Dave Does History

November has always felt like a month that holds two truths at once. It carries the last color of autumn while the first chill of winter settles in behind it. It is a time when the world seems to pause, not out of laziness, but because history has layered so much meaning onto these thirty days that you cannot help but feel the weight of it. This episode looks at how November became the month of re...

There are stories in the early Space Race that sit in the shadows, waiting for someone to stop and look at them with a little patience. This is one of those stories. Before John Glenn became a national hero, before America finally proved it could put a human being into orbit, a small and serious chimpanzee named Enos stepped into a cramped Mercury capsule and took the gamble first. His flight on N...

There is a point on the map where the world once seemed to split open, and the men who found it were not looking for a peaceful view. They were hungry, exhausted, and nearly out of patience when they sailed into a narrow cut in the coast of South America in October of 1520. They had spent more than a year chasing a rumor, and now the water twisted ahead of them like a riddle carved into the earth....

Here is a 150 word podcast introduction, shaped to your tone and all your rules. No em dash marks. Proper paragraphs. There is a certain kind of pride that lives deep in the bones of Lancashire, the sort that does not care what the mapmakers in London dream up or how many times someone redraws a boundary line. Lancashire Day, celebrated every November twenty seven, brings that pride to the surface...

Artemas Ward is one of those figures the Revolution seems determined to hide behind a curtain. Everyone knows Washington arrived in Cambridge to take command of the Patriot army. Almost no one remembers the man already holding the lines, organizing the chaos, and keeping the British bottled up long enough for Washington to have something to command. That man was Artemas Ward of Shrewsbury, a caref...

This week’s podcast opens with a grievance from the Declaration of Independence that rarely gets its share of attention. It sounds simple on the surface. The king tried to prevent the population of these states. Once you start looking at what that actually meant in 1776, the scene becomes far more vivid. It meant blocked land grants, stalled settlements, and a crown that wanted fewer colonists wan...

November 25, 1758. A cold rain falls on the forks of the Ohio. Exhausted British and provincial soldiers, expecting a final desperate battle, instead find only smoking ruins where Fort Duquesne stood the day before. The French have blown up their own magazines and vanished up the Allegheny River in the night. No flags are struck. No volleys are fired. Yet in that quiet moment the strategic heart o...

On Thanksgiving Eve 1971, while millions of Americans prepared for turkey and football, a nondescript man in a business suit bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle for twenty dollars cash. He gave his name as Dan Cooper, boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305, and settled into seat 18C with a bourbon and 7-Up. Less than thirty minutes after takeoff, he handed flight attendant Florence Schaf...

Today we're talking about the single most important defense of free speech ever written in English: John Milton's Areopagitica, published illegally in November 1644 while England was busy tearing itself apart in civil war. Parliament had just killed the king's censorship machine, watched ideas explode everywhere, panicked, and promptly rebuilt the exact same censorship machine under ne...

The Juan Fernández Islands first caught my attention thanks to a documentary so wildly inaccurate that it should have come with a warning label. The history was nonsense, the claims were absurd, yet the imagery was stunning. Those rugged cliffs rising from the Pacific, the wind carved ridges, and the lonely bays felt like a place where the world still keeps its secrets. It was the kind of landscap...

Josiah Bartlett does not always get the fanfare of the larger revolutionary names, yet his fingerprints are all over the birth of the nation. He was a frontier doctor who challenged the medical habits of his day and saved lives by trusting observation over superstition. He was a legislator who refused to bow to royal pressure. When the moment of truth came in July of 1776, he was the first delegat...

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...

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...

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 masterpi...

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 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...

In the frozen silence of the Barents Sea, two submarines from rival nations crossed paths on November 15, 1969. One was the USS Gato, a sleek American attack sub built for stealth. The other was the Soviet K-19, a ballistic missile boat already haunted by disaster and known among sailors as “the Widowmaker.” When their steel hulls collided 200 feet below the surface, the world nearly brushed nucle...

On November 14, 1969, the crew of Apollo 12 rode a pillar of fire into a gray and rain-soaked Florida sky. Just thirty-six seconds after liftoff, lightning struck the massive Saturn V, knocking out power, blinding the instruments, and filling the command module with flashing warning lights. A second strike followed, threatening to end the mission before it had even cleared the clouds. Inside the c...

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...

On November 12, 1928, the SS Vestris slipped beneath the gray Atlantic roughly two hundred miles off the Virginia Capes. She had sailed from New York two days earlier, overloaded and poorly maintained, bound for Buenos Aires on what should have been a routine voyage. Instead, she became a floating indictment of negligence and pride. The captain delayed his distress call, the crew mishandled lifebo...

On November 11, 1919, the small town of Centralia, Washington gathered to honor the first anniversary of the end of the Great War. What began as a peaceful Armistice Day parade ended in gunfire, chaos, and death. As members of the American Legion marched proudly in uniform, celebrating service and sacrifice, they were ambushed by members of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor grou...

On November 10, 1898, the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, was torn apart by the only successful coup d’état in American history. What began as a campaign of white supremacy ended in organized terror. Armed mobs burned The Daily Record , a Black-owned newspaper, and murdered scores of Black citizens while forcing the city’s elected officials to resign at gunpoint. By nightfall, Wilmington’s mul...

In the early hours of November 9, 1780, the quiet woods along the Broad River in South Carolina erupted in musket fire. The British, led by Major James Wemyss, had crept toward what they thought was a sleeping rebel camp. Instead, they charged straight into the muzzle flashes of men who had learned their lessons the hard way. This is the story of the Battle of Fishdam Ford, a small but fierce figh...

In 1960, America stood on the edge of a new decade, torn between the steady hand of experience and the promise of youthful change. The presidential race between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy was more than a contest for the White House. It was a battle for the nation’s direction in a tense and uncertain age. For the first time, the power of television would shape how vote...

On November 7, 1775, from the deck of a British warship anchored off Norfolk, Virginia, Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation that shook the colonies to their core. The royal governor declared martial law and promised freedom to any enslaved person who would take up arms for the King. It was a desperate act, meant to crush rebellion and strike fear into Virginia’s planters. Instead, it ignited outrag...