History Unplugged Podcast

Podcast

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

1122 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

<p>Late at night in his palace at Aachen, Charlemagne had a dream. A mysterious figure approached him carrying a sword engraved with four Germanic words: raht, radoleiba, nasg, and enti. The meaning s...
Sep 17, 20261h 6m
<p>On December 7, 43 BCE, a sixty-three-year-old man was carried in a litter down a woodland path near the Italian coast, fleeing soldiers who had been sent to kill him. When they caught up, he ordere...
Sep 15, 202652m
<p>On March 13, 1930, Adolf Hitler was sitting in the passenger seat of his chauffeur-driven car when a trailer truck sped through an intersection and struck the vehicle, pushing it across the road an...
Sep 10, 202644m
<p>Washington&rsquo;s most extraordinary achievement was not winning the Revolutionary War or helping found a new nation. It was something far rarer: He gave up power, twice. First, when he resigned h...
Sep 8, 202654m
<p>At 1:15 p.m. on April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, when his face suddenly fell forward. He raised his left hand to his temple and...
Sep 3, 202645m
<p>George S. Patton is considered one of America&rsquo;s greatest generals for his blitzes across Europe in World War 2. He is celebrated for breaking out of Normandy because his Third Army push out o...
Sep 1, 202652m
<p>Ram&oacute;n Mercader expected to easily kill Leon Trotsky, silently and instantly. He had rehearsed the blow for months, practiced the angle, tailored a pocket into his raincoat to conceal the sho...
Aug 27, 202648m
<p>In 533, a twenty-eight-year-old general named Belisarius sailed from Constantinople with 15,000 men to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals, a kingdom that had held it for nearly a century since...
Aug 25, 202652m
<p>A coast guardsman named Earl Cunningham froze to death on Lake Michigan trying to rescue five fishermen trapped on a drifting ice sheet. His last words were "I wish I could see my wife and three ch...
Aug 20, 202645m
<p>Humanity&rsquo;s story from 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC (from the end of the ice age to the beginning of civilizations) follows this pattern: primitive hunter-gatherers slowly progressed to farmers, then...
Aug 18, 202655m
<p>One of the most feared inventions ever was the Linotype machine. Debuting in 1886, it was designed to eliminate tens of thousands of newspaper jobs, specifically the hand-compositors&mdash;the high...
Aug 13, 202657m
<p>When Heinrich Himmler was appointed to command the army group defending Berlin in January 1945, his operations officer described briefing him as "talking about colors with a blind man." Himmler cou...
Aug 11, 20261h 1m
<p>A three-inch baboon bone bearing twenty-nine deliberate incisions was pulled from a South African mountain range in 1970. It is approximately 43,000 years old, and microscopic analysis shows the no...
Aug 6, 202654m
<p>Before Ivan was the Terrible, he was a young tsar who had tried and failed to destroy the last fragments of Genghis Khan&rsquo;s Empire in the Volga River Valley. In October of 1552, the 22-year-ol...
Aug 4, 202649m
<p>&nbsp;A ten-year-old boy gallops across the Russian steppe on a Kalmyk horse, collecting plants for his father while German settlers starve in earth dugouts along the Volga. Seven years later, that...
Jul 30, 202643m
<p>When the 7.8 magnitude earthquake tore through southeastern Turkey in 2023, the government posted that it would provide translation support in seven languages: Turkish, Arabic, Persian, English, Ru...
Jul 28, 202659m
<p>The Boston Tea Party is the most misunderstood event in American history. Every schoolchild learns it was an antitax protest, proof that Americans have always hated paying taxes. But the Tea Act of...
Jul 23, 202648m
<p>On May 9, 1873, as the Vienna Stock Exchange collapsed and thousands of speculators were wiped out in a single afternoon, young Salbert von Rothschild and two colleagues from the Schey and Goldschm...
Jul 21, 202644m
<p>The Disney version of Johnny Appleseed has a cheerful barefoot man in a tin pot hat scattering apple seeds for grateful pioneers to bake into pies. The real John Chapman collected his seeds for fre...
Jul 16, 202653m
<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