History Unplugged Podcast

In 1861, an archaeologist named James Farrer broke into a grass-covered Neolithic tomb on the Orkney Islands expecting to find ancient bones and treasure. The tomb was empty. But its walls were covered with runic inscriptions, dozens of them, carved by Norse visitors centuries earlier. Most were mundane: "Arnfinnr Food carved these runes." Some were lewd: Two were extraordinary: "Crusaders broke i...

When the First Crusade arrived at the walls of Antioch in 1097, the two most powerful Muslim rulers in Syria were not preparing a joint defense. They were trying to destroy each other. Ridwan of Aleppo and his brother Duqaq of Damascus had been locked in a fratricidal war over their dead father's territories, and neither would yield an inch to help the other. When Karbugha of Mosul finally assembl...

On the morning of January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall climbed into a ditch beside a half-finished sawmill in the Sierra Nevada foothills, stooped down, and found gold. He crawled out clutching his hat to his chest like a hurt child, showed the men a teaspoon of yellow flakes, and said "I have found it." Within a year, fifty thousand people from all six continents were racing to Cali...

Early America’s most important invention wasn’t Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod, or the cotton gin. It was the world's first fully automated flour mill, built by Oliver Evans in the 1780s. Evans's mill used a conveyor-belt grain elevator, leather straps, wheels, and Archimedean screws to process wheat from raw grain to finished flour without human hands touching it.  Prior...

The Pyrenees stretch 270 miles from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, separating France from Spain, and most people think of them as a natural barrier: remote, barren, and largely untouched. They would be wrong. These mountains sit at the edge of where early humans were supposed to have settled, yet a cave above the village of Tautavel contains the oldest human face ever found in Europe, a skull...

Rome seemed fundamentally opposed to Christianity in the first century. After all, the empire fed Christians to lions, taxed their communities, and crucified their followers, making Rome look like the natural enemy of everything the new faith stood for. Christians returned the hostility in the Book of Revelation, where Rome appears as Babylon, "the Mother of Harlots," a doomed empire whose destruc...

The first punctuation mark was a triangular symbol pressed into clay somewhere in Mesopotamia. Spaces between words were unknown for millennia, until a group of Irish monks pioneered them in the eighth century.  Flash forward 1200 years, and in 1905, Moscow's typesetters went on strike because a new regulation said they would be paid by alphabetical letter only, excluding commas, full stops,...

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 seemed immediately clear to the emperor, who fancied himself a philosopher as well as a conqueror. There would be four ages of his dynasty: one of abundance, one of sudden failure, one of great disorder,...

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 ordered his attendants to set down the litter, put his head out, and offered them his neck. They cut it off, along with the hand that had written the fourteen speeches attacking Mark Antony. The head and hand...

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 and stopping just short of crushing it. Everyone survived. Three years later, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Would tens of millions of people still have died if the truck had killed him? To many peop...

Washington’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 his command after victory. Then again, when he stepped down as president, establishing a precedent no law required and no force could compel. In an age dominated by kings and emperors, Washington chose re...

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 whispered to his cousin Daisy: "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head." He was dead by 3:35. That evening, Harry Truman, a former farmer and failed haberdasher who had been vice president for ei...

George S. Patton is considered one of America’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 of their holdings along the coast, unleashing a lightning-fast armored blitz across northern France that routed retreating German forces and liberated Paris months ahead of schedule. And following the Thi...

Ramón 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 shortened ice axe. On August 20, 1940, he stood behind Trotsky -- who was the principle leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russian but exiled by Stalin after losing a power struggle -- in the study...

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 the sack of Rome. The last time the Eastern Empire had attempted the crossing, the entire fleet had been destroyed. Belisarius landed, defeated the Vandal king in two battles, entered Carthage without a...

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 children once more." That was February 1936. A few months later, the same country that had been paralyzed by temperatures of negative sixty was recording temperatures above 110. Sidewalks exploded. Spare t...

Humanity’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 to village-builders, then to city-dwellers and kings. With enough food surplus to free up everyone from having to farm, religion, medicine, and art developed. But a revolution in archaeological science...

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—the highly skilled workers who painstakingly picked individual metal letters out of wooden trays to set type. The Linotype instead would cast an entire line of type in molten lead (hence "line-o'-type") on the s...

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 couldn't read a map scale, worked five hours a day due to chronic stomach problems, and once sent a lone battalion 30 kilometers into no man's land because he confused centimeters on the map with actual dis...

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 notches were made over time with different cutting tools, meaning someone was tracking something and coming back to update the record. It is the oldest known dataset in the world. Twenty thousand miles awa...

Before Ivan was the Terrible, he was a young tsar who had tried and failed to destroy the last fragments of Genghis Khan’s Empire in the Volga River Valley. In October of 1552, the 22-year-old Ivan stood outside the walls of a city that had raided, humiliated, and enslaved Russians for over a century. The Kazan Khanate, successor state to the Golden Horde and one of the wealthiest trading ci...

 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 same boy is standing on the deck of Captain Cook's Resolution as it crosses the Antarctic Circle for the first time in history, sketching birds and icebergs in a cabin so small he can barely turn around...

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, Russian, German, and Pashto. Kurdish, spoken by fifteen million people in the affected region, was not on the list. Elderly Kurdish speakers cried out for help in their mother tongue and could not be under...

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 1773 was actually a tax cut. Parliament lowered the duties on tea to bail out the East India Company, a corporation deemed too big to fail, and the Sons of Liberty destroyed ninety thousand pounds of te...

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 Goldschmidt banking families were nearly lynched on the floor of the exchange by infuriated stockjobbers and had to be rescued by police. That same evening, oblivious to the carnage a few hundred yards away, the...