Dave Does History

On September 10, 1898, Europe lost one of its most mythologized figures in the most unexpected way. Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known to the world as Sisi, was walking along the lakeside in Geneva. She was sixty years old, dressed in black as she had been since the death of her son, and she was about to board a steamship for what should have been a quiet journey. Instead, an Italian anarchist na...

This morning on Bill Mick Live we heard Senator Tim Kaine declare that our rights come from government, not from God or from nature. That claim rattles me because it cuts against the very foundation of the American idea. History is not just about dates and battles. It is how we pass down the virtues we want our children to carry. When we stop teaching those lessons, societies begin to slip. The Ro...

On this episode of Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live we took a hard look at a statement from Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia that deserves more than a passing shrug. Kaine declared that our rights do not come from God or from nature, but from government. That claim cuts right into the heart of the American idea. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence begins with the opposite truth, that we are cr...

Michelangelo’s David is one of those works of art that we think we know. We see him on postcards, posters, and T-shirts. He is reproduced so often that it is easy to forget what he really is. In Florence, standing seventeen feet tall, the marble figure looks less like a souvenir and more like a revelation. This was not a statue carved from perfect stone. It came from a massive block that other scu...

Special guests Lena and Graham from Patrol reports, sit in today to bring you the story of the Turtle... In September of 1776, New York Harbor was the stage for one of the most unusual moments in the American Revolution. The British fleet, anchored in force and confident of its dominance, faced a new kind of threat that no navy had ever encountered before. It came not from a ship bristling with ca...

On September 6, 1901, the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo was filled with excitement. Crowds gathered to see President William McKinley, a leader at the height of his popularity, who delighted in greeting ordinary Americans face to face. It was supposed to be a celebration of progress and prosperity, but history had other plans. Among those waiting in line was Leon Czolgo...

In September of 1622, the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha set sail from Havana carrying a fortune in silver, gold, emeralds, pearls, and goods that represented the wealth of an empire. She was the rear guard of the treasure fleet, armed with twenty bronze cannons and built to protect the convoy from attack. Her holds were so full that the registered cargo alone would be worth hundreds of...

On September 4, 1957, the front steps of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, became the stage for one of the most dramatic confrontations of the Civil Rights era. Nine African American teenagers, known now as the Little Rock Nine, tried to attend school like any other students. Instead, they found themselves blocked by the Arkansas National Guard and surrounded by an angry mob. Governor...

In 36 BCE, the Roman Republic’s fate wasn’t decided in the Senate or on a battlefield in Italy, but on the waves off Sicily. The Battle of Naulochus is a name most people have never heard, yet it was the clash that made Augustus possible. Rome was starving, her grain supply strangled by Sextus Pompeius, son of Pompey the Great, who ruled the seas like a pirate king. Into this crisis stepped Marcus...

On this week’s edition of Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live , we dig into the very first grievance Thomas Jefferson listed in the Declaration of Independence. It wasn’t about taxes, soldiers in your house, or even British warships off the coast. No, Jefferson opened with something that feels almost ordinary—laws. Specifically, the King’s refusal to give his assent to laws that the colonists beli...

On today’s episode of Dave Does History , we’re heading back to Massachusetts in the fall of 1774 for a story that almost rewrote the American Revolution’s opening chapter. It’s called the Powder Alarm, and it was the day when a rumor nearly set off a war months before Lexington and Concord. General Gage thought he was playing it safe by quietly seizing a stash of gunpowder from the colonists. Ins...

In the early hours of October 1, 1910, downtown Los Angeles was rocked by an explosion that tore through the Los Angeles Times building. The blast, fueled by dynamite hidden in a suitcase and ignited by barrels of ink and ruptured gas lines, turned the newsroom into an inferno. Twenty-one people were killed and more than a hundred injured. The city awoke not only to smoke and rubble, but to the op...

Today on Dave Does History , we tackle one of the most infamous names in all of Rome: Caligula. He’s the emperor remembered as a monster, a madman, and the poster child for how absolute power can twist a man beyond recognition. But the truth is more complicated. Born Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, nicknamed “Little Boots” by soldiers, Caligula was adored when he first took the throne in AD 37. Fo...

When most people picture the Washington–Moscow Hotline, they imagine a bright red phone sitting on the president’s desk, waiting to ring with the fate of the world on the line. Hollywood planted that image in our minds, but the reality was far less dramatic and far more important. The Hotline was not a telephone at all. It was a teletype circuit that clattered out carefully worded messages, later...

In August of 1778, the brand-new alliance between the United States and France got its trial by fire on the shores of Rhode Island. The plan was bold: French warships and American troops would trap the British at Newport and score a symbolic victory for the Revolution. What they got instead was a hurricane that scattered fleets, tempers that boiled over between allies, and a bloody fight that ende...

In August of 1946, the war was supposed to be over. Yet in the skies over Yugoslavia, five Americans lost their lives when their unarmed C-47 transport was shot down by Yugoslav fighters. These were not combatants in a declared war. They were airmen flying a routine supply run from Vienna to Italy, caught in the crossfire of a new world order taking shape. The United States demanded answers, Yugos...

On August 27, 1776, the ink on the Declaration of Independence was barely dry when George Washington and the Continental Army faced their first great trial. The British had returned with the largest force they ever sent overseas, and they chose New York as the place to crush the rebellion. What followed on Long Island was the biggest battle of the entire war, and it was a disaster for the American...

This week on Dave Does History , we dig into one of the most powerful lines in the Declaration of Independence: “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” You have heard it before, but what does it really mean? Jefferson was not just stringing together fancy words, he was deliberately echoing England’s own history. From Charles I losing his head in the Civil War, to James II’s downfall in the Glori...

In August of 1942, the war in the Pacific was a brutal tug of war. The Marines had landed on Guadalcanal and seized a half-finished airfield they named Henderson Field. For the Japanese, that dirt strip was a threat they could not ignore. What followed was a clash that became known as the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. It was a fight carried almost entirely in the air, where carriers launched str...

On August 24, 1938, the world witnessed a grim first in the history of flight. A China National Aviation Corporation Douglas DC-2 named Kweilin lifted off from Hong Kong on a routine passenger run. Painted clearly with civilian markings, the airliner was no military threat to anyone. Yet over the Pearl River, Japanese fighters intercepted the unarmed plane and opened fire. What followed was a shoc...

On the evening of  August 23, 1939 , a photograph was taken inside the Kremlin that, to this day, ought to make the blood run cold. At the table sat Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, pen in hand, and Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s trusted diplomat. Hovering behind them with an oddly satisfied grin was Joseph Stalin. They had just signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a document whose...

In the summer of 1614, the city of Frankfurt erupted in one of the darkest chapters of its history. While many of us think of ghettos as a phenomenon of the twentieth century, Frankfurt’s Judengasse had already been in existence for more than 150 years, a crowded street where thousands of Jews lived under strict rules and constant restrictions. It was here that Vincenz Fettmilch, a gingerbread bak...

On August 21, 1942, the still night along a small stream on Guadalcanal exploded into chaos. The Marines called it Alligator Creek, though the name was wrong, and history remembers it as the Battle of Tenaru. Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki marched nearly a thousand men straight into the Marine perimeter, convinced that victory was already his. What followed was hours of screaming charges, machine gun fire...

On this episode of Dave Does History we travel back to November 19, 1863, when Abraham Lincoln rose at Gettysburg to deliver what would become one of the most enduring speeches in American history. Lincoln was not the featured speaker that day, yet his brief two minutes transformed the way the nation understood itself. With 272 words he tied the bloodshed of the Civil War to the promise made in 17...

On the night of August 19, 1944, the South China Sea boiled with rain squalls, radar pings, and the tense silence of men waiting for torpedoes to strike. USS Bluefish, a Gato-class submarine, prowled into position alongside her sister, USS Rasher. Ahead of them churned Convoy Hi-71, one of Japan’s last great efforts to push fuel, troops, and supplies toward the Philippines. What happened in the ho...