Professor Buzzkill History Podcast

Professor Phil Nash joins us on our very first Man Crush Monday to tell us about the most important American Civil Rights leader that most people haven't heard of -- A. Philip Randolph, labor leader, and founder of the idea for a march on Washington. Randolph started his national career by organizing the first major African-American labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925. Hi...

Captain’s Quint’s story about the USS Indianapolis in the movie “Jaws” is only the beginning of a gut-wrenching piece of history, Buzzkillers. There’s a lot more to the Indianapolis sinking than most people know. Listen and learn from one of the Buzzkill favorites! 

Professor Marie Hicks joins us to talk about gender and employment in the emerging field of computing in Britain, and all the historical myths that surround them. In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. We examine why this happened in the tense post-war world, as Britain was losing its role as a global leader and innovator...

Introducing the first ever Professor Buzzkill Flashback Friday! Every Friday we'll be re-releasing old favorites. This week we have episode #56 - the Scopes Trial! On April 24, 1925, a high school teacher named John Scopes taught a class in Dayton, Tennessee, using a state-mandated textbook that included a chapter explaining Darwin’s theory of evolution. In doing so, Scopes was in violation of Ten...

General Curtis LeMay became one of the most important US military leaders during the Cold Wa. One of the most famous or well-known things about LeMay is that he reportedly said, in the mid-60s, that, in order to win the Vietnam war the US Air Force should, "bomb the North Vietnamese back into the Stone Age." Did LeMay say it? Or, more accurately, was he the first person to say it? And was he the f...

When asked about being drafted for the Vietnam War, Muhammad Ali is often quoted as saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong." This was immediately followed by the now-more-famous quote, “No Viet Cong ever called me n****r,” in a one-two punch of defiance. Ali's "quote" summarized in one glaring sentence the idea that oppression against African-Americans started at home, in the United S...

White supremacy has been rising at an alarming rate in the last few years. The “Irish Slaves” myth has been given new life by these extremists. The famous “Irish: the Forgotten White Slaves” email has been unearthed and promoted heavily again during the St. Patrick’s season. It’s an abuse of history, as well as being reprehensible morally.

As a parting piece of wisdom about generational stewardship of land and nature, Chief Seattle supposedly said to American colonizers pushing west, "we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." But, like spiritual quotes that get attached to Gandhi, political quips and gibes that get attributed to Churchill, and thoughtful sentiments that drift toward Martin Luth...

The Lost Cause is one of the most troubling aspects of American history. The ways in which the Confederacy and the pre-Civil War south has been romanticized and fictionalized has done immense damage to American historical consciousness and interpretation. Professor Philip Nash joins us to discuss how the Civil War, the period of Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era were twisted into an ahistorical...

Sometimes, Buzzkillers, the stars just seem to align. There's a meteor shower and a rainbow on the same day. And a whole bunch of writers, pundits, journalists, and aphorists come up with roughly the same idea at roughly the same time. Or at least they come up with it over a couple of decades, and, in terms of the history of quotations, that's the story of the aphorism and witticism, "life is just...

Cause. Singular. Not plural. We talk about the cause of the American Civil War because there was one overwhelming cause -- slavery. Not tariff disputes. Not states' rights. The Civil War was fought over the preservation of slavery in the south and its expansion to the west. But, perhaps no other aspect of the history of the United States has been so distorted and mythologized as the causes of the...

Anybody who's completed an elementary school education knows that Abraham Lincoln finished his dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863 by saying that, "...we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the p...

When and why were statues to Confederate soldiers, generals, and politicians put up across the American south? Why is the Confederate Battle Flag so proudly waved and displayed in many parts of the US? Professor Nash joins us to explain why all of this happened, who was selected for commemoration, and what it all means for American history and culture. We expose the falsehoods that are used as rat...

Upon seeing "The Birth of a Nation," the ground-breaking, if highly racist, piece of cinematography in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson is often quoted as saying, "It is like writing history with lightning." Nearly every American Buzzkiller out there has probably heard this in a 20th Century US history class, or a cinematography class, or on the myth-sustaining History Channel. But did he say it?

Practically nothing in the history of the United States has suffered from myth-making and misunderstanding as much as the history of race relations and racist violence. The history Ku Klux Klan is no exception. This is ironic. In its various incarnations, the KKK was supposed to be a secret organization. But historians know a great deal about it, and have analyzed it deeply. We explain the three p...

In the aftermath of the Dunkirk evacuation and the fall of France in June 1940, things looked pretty bleak for the British, and indeed they were. The Battle of Britain followed almost immediately, and lasted until the end of October 1940, but the British outlast the German bombing raids. The next year, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill went to North America on a morale-boosting...

The Buzzkill Institute has been inundated with phone calls, text messages, and panicked faxes after President Trump's recent response to North Korea's nuclear threats. He said: "North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen." Did he mean it? Could the President launch nuclear weapons in response to, for instance,...

I like this "no quote," Buzzkillers, because it's history of full of all the things we've been talking about on this show -- phrases and sentiments that "sound" like they were said by a prominent person so "they must be from him," misplaced (or moved) punctuation, and the glorious and rapid assumptions displayed on social media that keep the Buzzkill Institute funded. "I will mourn the loss of tho...

Professor Phil Nash joins us for part three of our examination of John F. Kennedy in the 100th anniversary of his birth. This episode looks at how the JFK legacy was constructed in the immediate aftermath of the assassination in 1963, how it was burnished by the first generation of Kennedy historians, and how it has been revised and re-interpreted since the 1970s. Along the way, we hear about the...

In 1972, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the impact of the French Revolution. "Too early to say," he replied. Given that the French Revolution of 1789 had occurred nearly 200 years before, Zhou Enlai was expressing the long view of history in a very witty and Oscar Wildean way. News of this quote flew quickly around the chattering classes in the west, and it was soon used as evidence th...

It's 2017, Buzzkillers, 77 years after the Battle of Dunkirk and the subsequent evacuation of allied troops from that area between the 26th of May and the 4th of June 1940. The evacuation has become a very famous and celebrated event in World War II history and especially in British history. "Dunkirk Spirit," the British refusal to give up in the face of disaster, and to keep plugging away at a pr...

Finally a quote that's actually true! Yes, Teddy Roosevelt did say that the best advice he'd ever heard about dealing with foreign affairs and potentially hostile foreign powers is to, "speak softly and carry a big stick." Speaking softly and carrying a big stick will mean that, "you will go far." When he was Governor of New York at the very end of the 19th century, he sometimes said in letters to...

FDR became governor of New York and later President for four terms despite having contracted polio. Professor Matthew Pressman from Seton Hall University joins us to discuss how the press and the American public were told about his disability, and how they reacted. We also learn how the Roosevelt campaign and administration tried to control public knowledge of FDR's condition by managing how infor...

"Quotes" supposedly from the Founding Fathers seem to rear their misattributed heads in the United States every year in the weeks surrounding July 4th. And Americans are often treated to a number of false quotations from the George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the boys to give them inspiration for the rest of the year. You often hear, "the best government is that which...

When was the Declaration of Independence signed? July 4th? August 2? Later? Why did John Hancock sign so prominently and hugely right in the middle? Did he have signature envy? What price did the signers pay for their patriotism? And how did the story of the signers' sacrifices get so out of control by the mid-20th century? Professor Buzzkill puts his John Hancock on this episode, and answers all...