UnTextbooked | A history podcast for the future

With a name like “The United States of America”, it can be easy to forget that this country’s borders extend well beyond the fifty states of the union.  In fact, millions of American citizens live on US territory well outside those borders.  It’s not just Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and the North Mariana Islands, but the many military bases we occupy across the globe...

A hundred years ago, there were roughly 2 billion people in the world. Today, there are almost 8 billion.  This rapid quadrupling of the world’s population has people asking, is the planet overpopulated? Some say, yes. Others say that it’s not so simple. This isn’t a new question. Researchers in the 19th and 20th centuries warned that unfettered population growth would lead to famine, poverty, and...

In the spring of 2021, UnTextbooked producer Gavin Scott read a headline that made his heart sink. The remains of 215 indigenous children were discovered buried in a mass grave near the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia. Over the next few months, more mass graves were found outside of other Canadian residential schools.  Before they died, these children had been part...

One morning in 1991, Senator Jesse Helms’ house was covered with a giant fake condom in an act of protest.  Helms had been a vocal opponent of funding AIDS research and he had introduced an infamous and popular bill amendment that prevented federal money from being spent on AIDS research.  There were few treatments available at the time, and with no help from the government, HIV was actively sprea...

The War On Terror is the longest foreign war the United States has ever fought. So long that many of the soldiers fighting weren’t even alive when it started. But the WoT seems unusual for another reason—it’s not a war on a nation, or even an organization—it’s a war against a concept.  September 11, 2001 was the alleged start date of this conflict, after the Twin Towers fell.  President George W....

Season 2 of UnTextbooked is near! New episodes starting Monday, Octoberr 18th, 2021. Join us for 15 more interviews where young people ask historians the questions that matter most. Watch the video trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB46hxDFQ58 And come to our launch party: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEkcO6vqTkiGdRvraFhbERExj8gxGWbW2DR

We’ve wrapped our first season of UnTextbooked!  Our producers have explored race, food, piracy, gender, medicine and so much more.   In this episode, UnTextbooked editor Bethany Denton shares five of her favorite moments from the season: How a Black teenager and his young lawyer changed America's criminal justice system.  Most Americans eat like kings without realizing it.  Damnation to the gover...

Throughout this series, we’ve heard historians say that the way Americans think about race is changing, as evidenced by the unprecedented numbers of Americans marching after George Floyd’s death. And along with this surge in action are critical conversations about what it means to be an ally, and what it means to “perform” allyship. UnTextbooked producer Daniel Ardity noticed what he thought to be...

People in the West have many harmful perceptions about Muslim women being submissive or oppressed. In fact, a study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that only 19% of Americans believed that Islam is respectful of women. These beliefs have been reinforced for centuries through media portrayals and stereotypes. One of those persistent stereotypes is that Muslim women are forced against the...

It’s undeniable that the way people eat has changed drastically in the last century. It took thousands of years for human societies to transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers. By contrast, it’s only been in the last hundred years or so that people have moved away from growing their own crops and raising their own livestock to getting most of their food from a restaurant or store.   Food histor...

On April 13, 1919, thousands of Indians gathered in Amritsar, Punjab to celebrate Baisakhi - a religious holiday. Such gatherings had been banned by the British colonial government, but the people gathered anyway to celebrate and to protest British imperialism.  What followed was the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre; British General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to open fire without warning on the cro...

During the Cold War, the United States feared the rise of Communism across the world. But in Latin America, the United States took action.  In 1970, Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidency with just a third of the vote.  He was a  socialist who started shaking things up across the country. Within just a couple years, a military coup removed him from power, and Augusto Pinochet, the American-ba...

Pop culture misremembers the Golden Age of piracy, and usually portrays pirates as apolitical agents of chaos.  But historians now believe that many pirates followed a democratic and egalitarian structure that put them directly at odds with the world’s biggest governments.  In the 1700’s, life as a European sailor left a lot to be desired.  Wages were low, conditions were dangerous, and captains c...

In 1987, the historian Paul Kennedy published a massive, nearly 700 page book called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In normal circumstances, the book might have been lumped in with the rest of academic writing that’s seen only by scholars…if it weren’t for the book’s conclusion, which flew in the face of American exceptionalism and certainly upset some people. In that final section of the...

James Marion Sims has a complicated legacy. He was a surgeon in the 19th century who, for decades, was heralded as the ‘Father of American Gynecology’ for his contributions to the field, including inventing the speculum. But those innovations came at the expense of the poor and enslaved women that he performed experimental surgeries on. Not much is known about the Black enslaved women and poor Iri...

For decades, experts have warned that the average American diet is potentially harmful. Americans tend to eat food that is laden with too much sodium, fat, and added sugars, and it's making people sick. What’s insidious about this is that a lot of Americans don’t even know that the food they’re eating is unhealthy. A lot of foods are deceptively sweeter, saliter, and fattier than one would assume....

As a kid, UnTextbooked producer Gavin Scott loved listening to his grandfather tell stories about their people. He used to like to imagine what his home was like back before white settlers came. As much as Gavin enjoyed learning about his culture, he sometimes felt out of place as the only gay person he knew of in his small hometown. So when he had the opportunity to work on this podcast, he decid...

Picture this: You’re nineteen years old, it’s a summer afternoon, and you’re driving around your hometown. You notice a group of other teenagers on the side of the road. As you get closer you realize that two of them are your cousin and nephew. You can tell by body language that things are getting heated, tempers are flaring. So you pull over. You get out of your car. You step in between your fami...

There’s a certain mythos around the founders of the United States. George Washington gets this treatment to the extreme. He’s painted riding brilliant white horses, standing up in boats, and puffing out his chest as he presides over the signing of the Constitution. He’s essentially an American folk hero. What’s odd is that this mythical understanding of a real person conceals the truth of what rea...

Democracy: a small word and a big concept foundational to the United States. Ideally, we’re a country of pluralism and self determination, but the reality is often different. Many dark chapters exist in our history: Slavery and the extermination of Native Americans, Disenfranchisement and voter suppression. Japanese internment and white supremacy. And yet, many of the ideals that surround the foun...

Women of color have been at the forefront of many movements, yet are often neglected, demonized, or ignored. Your history class probably didn’t teach you about Josephine Baker, who was not only a famous Black dancer and entertainer, but also a spy aiding in the French Resistance. You likely didn’t learn about Claudette Colvin either. She was the Black, pregnant fifteen year old whose civil disobed...

As the ashes of the Third Reich settled, a divided Germany struggled to come to terms with what just occurred. Generations of German philosophers, politicians, academics, and common citizens slowly and collectively decided to confront the horrific actions of the Nazis. They called this process “Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung”, or “working off the past”, though it has several names. Step by step, throu...

UnTextbooked is a history podcast for the future. Brought to you by teen changemakers who are looking for answers to big questions. We interview famous historians who have some of the answers. These intergenerational conversations bring the full power of history to you with the depth and vividness that most textbooks lack. Real history, to help you find answers to your big questions. UnTextbooked...