History Unplugged Podcast

King Charles VI of France (1368-1422) suffered from a particular disorder called "The Glass Delusion." He believed himself to be made of glass and could shatter at any moment. Advisors were told to tiptoe toward him and not wear shoes. He refused bathing for extended periods so as not to fracture. Fate was unkind to Charles VI. He began well; the king was known in his early reign as le Bien-Aimé (...

When Salvador Dali set out to paint a depiction of the infamous Roman Emperor Caligula in 1971, he chose to depict the thing nearest and dearest to the emperor's heart: his favorite racehorse, Incitatus. The painting “Le Cheval de Caligula” shows the pampered pony in all his royal glory. It is wearing a bejeweled crown and clothed in purple blankets and a collar of precious stones. While the gaudy...

Few mixtures are as toxic as absolute power and insanity. When nothing stands between a leader's delusional whims and seeing them carried out, all sorts of bizarre outcomes are possible. This is the beginning of a series launch in tandem with Scott's new book "History's Nine Most Insane Rulers." We will look at the lives of the nine most mentally unbalanced figures in history. Some suffered from g...

In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To “set Europe ablaze,” in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive  (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshooting, was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and...

After World War II the German economy was a smoldering ruin. Scorched-earth policies destroyed 20-70% of all houses. Factories, hospitals, and schools were bomb craters. Germans only ate 1,000-1500 calories a day. There was no food in the stores because price controls disincentivized shop keepers and farmers to sell anywhere except the black market. But something happened in 1948 that changed ever...

Delving into your family history can reveal many surprises, but for Russian-American author Alex Halberstadt, it meant learning about his grandfather's experience as Joseph Stalin's bodyguard. As the last living member of Stalin's security revenue, his grandfather, who lives in Ukraine, spoke of the fear of coming to work every day with the possibility you could be executed in a purge. Halberstad...

One of the most mysterious submarine disasters in history was the sinking of the HL Hunley, a Confederate Civil War submarine. This 40-foot-long tin can was the first to successfully attack another ship—but the results were as disastrous as they were historic. Shortly after its torpedo exploded, the Hunley disappeared off the coast of Charleston. The mystery of what happened to the Hunley and its...

After the massive devastation and scorched earth wartime methods of the Civil War, America tried to rebuild itself. This era was known as Reconstruction and lasted from 1865 to 1877. Many hoped at the beginning that the South would peacefully re-enter the Union, slaves would enjoy full liberty as American citizens, and the United States would emerge stronger. It didn’t. Reconstruction showed that...

Everyone thinks they know what happened at the Lincoln assassination… but do they? After 150 years, a multitude of unsolved mysteries and urban legends still surround the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Today's guest is Robert Hutchinson, author of the book "What Really Happened: The Lincoln Assassination." He takes a new look at the case and explores what really happened at Ford’s Theatre on th...

Japan’s WWII development of a nuclear program is not universally known. But after decades of research into national intelligence archives both in the US and abroad, today’s guest Robert Wilcox builds on his earlier accounts and provides the most detailed account available of the creation of Japan’s version of our own Manhattan Project—from the project’s inception before America’s entry into WWII,...

John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, became America’s first great political couple. John C. Frémont, one of the United States’s leading explorers of the nineteenth century, was relatively unknown in 1842, when he commanded the first of his expeditions to the uncharted West. But in only a few years, he...

Fiction abounds with stories of Nazi Superscience: From Captain America's nemesis Red Skull to the B-movie treasure Iron Sky (which suggests the Third Reich established a moon base after the war). But the trope is based in some fact. Nazis did aggressively research cutting edge weapons to turn the tide of a war they were increasingly losing. Some weapons, such as the V2 rocket, did see production...

With the endless talk of COVID-19, many think we are facing an unprecedented threat of the collapse of our civilization. But Dan Carlin, host of Hardcore History, doesn’t believe anything we are facing is unprecedented. He’s spent years looking at apocalyptic moments from the past as a way to understand the challenges of the future. Dan joins us on today’s episode to discuss some of the biggest qu...

Before the 1900s, solving a murder was done using conjectural theories or flimsy psychological notions of what makes a killer a killer. That all changed with the development of forensic techniques employed at crime scenes, but few know the origin story of these now taken-for-granted methods of solving murders and other misdeeds. It all changed with the revolutionary contributions of Edward Oscar H...

A listener named Liam requested an episode looking at a deep dive into his hometown of Montreal and how it came to be a center of commerce and culture in North America. We’ll do that, but rather than talk about historical buildings and fountains (and other facts you'd find in a Frommers Guide) we’ll look way deeper and see how Montreal was a cultural powerhouse in its long history, everything from...

Go to www.historyunpluggedpodcast.com to learn about Scott's new upcoming book "History's 9 Most Insane Rulers" and how you can get exclusive content. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse. The decade there produced the largest human migration in American history, far exceeding the settlement of the West, as millions flocked to the grand hotels and the new cities that rose rapidly from the teeming wetlands. The boom spawned a new subdivision civilization—and the most egregious large-scale...

Quarantines are nothing new: they've been used since at least the Bronze Age to prevent the spread of leprosy. In this episode (rebroadcasted from a Facebook Livestream), we'll look at the various ways that humans rode out the plague and other disease. Some panicked, like the Flagellators during the Black Death. But others took advantage of the time and bunkered down with friends, taking long walk...

When people think of the American Civil War, specific images spring to mind—Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Scarlett O’Hara escaping a burning Atlanta in a hoop skirt, and blue and grey uniforms clashing on bloodied battlefields. The war is well researched, but there is still the little-known, yet still vastly important, history of the Civil War in the American West. I’m talking today with Megan Kat...

Nearly 1,600 years after Patrick arrived on Ireland (first as a slave, then as a missionary who brought Christianity to the island), he is celebrated as the patron saint of the Emerald Isle and apocryphally believed to have eliminated snakes from the island (which he didn't, but the belief makes sense if you replace snakes with pre-Christian paganistic beliefs). But what exactly are patron saints?...

COVID19, aka - the coronavirus, has triggered mass quarantines and spooked markets across the globe. To date, over 3,000 have died and over 100,000 infected. But however dangerous this virus ends up being, it doesn't belong in the same galaxy as Spanish Flu, which killed up to 100 million in 1918, which was 5 percent of the earth's population. Today's guest is Dr. Jeremy Brown, director of emergen...

“Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president” This was Betty Kearse's family motto; a way to remember that they were descended from James Madison, but also Coreen, a slave who worked on the Montpelier plantation whom her descendants believe had a child with the fourth president. Kearse, a pediatrician and author of the book “The Other Madisons: The Lost History o...

The Cold War existed vaguely in a fifty-year stretch and lacked the defining moments of a major military conflict. However, there is a strong argument to be made that it defined the 20th century. While most point to World Wars One and Two as the most important events of the century, the institutions that dominate today's nations are by-products of the Cold War: the military-industrial complex, the...

Some American presidents appear to do their jobs in a more organized way than others, but the White House has always been filled with ambitious people playing for the highest stakes and bearing bitter grudges. There is a myth that staffs all compromise and put aside petty differences for the greater good. But behind the scenes, staff members leaked stories to gain an upper hand in policy fights, t...

When Clarence Smoyer is assigned to the gunner’s seat of his Sherman tank, his crewmates discover that the gentle giant from Pennsylvania has a hidden talent: He’s a natural born shooter. At first, Clarence and his fellow crews in the legendary 3rd Armored Division—“Spearhead”—thought their tanks were invincible. Then they met the German Panther, with a gun so murderous it could shoot through one...