History Unplugged Podcast

Podcast

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

1103 episodesen-us
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 (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.

Episodes

All the World’s Empires Became Nations in Less Than 100 Years, and What That Means for the Next 100

<p>For the last 5,000 years, empires ruled the world &mdash; Rome administered hundreds of languages across three continents, and the Ottomans governed Christians, Jews, and Muslims under a single leg...
Jul 14, 202649m

Five Cambridge Graduates Became Soviet Spies and Built Stalin’s Empire

<p>The Cambridge Five did more damage to the Western Bloc than any other intelligence outfit of the Cold War. They were five Cambridge graduates who drank gin at the right clubs, moved through the rig...
Jul 9, 202658m

Washington’s Power Went Beyond President or General – He Was a Full-Fledged Patriarch

<p>Washington was the perfect man for an impossible moment &mdash; aristocratic enough to command the respect of erudite founders like Hamilton and Jefferson, yet only a mid-level Virginia planter who...
Jul 7, 202654m

Abigail Adams Beat Warren Buffet’s Rate of Return and Ben Franklin Loved Debt: Personal Finance Lessons From Colonial America

<p>Many so-called timeless beliefs about money pitched by financial advisors today (compound interest, real estate, index funds, retiring early) are not timeless pieces of wisdom, but a set of ideas i...
Jul 2, 202654m

The Highs and Lows of Roman Slavery: From the Emperor's Advisor to Suffocating in Sulfur Mines

<p>When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul he boasted that he killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. This is the truth about the Roman empire: Rome could not function without slavery as it unde...
Jun 30, 202656m

A Day at the Gladiatorial Games: Beast Hunts, Mass Slaughter, and Flooding the Colosseum to Reenact Roman Naval Battles

<p>A gladiator named Diodorus defeated his opponent Demetrius in the arena, accepted his submission, discarded his own helmet and shield, and reached for the palm branch that marked his victory. Then ...
Jun 25, 202652m

The Black Death’s Global Ripple Effects, and How They Were Felt Outside Europe

<p>Of the millions of victims of the Black Death, one was a teenager named Joseph ben Meir Abulafia, who died of the plague in Toledo in 1349 alongside his new wife. His tombstone was inscribed as a c...
Jun 23, 202652m

The Part of the Declaration of Independence Nobody Reads (Grievances Against King George) Is the Part That Actually Mattered

<p>On July 9, 1776, a group of American soldiers listened to the Declaration of Independence read aloud in New York City, then rushed down Broadway and spent several minutes prying a two-ton golden eq...
Jun 18, 202648m

Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish–Muslim Relations

<p>For more than 1400 years, the history of Jewish and Muslim engagement has been a complex story of cooperation and conflict. The best known events are hostile encounters (like the 1066 Granada massa...
Jun 16, 202656m

How 10 Whalers Survived Three Years Shipwrecked in the South Pacific

<p>In 1832, a New Bedford whaleship called the Mentor struck a reef in the remote Pacific archipelago of Palau. The tiny, 100-foot-long ship began sinking immediately, and the 22 men who made up its c...
Jun 11, 202654m

The Nobels Built Russia’s Oil Industry, Invented Dynamite and the Oil Tanker, But Were Still Crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution

<p>The Nobel family (which are the namesake of the Nobel prize), had a rags-to-riches story bigger than the Rockefellers or Morgans. The Nobel patriarch Emanuel fled debtor&rsquo;s prison&nbsp; in 183...
Jun 9, 202644m

The American Revolution Went Way Outside of America, Pulling in Caribbean Colonies, African Forts, and Chinese Trading Houses

<p>The thirteen colonies that became the United States were just&nbsp;<em>half</em>&nbsp;of the British colonies that existed in the 18th century. The empire stretched from New England, south to Georg...
Jun 4, 202652m

Ford’s Auto Domination Came From a 1909 Race Across America Through Mud-Choked Roads

<p>In June 1909, five automobiles lined up in front of New York's City Hall to attempt something no car had ever done: drive all the way to Seattle. The Ocean-to-Ocean Race was supposed to be a public...
Jun 2, 202653m

Al Capone’s Missing $100 Million, and the TV Journalist Who Embarrassed Himself to Find It

<p>On the night of April 21, 1986, an estimated 30 million Americans sat in front of their televisions waiting for a moment that almost no one alive had ever seen: a live, prime-time excavation of a g...
May 28, 202652m

How the Dollar Created America (Part 2)

<p>Part 2 of our exploration of how the U.S. dollar is older than the United States itself and has a level of power beyond the Federal Reserve and even beyond the U.S. government. We&rsquo;re joined b...
May 26, 202651m

How the Dollar Created America (Part 1)

<p>The U.S. dollar's origin story begins not in Philadelphia or Washington, but in a half-frozen mining valley in 16th-century Bohemia, where Saxon miners accidentally named their town after a saint a...
May 21, 202651m

From Patriot to Pirate: How Revolutionary War Hero Sam Mason Became a River Outlaw

<p>One of the greatest threat to early America was piracy, but it wasn&rsquo;t found in the Caribbean or Gulf Coast. It was pirates on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Samuel Mason fought bravely at t...
May 19, 202648m

Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs

<p>When Russia's Dowager Empress was pregnant with the future Tsar Nicholas II in 1868, she dreamed that a peasant would one day kill her son. The idea terrified her, and for the rest of her days she ...
May 14, 202646m

The Revolutionary War’s Charlie Wilson: A Spanish Spy Chief Funded the Siege of Yorktown, Helping Washington Win

<p>Everyone knows the American Revolution was won at Yorktown in 1781, when Cornwallis&rsquo;s Army was trapped, but almost no one knows that victory depended on a Spanish intelligence operative who r...
May 12, 202659m

Europe Dominated Because It Never Stopped Fighting Itself

<p>Why did the West dominate all rivals on Earth? How did a group of states that were nearly wiped out in the late Middle Ages by enemies to the south and east grow to conquer the globe by the 16th ce...
May 7, 202654m