One Shot At History

What happens when the U.S. Navy, Cold War paranoia, and a quiet patch of northern Wisconsin collide? You get one of the weirdest stories in American history.   In this episode, we follow the Navy’s secret plan to turn the Wisconsin woods into a giant communications system for nuclear submarines, complete with buried cables, tiny signals, big controversy, and a whole lot of “wait… they did what?” e...

Forget everything you think you know about spies. James Bond had an Aston Martin and the full backing of British intelligence. Jason Bourne had black-ops conditioning and a talent for parkour. The American Founders had a printing press, some tobacco to barter with, and a desperate shortage of gunpowder. They still pulled it off. When George Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775,...

This week on One Shot at History, we're trading Wisconsin weather for Arkansas weirdness — and there is a lot of it. We start in Little Rock in 1920, where two police officers on a routine patrol stumble into a ditch, see lights floating into the treetops, and nearly get shot by three women who were ghost hunting on a new moon. It gets stranger from there. We visit the White River, home to Ark...

OLD COLD CASE Horicon City Marshal William Gibson — Civil War veteran, father of four, a man his community trusted with their safety — was shot once, point-blank, on the steps of his own jailhouse, in front of his ten-year-old son. The killer vanished into the dark Wisconsin night. Suspects were arrested across the state. Leads were chased down, and evidence was recovered. A reward climbed to two...

On a bitter November day in 1914, the C.F. Curtis , the Selden E. Marvin , and the Annie M. Peterson headed out onto Lake Superior carrying lumber, freight, and a crew of working people bound for another routine run — and vanished into one of the lake’s worst storms. More than a century later, the wrecks were finally found again, turning a long-lost maritime disaster into a gripping story of ambit...

Podcast Name: One Shot at History "The Axe and the Immigrant: The Dejanovich Case of 1914": It's July 1914 in Horicon, Wisconsin. A Croatian laborer named Joseph Dejanovich wakes up in the middle of the night to the blow of an axe — and somehow survives. His wife, nineteen-year-old Barbara, is arrested and charged with attempted murder. The evidence seems damning: a sharpened axe, a...

A Different Kind of History — But One That Mattered This is a different kind of episode for me. I'm a history person. I like documents, primary sources and the things we can pin down. But history is also made of the moments that resist explaining — the things that happened that we still can't fully explain. The Mayville circles are part of Wisconsin's history, whether or not we ever know what caus...

Today on One Shot at History, we're pulling back the curtain on one of America's most beloved literary figures. Laura Ingalls Wilder — author of the Little House on the Prairie series — shaped the way generations of Americans imagined frontier life. The log cabins, the open prairie, the warmth of Pa and Ma, and the close-knit Ingalls family.   But there's something Laura kept out of th...