The Dave Bowman Show

Thanksgiving Eve, 1971. While most Americans were carving turkeys or stuck in holiday traffic, a quiet man in a cheap suit and clip-on tie walked up to the Northwest Orient counter at Portland International Airport, paid twenty bucks cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle, and boarded Flight 305 like he belonged there. He gave his name as “Dan Cooper.” Nobody thought twice about it.

Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate: John Milton’s Areopagitica, published on November 23, 1644, is the single most important prose defense of free speech ever written in the English language. Full stop. Nothing else comes close. Not Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, not Mill’s On Liberty, not even Holmes’ Abrams dissent. Those are all brilliant, but they’re footnotes to Milton....

Here is a **150-word introduction** specifically tailored **for the outline** you’re building, keeping the tone sharp, skeptical, poetic, and grounded in your frustration with Congress. No em dashes. Proper paragraphs. --- The story begins on the island of Pharos, where Menelaus sat stranded with treasure in his hull and no wind in his sails. He discovered the reason for his misery only when the o...

I first learned about the Juan Fernández Islands from a documentary so spectacularly awful that it almost looped back around to brilliance. It was called Apocalypse Island, a kind of budget fever dream that promised ancient secrets, apocalyptic codes, and a stone monument that was supposed to point to the end of the world or something equally profound. The “history” in it was a wreck. The claims w...

The night air in the Formosa Strait felt like a lid pressed down on the sea. Clouds hung so low they nearly brushed the masthead light of anything tall enough to carry one. Rain drifted in and out as if the sky could not decide whether to spit or swallow. The water was rough, the wind stiff, and visibility sat so close to zero that even the best eyes in the Pacific Fleet would have been useless. I...

Josiah Bartlett is one of those names that shows up on the Declaration of Independence, gets a nod in a textbook, then quietly disappears behind louder, flashier founders. That is a shame. If you trace his life from a muddy frontier village in New Hampshire to the floor of the Continental Congress, then on to the governor’s chair and the sickbed of half his colony, you find a man who was constantl...

In the quiet backcountry of South Carolina, a small trading village called Ninety Six became the unlikely center of a civil war within the American Revolution. It was a crossroads of trails and tempers, where Loyalists and Patriots clashed not just over independence, but over who truly represented justice and order. In this episode, we look at the two sieges that defined Ninety Six: the first in 1...

The story of the American Revolution usually unfolds with images of muskets, marches, and men debating the future of a continent. Yet the fight for liberty also lived in quieter rooms where spinning wheels hummed and tea went untouched. The Daughters of Liberty stepped into that space and turned ordinary domestic life into a political force that Parliament never saw coming. Their work pulled women...

Welcome to another captivating episode of Dave Does History, recorded live on Bill Mick LIVE on November 18, 2025. After a five-week recovery from shoulder surgery, historian Dave Bowman makes a triumphant return to explore a profound and often overlooked influence on America's founding: Virgil's ancient epic, The Aeneid. Far from mere mythology to the Founding Fathers, this Roman masterpiece shap...

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, when Chicago was bursting with industry and ambition, a man named H. H. Holmes built something far darker than a business empire. Behind his polite smile and bowler hat was a mind that turned murder into method and fraud into daily practice. This episode of Dave Does History examines the life and crimes of Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as H. H...

In this episode of *Dave Does History*, we take a hard look at how the decline of liberal education has left America vulnerable to the false promises of socialism. Once, our schools taught citizens how to think, how to reason, and how to recognize truth from illusion. Today, they train workers for jobs but not minds for liberty. The result is a generation that confuses equality with fairness and e...

In this episode of *Dave Does History*, we ride back to the early 1820s, when the American frontier was not yet a land of settlers but of merchants chasing profit across a sea of grass. The story begins with William Becknell, a man drowning in debt who set out from Missouri and ended up opening the Santa Fe Trail. His daring 1822 expedition proved that wagons could cross the Great Plains, carrying...

Welcome back to *What The Frock*, where Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod return from a short hiatus with more laughs, philosophy, and unexpected wisdom than ever. In this episode, the duo tackles the latest round of AI hysteria sparked by Matt Walsh’s claim that 25 million jobs are about to vanish. Rabbi Dave questions the panic, pointing out that technology has been reshaping jobs since the steam engine,...

The Barents Sea was gray and angry on November 15, 1969. Beneath those frigid waves, two nuclear submarines—one American, one Soviet—found themselves in a dance of shadows that neither captain intended to finish with a crash. The USS Gato, an American attack submarine built for silent hunting, and the Soviet K-19, a ballistic missile boat already infamous among sailors as “the Widowmaker,” collide...

So yes, the launch of Apollo 12 was almost a cautionary tale. The weather was uncooperative. The atmosphere used the rocket like a spear for lightning. The cockpit lit up with warnings, then went dark. A second strike could have frightened the most stoic crew into reaching for abort calls. Instead, three men kept flying, a room full of engineers kept thinking, and one controller reached into his h...

John Dickinson was called the Penman of the Revolution, but his story is more complicated than that. He was a patriot who resisted British authority with his pen long before most dared, yet when independence came to a vote, he stood against declaring it too soon. His caution earned him scorn from some and respect from others. He believed in liberty, but he also believed that liberty without order...

You can dress a ship in brass and bunting and call her safe, but the sea is an unforgiving bookkeeper. It tallies every shortcut and comes calling when the ledger runs red. The SS Vestris sailed out of Hoboken on the afternoon of November 10, 1928, as if routine could ward off reality. Within forty-eight hours, that confidence had been rolled flat by gray Atlantic seas, bad decisions, and a cultur...

The morning of November 11, 1919, dawned with flags fluttering and veterans standing tall in Centralia, Washington. It was the first anniversary of the Great War’s end, a day meant for solemn remembrance and celebration of peace hard-won. By sundown, that small lumber town had become the stage of one of America’s bloodiest labor conflicts. Four veterans lay dead, a radical hanged by a mob, and a c...

In the film *The Caine Mutiny*, we are told that there has never been a mutiny aboard a United States Navy ship. That is true, at least by the letter of the law. But there have been moments that tested the courage, discipline, and endurance of those who serve beneath the waves. This is the story of one such moment. In November 1943, deep in the Makassar Strait, the crew of the submarine USS *Billf...

The Wilmington Massacre of 1898 was not an accident of mob violence or a moment of spontaneous fury. It was a plan, a deliberate and coordinated seizure of power, carried out in the clear light of day by men who believed that their race, and their race alone, had the right to rule. On November 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, those men took up rifles and machine guns and overthrew a lawful...

The first time you hear the name Fishdam Ford you might think it is a misprint, a sleepy bend of river that could not possibly matter to the great gears of the Revolution. That mistake is how men get ambushed. The place sits near the Broad River in the South Carolina backcountry, a patch of woods and water that, in November of 1780, held the difference between a militia that learned from its scars...

It was one of those moments in history when the nation’s pulse quickened, when politics felt less like policy and more like destiny. The year was 1960, and America stood at the threshold of a new decade, restless from recession, confident in its prosperity, but haunted by the long shadow of the Cold War. Out of that tension rose two men who would define a generation’s choice between continuity and...

The year was 1775, and Virginia stood at the edge of a storm. In the calm before revolution turned to full war, one British governor, an imperious Scotsman named John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore, issued a decree that would send shockwaves through the colonies and echo across centuries. From the deck of a British warship anchored off Norfolk, Lord Dunmore declared martial law in the colony of Vi...

In the years after World War II, the U.S. Navy faced a new kind of threat. The kamikazes were gone, but the sky itself had become the enemy. Long before satellites and airborne warning planes, the Navy turned to an unlikely solution. It pulled its old fleet submarines out of mothballs and refitted them with radar, turning hunters of the deep into sentinels of the sky. These were the radar picket s...

It was the night the U.S. Navy took back the darkness. On October 11, 1942, off Cape Esperance near Guadalcanal, Rear Admiral Norman Scott led a small task force into waters already littered with wreckage from earlier defeats. His orders were clear: protect the convoy, challenge the Japanese, and prove that America could fight—and win—at night. What followed was chaos and courage in equal measure....