatra stood six other women who bore her name. The infamous Cleopatra we think we know was actually the seventh queen in a long line of powerful female rulers whose stories have been lost to history. The seven queens named Cleopatra, ruling from 192–30 BC, defied the stereotype of the nameless, faceless women of antiquity and instead challenged the norms of their time.Today’s guest, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones unearths the lost stories of all seven monarchs in “The Cleopatras: The Forgotten Queens of Egypt.” Exploring a part of the Hellenistic World often neglected by historians, Llewellyn-Jones brings to life the complicated, tempestuous stories of the seven queens marrying the same man, sending armies into war, and plotting to overthrow their kings for sole rulership.While each Queen Cleopatra encountered a unique set of challenges and ruled with her own set of strengths, each generation influenced the next, culminating in a powerful dynastic line that ultimately transformed the imperial politics of their house into global politics.The Cleopatras shines a light on the six influential yet forgotten Queen Cleopatras and reveals how Cleopatra VII, whose real story disappears beneath the weight of all the stereotypes we pin on her, should be remembered as a consummate politician who learned from the generations of women before her.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When 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 innocuously named Maid Honour Force--was led by Gus March-Phillipps, a wild British eccentric of high birth, and an aristocratic, handsome, and bloodthirsty young Danish warrior, Anders Lassen. Amped up on amphetamines, these assorted renegades and sociopaths undertook the very first of Churchill's special operations--a top-secret, high-stakes mission to seize Nazi shipping in the far-distant port of Fernando Po, in West Africa.Though few of these early desperadoes survived WWII, they took part in a series of fascinating, daring missions that changed the course of the war. It was the first stirrings of the modern special-ops team, and all of the men involved would be declared war heroes when it was all over.To discuss this unit, dubbed by Churchill “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is today’s guest, Damien Lewis, author of the book by the same name.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For 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, revelatory history.Guiding us through it is today’s guest, Bettany Hughes, author of “The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.” She has traveled to each of the sites to uncover the latest archaeological discoveries and bring these monuments and the distinct cultures that built them back to life.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Many 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 Living Constitutionally, set out to answer.For one year, he committed to living as the original originalist, expressing his constitutional rights using the tools, lifestyle and mindset of when they were written in 1787. He bore muskets. He wrote pamphlets with a goose quill by candlelight. He quartered soldiers. He tried to pay for goods and services with gold. He applied for a letter of marque from Congress, which would make him a legal pirate (a practice that the U.S. government sanctioned during the Revolutionary War). He gave his friends the same gift that George Washington did: a lock of his own hair. This year-long project was Jacobs’ humble attempt to figure out how to interpret the Constitution and whether we can improve the American experiment.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Many 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 with today, with the rise of radical political factions that resorted to extreme protests and violence to achieve their This can be seen in the construction of the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, symbol of reactionary French Catholicism, and the Eiffel Tower, centerpiece for the Universal Exposition of 1889—both of which were the result of significant technological progress. That progress also brought electricity (Paris became “the city of light”) as well as industrial displacement, already underway with the other construction projects of Baron Georges Haussmann.To explore these themes is today’s guest, Mike Rappaport, author of “City of Light, City of Shadows, Paris in the Belle Époque.” We explore social pressure from both right and left to address the deepening sense of social injustice and inequalities in the form of violent anarchism and syndicalism.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To 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 was Princess Gulbadan (1523-1603), a daughter of the first Mughal Emperor who wrote the empire’s first history. Gulbadan was a dynamic and influential figure and a trusted advisor to the Empire. She was part of the peripatetic royal household. The Mughals had moved often across long distances, living for extended periods in the open country in royal tents pitched in gardens, and in citadels. But when Gulbadan was in her 50s, her nephew Akbar the Great established a walled harem in his capital Fatehpur-Sikri near Agra — an effort to showcase his regal authority as Emperor. From behind these walls, Gulbadan longed for the exuberant itinerant lifestyle she’d long known. With Akbar’s blessing, Gulbadan led a remarkable and unprecedented four-year pilgrimage of Mughal women to the distant Muslim Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina and beyond. Amid increasing political tensions, the women were expelled for their “un-Islamic” behavior, a thinly veiled effort to curb Mughal influence in the Holy cities, controlled at the time by the Ottoman Sultans of Turkey. Their travels home included a dramatic shipwreck in the Gulf of Aden. After her return to India, Akbar asked Gulbadan to record her memories of the Mughal Dynasty to serve as a source for the first official history of the Empire. What she wrote was unparalleled in both form and content. She captured the gritty and fabulous daily lives of ambitious men, subversive women, brilliant eunuchs, devoted nurses, gentle and perceptive guards, captive women, and children who died in war zones. To explore Gulbadan’s life is today’s guest, Ruby Lal, author of “Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On 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: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. “ We analyze the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”At the heart of this narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

LSD 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 coopted LSD for their mind control military research—research that the US was desperate to acquire. This research birthed MKUltra, the CIA's notorious brainwashing and psychological torture program during the 1950s and 1960s.Today’s guest is Norman Ohler, author of “Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age.” We discuss:· How the history of LSD is interwoven with that of the Cold War and its arms race, and how the US government’s introduction to LSD through Nazi research influenced much of the federal government’s early attitudes around it· How, in addition to LSD’s militarized misconception from the Nazis, there were other areasof US drug policy influenced by the Third Reich for over half a century· How psychedelic research was marginalized and stigmatized for so long by prohibition and the War on Drugs, and how high the hurdles remain today for approval of psychedelic medicine, despite the opportunities—rather than dangers—they representSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 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 New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and, at age seven, got his first musical instrument, a ten-cent tin horn that drew buyers to his rag-peddling wagon and set him on the road to elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom. William James Basie was son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town, and who finally engineered his getaway with help from Fats Waller.To explore their stories is today’s guest, Larry Tye, author of “The Jazz Men: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

America 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 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 look at what went wrong for the Germans at Dunkirk.As supreme military commander, Hitler had seemingly achieved a miracle after the swift capitulation of Holland and Belgium, but with just seven kilometers before the panzers captured Dunkirk – the only port through which the trapped British Expeditionary force might escape – they came to a shuddering stop. Only a detailed interpretation of the German perspective – historically lacking to date – can provide answers as to why.SponsorsGet Exclusive NordVPN deal here → https://nordvpn.com/historyunplugged It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee!"See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Naval 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 vessels. Its fate was sealed on June 19, 1864, after a fourteen-month chase that culminated in one of the most dramatic naval battles in history.The dreaded Confederate raider Alabama faced the Union warship Kearsarge in an all-or-nothing fight to the death, and the outcome would effectively end the threat of the Confederacy on the high seas. To talk about this story is historian Tom Clavin, author of the new book To the Uttermost Ends of the Earth: The Epic Hunt for the South's Most Feared Ship―and the Greatest Sea Battle of the Civil War.We look at historically overlooked Civil War players, including John Winslow, captain of the USS Kearsarge, as well as Raphael Semmes, captain of the CSS Alabama. Readers will sail aboard the Kearsarge as Winslow embarks for Europe with a set of simple orders from the secretary of the navy: "Travel to the uttermost ends of the earth, if necessary, to find and destroy the Alabama." Winslow pursued Semmes in a spectacular fourteen-month chase over international waters, culminating in what would become the climactic sea battle of the Civil War.SponsorsGet Exclusive NordVPN deal here → https://nordvpn.com/historyunplugged It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee!"See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 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 conditions of their birth, and when are they universally condemnable? What separates a Thomas Jefferson from an Emperor Nero?To discuss this incredibly challenging topic is someone perhaps nobody better qualified: Dr. Victor Davis Hanson. He is an emeritus classics professor and author of books on the Peloponnesian War or assessing the ancient world’s best military leader. He was also awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 and was a presidential appointee in 2007–2008 on the American Battle Monuments Commission.We discuss the following:•Times when American’s feared the removal of Jefferson or Theodore Roosevelt statues in 2021 (or their toppling in riots). But we have also celebrated statue removal, such as the removal of Saddam Hussein’s statues after the fall of his regime in 2003 or the removal of Marx/Lenin Statues in Eastern Europe in 1991. What is the difference?•The criteria for a community to remove a statue in a healthy way•How we judge those of the past and determine that some character flaws are due to their times of birth, while other character flaws are universally condemnable – Essentially, what makes a slave-owning Jefferson a product of his time while, say, a Nero, is universally understood as cruel•The dangers of canceling anyone who doesn’t meet our 21st century standards; conversely, the dangers of slavish worship of them•Who deserves more statues todaySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One 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 than twenty-eight ships would be involved in the rescue of Titanic survivors along with four different countries.At the heart of the rescue are two young Marconi operators, Jack Phillips 25 and Harold Bride 22, tapping furiously and sending electromagnetic waves into the black night as the room they sat in slanted toward the icy depths and not stopping until the bone numbing water was around their ankles. Then they plunged into the water after coordinating the largest rescue operation the maritime world had ever seen and thereby saving 710 people by their efforts.The race to save the largest ship in the world from certain death would reveal both heroes and villains. It would begin at 11:40 PM on April 14, when the iceberg was struck and would end at 2:20 AM April 15, when her lights blinked out and left 1500 people thrashing in 25-degree water. Although the race to save Titanic survivors would stretch on beyond this, most people in the water would die, but the amazing thing is that of the 2229 people, 710 did not and this was the success of the Titanic rescue effort.We see the Titanic as a great tragedy but a third of the people were rescued and the only reason every man, woman, and child did not succumb to the cold depths is due to Jack Phillips and Harold McBride in an insulated telegraph room known as the Silent Room. These two men tapping out CQD and SOS distress codes while the ship took on water at the rate of 400 tons per minute from a three-hundred-foot gash would inaugurate the most extensive rescue operation in maritime history using the cutting-edge technology of the time, wireless.To talk about this race against time is frequent guest Bill Hazelgrove, author of the new book One Hundred and Sixty Minutes: The Race to Save the RMS Titanic.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scandinavia 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 Constantinople, and the castles of England and Ireland. But nowhere would they leave a deeper mark than across the Atlantic, where the Vikings’ legacy would become the American Dream.Today’s guest Arthur Herman, author of The Viking Heart, discusses this historical narrative but matches it with cutting-edge archaeological discoveries and DNA research to trace the epic story of this remarkable and diverse people (despite myths of racial purity misappropriated by groups like Nazi ethnographers). He shows how the Scandinavian experience has universal meaning, and how we can still be inspired by their indomitable spirit and the strength of their community bonds, much needed in our deeply polarized society today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There’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 self-worth and molds our values. But are we hard-wired to work as hard as we do? Did our Stone Age ancestors also live to work and work to live? And what might a world where work plays a far less important role look like?To answer these questions, today’s guest James Suzman, author of Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots charts a grand history of "work" from the origins of life on Earth to our ever more automated present, challenging some of our deepest assumptions about who we are. Drawing insights from anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, zoology, physics, and economics, he shows that while we have evolved to find joy meaning and purpose in work, for most of human history our ancestors worked far less and thought very differently about work than we do now. He demonstrates how our contemporary culture of work has its roots in the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago. Our sense of what it is to be human was transformed by the transition from foraging to food production, and, later, our migration to cities. Since then, our relationships with one another and with our environments, and even our sense of the passage of time, have not been the same.Arguing that we are in the midst of a similarly transformative point in history, Suzman argues that automation might revolutionize our relationship with work and in doing so usher in a more sustainable and equitable future for our world.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before 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 him. This event may have been the catalyst for America’s entry into World War One and permanently altered U.S.-Mexican border policy.Jeff Guinn, author of the new book "War on the Border," joins us to discuss this critically important event in American history. The “Punitive Expedition” was launched in retaliation under Pershing’s command and brought together the Army, National Guard, and the Texas Rangers—who were little more than organized vigilantes. The American expedition was the last action by the legendary African-American “Buffalo Soldiers.” It was also the first time the Army used automobiles and trucks, which were of limited value in Mexico, a country with no paved roads or gas stations. Curtiss Jenny airplanes did reconnaissance, another first. One era of warfare was coming to a close as another was beginning. But despite some bloody encounters, the Punitive Expedition eventually withdrew without capturing Villa.Although the bloodshed has ended, the US-Mexico border remains as vexed and volatile an issue as ever.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At 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 influential political movements in our history. To some, it demonstrated the power of a rising majority to push back against slavery. To others, it looked like a paramilitary force training to invade the South.Today’s guest, Jon Grinspan (author of “Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War”) examines how exactly our nation crossed the threshold from a political campaign into a war. We look at the precarious relationship between violent rhetoric and violent actions.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 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 tolerate scrutiny, even in the form of philosophical critique. To understand what happened and how it happened, we have to come to terms with the motives of the priests, and as importantly, Socrates’ motives in provoking them. His trial is perhaps first, but not last, great battle between philosophy and religion.To explore this mystery is today’s guest, Matt Gatton, author of “The Shadows of Socrates.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A 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.” For centuries after these first encounters, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch--and influenced global markets--and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists.Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to control the majority of the continent. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created new institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their preponderance of power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.