History Shorts

Dr. Christopher Warren, Vice President of Curatorial Affairs and Chief Curator at the National WWI Museum and Memorial, joins History Shorts for a full conversation about the Great War, memory, and why World War I still matters. The National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City is America's official museum and memorial dedicated to the First World War. Visitors enter across a glass bridge over 9...

In 1921, thousands of armed coal miners marched through the mountains of West Virginia. Many wore red bandanas around their necks—one historical association behind the term "redneck." Their destination was Blair Mountain, where company-backed forces waited. What followed became the largest armed labor uprising in American history. For days, miners and defenders exchanged gunfire across the mountai...

In August 1911, a starving man walked out of the foothills near Oroville, California—and into a world that believed his people had disappeared. He became known as Ishi , a member of the Yahi people whose community had been devastated by disease, displacement, and violence during California's settlement. Ishi was taken to San Francisco, where anthropologists studied his language, traditions, and kn...

  The 1904 Olympic marathon may have been the strangest race in history. Runners battled brutal heat, choking dust, and almost no drinking water. One competitor was chased off course by wild dogs. Another stopped along the way to eat rotten apples. Then there was Thomas Hicks, whose trainers kept him moving with doses of strychnine, egg whites, and brandy. And the apparent winner? Fred Lorz crosse...

In 1828, Queen Ranavalona I took the throne of Madagascar—and began one of the most controversial reigns in African history. Determined to preserve Malagasy independence from growing European influence, Ranavalona expelled missionaries, restricted Christianity, resisted foreign powers, and fiercely defended traditional customs. Her methods could be brutal. Forced labor, military campaigns, executi...

In 1910, Dearfield, Colorado, was founded on the High Plains as an agricultural community where Black Americans could build something largely denied to them elsewhere: land, independence, and economic opportunity. Against difficult odds, Dearfield grew. Families farmed the surrounding land, businesses opened, and the settlement became one of the most important Black homesteading communities in the...

At the turn of the twentieth century, America's food supply could be terrifying. Manufacturers routinely added chemicals and preservatives to food—with little regulation and few requirements to tell consumers what they were eating. So government chemist Harvey Wiley conducted an extraordinary experiment. Beginning in 1902, a group of young men volunteered to eat meals deliberately laced with subst...

When Americans watched fascists march down Main Street in the 1930s, they told themselves it was a European import—new, foreign, un-American. Joseph Kelly says that story is wrong. In The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915 , Kelly traces a homegrown political tradition from the Missouri crisis through a Southern police state and Jim Crow, then out across the nation after th...

Ben Macintyre joins History Shorts to discuss his new book Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy . In 1981, Tehran was still reeling from the Iranian Revolution. The Shah was gone, Ayatollah Khomeini's regime was consolidating power, and the Soviet Union was actively working to exploit the chaos. Into this dangerous environment stepped KGB Major Vladimir Kuzichkin—a hi...

In 1817, a mysterious young woman appeared in an English village speaking an unknown language and wearing exotic clothing. She claimed to be Princess Caraboo, royalty from the distant island of Javasu who had been kidnapped by pirates and escaped by jumping overboard near England. High society was captivated. Newspapers reported her story. Scholars examined her strange language. She performed unus...

Before the FBI or Secret Service became household names, there were the Pinkertons. Founded by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton in 1850, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency hunted train robbers, infiltrated criminal gangs, protected Abraham Lincoln, and developed an enormous network of private investigators. Their famous logo—a watchful eye above the words "We Never Sleep"—helped give us the...

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles interrupted America's radios with terrifying news: Martians had invaded New Jersey. Except they hadn't. Welles's War of the Worlds was a radio drama presented partly as breaking-news bulletins. Some listeners who tuned in late mistook fiction for reality, and stories of nationwide panic quickly followed. But did millions of Americans really flee their homes in ter...

Before World War I, German was everywhere in America. Millions of Americans spoke it. German-language newspapers flourished. Schools taught it. Churches worshipped in it. Entire communities conducted daily life in German. Then America entered the war. Suddenly, the language of millions of Americans became the language of the enemy. German books were removed from libraries. Schools dropped German c...

In 1940, with Nazi Germany sweeping across Europe and invasion seemingly possible, Britain faced an extraordinary question: What happens to the country's wealth if Hitler reaches London? The answer was Operation Fish. In one of the largest movements of wealth in history, Britain secretly shipped enormous quantities of gold and securities across the submarine-infested Atlantic to Canada for safekee...

He launched Sputnik. He sent Yuri Gagarin into space. He helped turn the Soviet Union into the world's first space superpower. And almost no one knew his name. Sergei Korolev was the brilliant engineer behind the Soviet Union's greatest early triumphs in the Space Race. But before becoming the architect of its space program, Korolev had been arrested during Stalin's purges, tortured, sent to the G...

In 480 BC, Persian King Xerxes I was preparing one of the largest invasions of ancient Greece ever attempted. To move his enormous army into Europe, his engineers constructed floating bridges across the Hellespont, linking Asia and Europe. Then a storm destroyed them. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Xerxes responded by declaring war on the water itself. He ordered the Hellespont whippe...

In February 1915, with the First World War raging, hundreds of Indian soldiers serving the British Empire in Singapore suddenly mutinied. Men of the 5th Light Infantry turned their weapons against their officers and seized control of parts of the colony. For nearly a week, British authority in one of its most important Asian strongholds teetered as fighting spread and colonial officials scrambled...

During the Vietnam War, the United States launched a secret operation with an extraordinary objective: use the weather as a weapon. Beginning in the 1960s, American aircraft flew missions over Southeast Asia seeding clouds with chemicals in an attempt to extend the monsoon season. The goal of Operation Popeye was simple—produce more rain over key sections of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, turning roads in...

Benjamin Franklin was a printer, scientist, inventor, diplomat—and possibly one of the most effective intelligence operators of the American Revolution. While living in London, Franklin cultivated political contacts, acquired private correspondence, and secretly sent sensitive information back to the colonies. During the Revolution, his diplomatic mission in Paris became a center of intrigue, fill...

In August 1835, a New York newspaper announced an astonishing discovery: life had been found on the Moon. According to The Sun , famed astronomer Sir John Herschel had used a revolutionary new telescope to observe lunar forests, strange animals, crystal formations—and even intelligent, winged humanoids. The reports were detailed, scientific-sounding, and completely fabricated. Readers couldn't get...

In October 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a devastating stroke that left him partially paralyzed and severely impaired. But the full extent of his condition was kept from Congress, the Cabinet—and the American public. For the remaining seventeen months of his presidency, access to Wilson was tightly controlled by his wife, Edith Wilson , and his physician. Government documents passed thro...

Bestselling author Robert Harris joins History Shorts for a conversation about his newest novel, Agrippa . Harris returns to ancient Rome to tell the story of Marcus Agrippa — the brilliant general, master engineer, and lifelong right-hand man to Augustus. In this wide-ranging interview, he discusses how he approached writing from Agrippa's perspective, the complicated friendship and power dynamic...

For decades, Geronimo resisted attempts by the United States and Mexico to confine the Apache people to reservations. His small band repeatedly escaped into the rugged mountains of the Southwest, pursued by thousands of American troops across some of the most unforgiving terrain in North America. By 1886, however, the pursuit was nearing its end. On September 4, Geronimo and his remaining follower...

Did Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly maneuver the United States into World War II? Long before Pearl Harbor, FDR was determined to help Britain survive Nazi Germany. His administration traded destroyers for British bases, pushed through Lend-Lease, expanded the Navy's role in the Atlantic, and imposed increasingly severe economic sanctions on Japan—all while most Americans remained deeply wary of an...

In 1697, Tsar Peter the Great set out on one of history's most unusual diplomatic missions. Traveling across Europe under the alias "Peter Mikhailov," the towering Russian ruler attempted to remain anonymous while studying the technologies, industries, and military innovations that had made Western Europe so powerful. Unsurprisingly, almost no one believed his disguise. Rather than simply meeting...