The Dave Bowman Show

When people think of Rome’s worst emperor, Caligula is usually the first name they blurt out. He has become a sort of shorthand for tyranny, madness, and depravity. If you want an example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely, the popular image of Caligula will do the job. He is the emperor who supposedly made his horse a consul, slept with his sisters, declared himself a god, ordered his troo...

The Washington–Moscow Hotline is one of those Cold War stories that everyone thinks they know, but almost nobody really understands. Ask most people and they will tell you about a red phone, sitting on the president’s desk, ready to ring in the dead of night. The president picks it up, and the voice on the other end is a Soviet premier warning that the missiles are flying. That image is iconic. It...

This episode starts with a couple of stories that probably only I care about, like the lawsuit over Seattle’s homeless shelter hotels and yet another IT failure that managed to make life harder for the people caught in its web. But then the show turns inward. I take you through the long story of my right shoulder, which goes all the way back to Navy sports in the 1980s, took a bad turn with a fall...

On August 29, 1915, the United States Navy did what no one thought possible. It raised a sunken submarine from 300 feet of water and brought her crew home. The recovery of the USS F-4 was born out of tragedy, but it became a landmark in naval engineering and a testament to the determination of sailors and divers who refused to yield to the sea. The echoes of that day still resonate in every modern...

Last year President Biden said 70,000 Americans die each year from fentanyl overdoses. It’s a staggering number, and his thought we should do something about it.

The summer of 1778 found the Revolution at a crossroads. The war had already seen stunning American victories like Saratoga, where British General Burgoyne surrendered his entire army, but it had also seen disasters, retreats, and long winters of misery. Into that mix came a new player, an old enemy of Britain and an unexpected friend to the struggling United States: France. The French had finally...

Washington State just handed a Florida shipyard a contract worth 714 million dollars to build three new hybrid-electric ferries. For the first time in decades, these boats won’t be built here at home, and the ripple effects are already hitting taxpayers, local shipyards, and the reliability of our ferry system. The story is bigger than dollars and steel. It’s about climate mandates, political choi...

The war was supposed to be over. August 1946 was meant to be a summer of recovery, not another season of graves. But peace is rarely clean, and the world that emerged after World War II was fragile, fractured, and full of sharp edges. In one of those forgotten yet telling moments, five American airmen were killed when their unarmed transport plane was shot down over Yugoslavia. Their deaths signal...

And it's time to stop the pretending that it is

Submariners live for the sea stories, and some are colder than others. On this episode of Patrol Reports, Dave Bowman sat down with Captain Jim Harvey, former commanding officer of USS Queenfish (SSN-651), to revisit a patrol that pushed the limits of technology, seamanship, and nerves: surfacing at the North Pole in August of 1985.

Cracker Barrel has long been a roadside favorite, a place for biscuits, rocking chairs, and a slice of nostalgia. But today the chain is at the center of a high-stakes corporate fight. Activist investor Sardar Biglari is challenging Cracker Barrel’s leadership, arguing that the company has wasted money, lost touch with its customers, and needs a drastic overhaul. His plan is blunt: cut waste, sell...

The summer of 1776 was supposed to be the season when everything changed. On July 4, the delegates in Philadelphia had declared to the world that the thirteen colonies were no longer subjects of King George III, but free and independent states. The ink was barely dry when George Washington found himself staring across New York Harbor at the largest armada the British Empire had ever assembled. Tho...

Are Talk Radio hosts... journalists?

By late August 1944, Japanese supply operations in the Philippines were reduced to a dangerous gamble. With deepwater shipping lanes under constant threat from American submarines, the enemy had turned to small intercoastal tankers to shuttle fuel and oil between island bases. These vessels could slip close to shore where larger warships hesitated to follow, but if they were caught in open water t...

This week on Dave Does History, we dig into one of the most powerful lines in the Declaration of Independence: “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” You have heard it before, but what does it really mean? Jefferson was not just stringing together fancy words, he was deliberately echoing England’s own history. From Charles I losing his head in the Civil War, to James II’s downfall in the Glorio...

Here's the thing... we're losing the last WWII Vets

Today on Dave Does History, Dave is out, but the show rolls on with Lena Marlowe and Graham Calder in the host chairs. Together, they tackle one of the thorniest questions in American public life: should the National Guard be used to police our cities? Chicago often takes center stage in this debate, with violent crime making national headlines and sparking calls for action beyond what local law e...

In August 1958, USS Queenfish (SS-393) was back in San Diego after her WestPac deployment and quickly moved into a maintenance phase. The deck log shows that beginning on August 21 she entered an availability period, and over the following days the crew oversaw the offloading of her torpedoes. This was standard practice before any yard period, both for safety reasons and to allow overhaul work in...

Broadcasting High Schools Sports is not a good idea

The summer of 1942 in the Pacific was not so much a season as it was a meat grinder. The United States had been reeling since Pearl Harbor, lurching from one setback to another, and only just beginning to claw its way back. Coral Sea in May had been a draw that felt like a moral win. Midway in June was a spectacular success, the sort of thing that Hollywood scripts itself around, where four Japane...

In this episode of What the Frock, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod belly up to the breakfast table to dish out a hearty helping of truth behind the Cracker Barrel controversy sweeping social media. Did the CEO really say, “MAGA doesn’t have to eat here”? Spoiler alert—she didn’t. But that didn’t stop the viral outrage machine from firing up the griddle. The hosts unravel how a fake quote, amplified by co...

The USS Ronquil (SS-396) was a Balao-class submarine, one of the many steel predators the U.S. Navy sent into the Pacific during World War II. She carried the name of a humble spiny-finned fish from the waters of the Pacific Northwest, but her business was far from small. Commissioned on April 22, 1944, under the command of Lieutenant Commander H. S. Monroe, Ronquil’s steel frame stretched over 31...

So what's the real problem?

On August 24, 1938, the world crossed a terrible new threshold. A China National Aviation Corporation Douglas DC-2 named Kweilin lifted off from Hong Kong with eighteen people aboard. It was clearly marked as a civilian aircraft, painted with mail insignia and the letters CNAC across its wings. But that did not matter to the Japanese fighters that intercepted it over the Pearl River. The pilot, an...

Buy you favorite players jersey! How about... NO?