Ohio V. The World

Season 9, Episode 6: "Ohio v. the Semiquincentennial". Happy 250th birthday America! This bonus episode for the U.S.'s semiquincentennial features an exclusive interview with the Executive Director of Ohio 250 and friend of the pod, Todd Kleismit. Todd has been running Ohio's 250th operation since 2022 and we talk about the road to get here to the actual day July 4, 2026. Over a couple Columbus Br...

Alex heads to the North Coast for Episode 5: "Ohio v. the Great Lakes" to tell the story of the most infamous sinking in Great Lakes history, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald 50 years ago. 29 sailors lost their lives and the causes for the sinking are still not fully known. The majority of the famous ship's crew were from the Buckeye State. A ship that was known as "the Toledo Express" is foreve...

Episode 4: "Ohio v. Mexico". With America's military ramping up operations in the Western Hemisphere, Alex takes a look at America's last war on the southern border, the Punitive Expedition of 1916 in Mexico. The US invaded Mexico following the raid of Columbus, NM and the killing of 18 Americans by Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa. This conflict lasted nearly an entire year and would end in a...

Episode 3: "Ohio v. Radio" (the Original Fake News). Alex looks at early radio as the new mass media force it was in the first half of the 20th century. We travel to Cincinnati, the home of Powell Crosley, Jr. the "Henry Ford of Radio" and learn about the outsized role of Ohio in the rise of radio. The cultural power of radio is discussed and how the public's trust in this new media was destroyed...

Season 9, Ep. 2: "Ohio v. Invasion" : When the US Almost Lost Cincinnati. In September 1862, the US Civil War was raging and the Confederates were winning victory after victory. Today, Alex talks about the overlooked story of the Defense of Cincinnati as the Rebels moved in to take the Queen City of the West in the fall of 1862. It was an incredibly close run thing. We talk about Cincinnati, the 6...

Ohio v. the World podcast is back! It’s the Season 9 premiere “Ohio v. Veterans. Alex is back to discuss what happens when the US Army is used against its own citizens as it was during the Bonus Army Riot of July 1932 in Washington, DC. We travel back to the Great Depression to bring you this forgotten story from American history that rocked the nation at the time. Tens of thousands of World War I...

Episode 11: "Ohio v. Crime" (Part 2): the FBI Strikes Back. Alex concludes Season 8 with a bang, literally. The bullets are flying as the J. Edgar Hoover's FBI is shooting to kill public enemies one by one. We pick up the story in the summer of 1934 as John Dillinger, Public Enemy #1 is shot down in Chicago by the famous FBI agent Melvin Purvis and the tide begins to turn against the gangsters in...

Episode 11: "Ohio v. Crime" (Part One): The Rise of the Gangsters. In Part 1 of the Season 8 finale, Alex goes to back to the 1930s and the War on Crime. At the height of the Depression, a new breed of violent criminal roams the country. Armed with Tommy Guns and fast getaway cars, criminals like John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, etc. shoot and rob their way across the Midwest and Ohio, in particu...

It's Election Day and we're back with another presidential episode "Ohio v. the 25th Amendment." We look at two major presidential health emergencies that were covered up prior to the 25th Amendment and the history of presidential infirmity. First is the story of Woodrow Wilson's massive stroke in the fall of 1919 and how the 1st lady, Edith Wilson, became the first female president. And we look a...

Four American Presidents have been assassinated in office. Two of them are among the most infamous moments in US history, the Lincoln and JFK assassinations. The "other" two assassinated Presidents were both from the Buckeye State: William McKinley and James Garfield. Unfortunately, the events of this campaign season have brought presidential assassinations back into the news. Alex looks at the ex...

Our Presidential mini-season is back for 2024! We start with a bio episode on Ohio's last Vice President, General Charles G. Dawes (1925-1929), Calvin Coolidge's running mate from Marietta, Ohio. With JD Vance on the Republican ticket, Ohio may be seeing their first VEEP in 100 years. Charles Dawes is completely lost to history despite being a Nobel Peace Prize winner, writer of a #1 pop song, WWI...

BONUS EPISODE: A CEO Roundtable Discussion on the State of Ohio History. Alex finally ends his summer break and sits down with the leaders of the 3 leading history organizations in the State of Ohio. We visit with the CEO/Executive Directors of the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Ohio History Connection and the Cincinnati Museum Center for a candid conversation, on their impressive careers...

Episode 6: "Ohio v. Cancel Culture". Seems like everyone is getting cancelled these days from celebrities to political figures, Alex examines five historical examples of cancelled Ohioans to show cancel culture is not just a thing of the present. We sit down to tell 5 stories from the 18th, 19th and 20th Century Ohio that could just as easily been ripped from today's headlines. Alex talks with fri...

Ep. 5: "Pete Rose v. the World" (PART TWO). Alex examines the fall of baseball's all-time hits leader, Cincinnati's own Pete Rose. This two-part episode follows his rise from obscurity on the Queen City's West Side to 20th Century sports icon and his spectacular fall that leads to his banishment from baseball for gambling. Part Two covers Rose and the Big Red Machine's second championship in 1976...

Ep. 5: "Pete Rose v. the World" (PART ONE). Alex tackles the life and career of baseball's all-time hits leader, Cincinnati's own Pete Rose. This two-part episode follows his rise from obscurity on the Queen City's West Side to 20th Century sports icon and his spectacular fall that leads to his banishment from baseball for gambling. Part One covers Rose childhood and unlikely ascension to MLB MVP...

Episode 4: "Ohio v. the 14th Amendment" John Bingham is one of the most important figures in American history to be all but forgotten. He drafted one of the most important Constitutional amendments: the 14th Amendment. Bingham spent decades 8 terms in Congress, prosecuted the Lincoln assassination conspirators and prosecuted the first ever Presidential Impeachment trial in 1868. We live with the r...

Broken Rings: Israel, Palestine and the Munich Olympic Massacre EPISODE 3: Ohio v. Terrorism. Alex recounts the tragedy of the 1972 Munich Massacre and the murder of Cleveland’s David Berger. We look at the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and its role in the death of David Berger and his fellow Olympic athletes.  We’re joined by author and professor David Clay Large to discuss the events...

Episode 2: Ohio v. the Universe: Are we alone? We analyze the Wow! Signal, what many consider the first legitimate contact with an extraterrestrial source, which happened in Ohio in August 1977. Alex goes all in on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), the history, the science and the most fascinating moment in SETI at the Ohio State Radio Telescope in Delaware, Ohio. We sit down wi...

Alex details the rise of anti-semitic and fascist groups during the Depression in America. These groups hatred of Jews, FDR and core American values spreads across the country and its roots begin in Ohio and the entire Midwest. The Radio Priest, Father Charles Coughlin, becomes the most popular media figure in US history. His demagoguery propels these anti-semitic ideas into the mainstream. Guest...

Part Two: Ohio v. Fascism. The cautionary tale of the rise and fall of American Fascism in the 1930s is explored in detail in Part Two of our Season 8 premiere. Nazi Germany and her allies in the US are defeated as World War II begins in Europe but not without a fight. The propaganda effort finds an effective home on Capitol Hill with George Sylvester Viereck and a group of sympathetic Congressmen...

We're back! Season 8 of Ohio v. the World drops on March 5, 2024. Thanks for being patient through our 2023 hiatus but Season 8 is in production and on its way to your ears. Go back and listen to all of our 99 episodes on the Evergreen Podcast Network https://evergreenpodcasts.com/ohio-v-the-world Email us at ohiovtheworld@gmail.com with show ideas or to get an OvTW t-shirt. Free shipping and free...

FyreFest, Altamont, Woodstock '99, Astroworld are some of the biggest festival disasters in American history, today we'll look at some of the most flawed festivals in Ohio history in our Season 7 Finale. We start with BalloonFest '86 a fatally flawed world record setting balloon release festival in Downtown Cleveland. We relive the ecological disaster and dangerous consequences of the City of Clev...

In the penultimate episode of Season 7, Alex travels back to the Gilded Age to uncover the forgotten story of the greatest con woman of the era, Cleveland's Cassie Chadwick. In the second part of a two-part con artist series, Alex tells the story of how Cassie defrauded some $60 million from banks using her alleged connection to America's richest man, Andrew Carnegie. We're joined by two great gue...

Alex tells the story of John Spano, the con man who managed to buy a National Hockey League team despite having almost no money. Spano's ill-fated purchase of the New York Islanders in 1997 is examined with the journalist who lead the investigation that exposed one of the biggest scams in American sports history. Alex is joined by John Valenti of Newsday on the 25th Anniversary of the the con man...

Alex finally gets around to telling the story of the most famous Ohioan, Thomas Alva Edison. We sit down with the leading Edison scholars to discuss his amazing life of invention and innovation. And to spice it up we tell the story of "the Wizard of Menlo Park" in reverse, from death to birth. Alex details his most important inventions from electric light to motion pictures to the phonograph and s...