History Unplugged Podcast

It’s been fifty years since the end of the Vietnam War, yet the memory of the war lives on, the nationwide protests of the 1970s mirroring ones happening on college campuses today. In today’s episode we take a panoptic overview of the political debates in Washington, the ground and air operations in Southeast Asia, and the shocking erosion of American defense capabilities. We also dive into the fi...

The Barbary States (Morocco, Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis) were the greatest thorn in the side of the young American republic after it won independence, preying on trade ships, enslaving American crews, and demanding levels of ransom that consumed much of the federal budget. But why did the Barbary states rely on piracy for economic survival and why couldn't they engage in typical commerce? In the 16th...

Churches are many things to us - they are places of worship, vibrant community hubs and oases of calm reflection. To know a church is to hold a key to the past that unlocks an understanding of our shared history. Andrew Ziminski, today’s guest and author of “Church Going – A Stonemason’s Guide” has spent decades as a stonemason and church conservator, acting as an informal guide to curious visitor...

The American Navy was birthed in the Barbary Wars. Sure, there was a token navy in the Revolutionary War, but battles were mostly won in that war by American privateers (or, if you were British, pirates). To understand where the U.S. Navy came from, we need to take a step back and look at the stake of naval warfare in the 18th century.  The early American Navy resembled the British Navy in its use...

On May 29, 1453, Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II captured Constantinople, bringing an end to over a thousand years of Byzantine rule. The city's formidable walls, which had stood nearly impenetrable for eight centuries, finally fell to hisforces. With its conquest, Constantinople was declared the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. Some historians marked this conquest as the end of the Middle Ages. Built...

In this new mini-series, Scott Rank is rejoined by James Early (his co-host on many other military history mini-series, covering the Civil War, World War One, and the Revolutionary War) to look at a little-known war that pitted the infant United States against the Barbary States of North Africa.   The Barbary Wars were a series of conflicts between the United States and the Barbary States of North...

James Early and Scott will be doing a nine-part series starting tomorrow called Key Battles of the Barbary Wars (1801-1815). We look at an infant United States try to assert itself in the Atlantic World, as North African pirates demand tribute, capture crews, and do everything it can to humiliate the nation as European powers looked on, wondering if the new nation would be project any sort of powe...

The Civil War wrought horrible devastation on its soldiers: Nearly 500,000 were wounded by bullets, shrapnel or sabers and bayonets. Medicine was still primited, and often a doctor could do little more than amputee an injured limb. As a result, thousands of veterans were left missing one to four limbs, yet still needed to attempt providing for their families despite few job prospects and even fewe...

The pirates that exist in our imagination are not just any pirates. Violent sea-raiding has occurred in most parts of the world throughout history, but our popular stereotype of pirates has been defined by one historical moment: the period from the 1660s to the 1730s, the so-called "golden age of piracy." The Caribbean and American colonies of Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands—where pira...

Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea?  Kublai Khan is one of history's most fascinating characters. He brought I...

Aesop’s fables are among the most familiar and best-loved stories in the world. Tales like “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Dog in the Manger,” and “Sour Grapes” have captivated audiences for roughly 2,600 years. Written by a non-Greek slave (who may not have existed but was reported to be very ugly), Aesop was an outsider who knew how to skerwer Greek society and identify many of the contraditio...

Since the dawn of the Greek Classical Era up to World War II, thousands have lost their lives fighting over the pass at Thermopylae.. The epic events of 480 BC when 300 Spartans attempted to hold the pass has been immortalized in poetry, art, literature and film. But that is not the only battle fought there. Twenty-six other battles and holding actions took place, and they were fought by Romans, B...

In 1864, a young Austrian archduke by the name of Maximilian crossed the Atlantic to assume a faraway throne. He had been lured into the voyage by a duplicitous Napoleon III (the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte). Keen to spread his own interests abroad, the French emperor had promised Maximilian a hero's welcome. Instead, he walked into a bloody guerrilla war. With a head full of impractical ideals -...

Over the past few years, much has been written and created around Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, but little attention is paid to those whose lives were ended or forever changed when the bombs dropped in Japan. In this episode, we delve into the experiences of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. On that day the Enola Gay released its devas...

The original Harlem Globetrotters weren’t from Harlem, and they didn’t start out as globetrotters. The talented team, started by Jewish immigrant Abe Saperstein, was from Chicago’s South Side and toured the Midwest in Saperstein’s model-T. But with Saperstein’s savvy and the players’ skills, the Globetrotters would become a worldwide sensation At 5’3”, Saperstein is not who we might imagine would...

Was Harry Truman really our poorest president or simply a man up at 2 a.m. struggling with financial anxiety? Did Calvin Coolidge get bad advice from his stockbroker to buy stocks in 1930 as the market continued to crash? Is it true George Washington enhanced his net worth by marrying up? We often think of the US presidents as being above the fray. But the truth is, the presidents are just like us...

From the taking of the holy city of Jerusalem in the 7th century AD by Caliph Umar, to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I, Christian popes, emperors and kings, and Muslim caliphs and sultans were locked in a 1300-year battle for political, military, ideological, economic and religious supremacy. Some of the most significant clashes of arms in human history include...

More Americans have peanut allergies today than at any point in history. Why? In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a strict recommendation that parents avoid giving their children peanut products until they're three years old. Getting the science perfectly backward, triggering intolerance with lack of early exposure, the US now leads the world in peanut allergies-and this misinformat...

Appleton Oaksmith was a swashbuckling Civil War-era sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-19th century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering schemes in Nicaragua, Cuban liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. But in his life we also see the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln Administration went to destroy...

For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. But it has been received by different cultures and language groups in (sometimes) radically different ways.  Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, and every community it has encountered has read, heard, and seen the Bible through its own language and cultur...

In World War II, there were no C-130s or large cargo aircraft that could deliver heavy equipment – such as a truck or artillery piece – in advance of an airborne invasion. For that, you needed to put that equipment, along with its crew, in a glider. These were unpowered boxes of plywood, pulled by a towing plane into enemy territory by a single cable wrapped with telephone wire. The men who flew o...

From George Washington’s powdered pigtail to John Quincy Adams’ bushy side-whiskers and from James Polk’s masterful mullet to John F. Kennedy’s refined Ivy League coif, the tresses of American leaders have long conveyed important political and symbolic messages. There are surprising, and multi-dimensional ways that hair has influenced the personalities, public and private lives, personal scandals,...

This is the question that historians have argued since the end of World War Two. How much did an average person know, and, more importantly, how responsible were they?  What made people “perpetrators,” “bystanders,” and “victims” within a wider context of coercion and consent? To explore this question is today’s guest, Richard Evans, author of “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich.” We lo...

Iberia was one of three crucial theatres of the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome. Hannibal of Carthage’s siege of Saguntum in 219 BC triggered a conflict that led to immense human and material losses on both sides, pitting his brother Hasdrubal against the Republican Roman armies seeking to gain control of the peninsula. Then, in 208 BC, the famous Roman general Scipio Africanus defeated...

Contrary to popular belief, Robin Hood may not have been the merry medieval outlaw of Sherwood Forest. Rather, a look at real historical figures who inspired the legend are narrowed down to the most unlikely suspect: an Anglo-Saxon hitman who may have assassinated the King of England. Today’s guest, Peter Staveley, proposes that Robin Hood lived during the time of William II (near the time of the...