History Unplugged Podcast
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History Unplugged Podcast
For history lovers who listen to podcasts, History Unplugged is the most comprehensive show of its kind. It's the only show that dedicates episodes to both interviewing experts and answering questions from its audience. First, it features a call-in show where you can ask our resident historian (Scot...
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1041 episodi
The American Revolution was a World War in All but Name
The Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, known as the "shot heard round the world," marked the first military engagements of the American R...
How Napoleon and Churchill Used Neuroscience to Make a Better Soldier and More Loyal Public
The brain acts in strange ways during wartime. Even in active combat situations, when soldiers are one mistake away from death, many can’t fire on th...
William F. Buckley JR.'s Guide to Friendship in a Polarized Era
William F. Buckley Jr., the charismatic intellectual who defined modern American conservatism, was famously skilled at forging friendships across the...
What it Was Like Living Through the USSR’s Collapse
The Collapse of the Soviet Union was twice as devastating as the Great Depression for those who lived there. It immediately led to widespread economic...
The Battle of Agincourt, 1415: Longbowmen, Bands of Brothers, and Henry V’s Triumph
From Shakespeare's 'band of brothers' speech to its appearances in numerous films, Agincourt rightfully has a place among a handful of conflicts whose...
Clarence Dillon: The Roaring 20s Wall Street Baron Who Wrote the Rules for Corporate Takeovers, Junk Bonds, and Bankruptcy
J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles E. Mitchell are names that come to mind when thinking of the most prominent icons of wealth and influenc...
A Utah Indian Chief Controlled the 1800s Mountain West Through Slave Trading, Building Pioneer Trails, Horse Stealing, and Becoming Mormon
The American Indian leader Wakara was among the most influential and feared men in the nineteenth-century American West. He and his pan-tribal cavalry...
Why Did Rome Fall? Wrong Question. How Did it Last 2,000 Years Despite Changing its Religion, Language, and Government?
Rome began as a pagan, Latin-speaking city state in central Italy during the early Iron Age and ended as a Christian, Greek-speaking empire as the age...
The Real Deadwood: A Gold Rush Town Built in a War Zone but Obliterated in an Inferno
Gunslinging, gold-panning, stagecoach robbing, whiskey guzzling – the myth and infamy of the American West is synonymous with its most famous town: De...
America's Pacific Dawn: The Spanish-American War Ushered In Global Reach and Savage Conflict
Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, was in Havana in 1898, investigating the terrible conditions endured by Cubans whom the Spanish government...
The Unhealed Wounds of WW2 POWs and Combat Veterans
Nearly 16.4 million Americans served in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II, and for millions of survivors, the fighting left many of them physicall...
Robert McNamara Thought Enough Data Could Win Any War. Instead, It Led America to the Vietnam Quagmire
Robert S. McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense during JFK and LBJ’s administrations, and one of the chief architects of the Vietnam war, made a shoc...
The Philistine Connection: Do the Roots of October 7 Go Back 3,000 Years?
The October 7th attacks of Hamas on Israel were an unprecedented, surprise incursion by land, sea, and air that stunned the world and prompted Israel...
The Thucydides Trap: How A Rising Athens Made The Peloponnesian War Inevitable
The Peloponnesian War is considered one of the most famous wars of the ancient world not only because it was a massive and devastating conflict that r...
The Free French Army in North Africa, 1940-1945
One of the principal architects of Allied Victory in North Africa during World War Two was French General Louis Dio. His importance in North Africa li...
An Inventor’s Quest to Build a Pneumatic Subway System in 1870s New York
Alfred Beach built America’s first operational subway in secret beneath 1860s Manhattan, decades before the city’s official electric subway line in 19...
Spirited Rivalry: Did Ireland or Scotland Invent Whisky?
There’s a divide between Scotland and Ireland as fierce as the Protestant/Catholic split during the Thirty Years’ War or the battles between Sunnis an...
The Horse That Ate the Legion: Rome’s Cavalry's Triumph Over the Infantry
The cavalry 'wings' that probed ahead of the Roman Army played a key role in its campaigns of conquest, masking its marching flanks and seeking to enc...
Beyond Joan of Arc and Agincourt: How the 100 Years War Crushed Medieval Europe and Launched its Global Order
Modern France and Britain were forged in the fires of the Hundred Years War, a century-long conflict that produced deadly English longbowmen, Joan of...
Reverse Ellis Island: American Migrants Who Fought for Mussolini and Built Stalin’s USSR
America saw a significant reverse-migration in the 1800s and 1900s, with 20–50% of Italian immigrants returning to Italy as ritornati and tens of thou...
Don’t Use Rome as a Model of Why Societies Collapse; Use Crime Syndicates and Somalia Instead
12,000 years ago, human history changed forever when the egalitarian groups of hunter-gathering humans began to settle down and organize themselves in...
A Union General Found a Loophole in the Fugitive Slave Act, Causing 1 Million Slaves to Flee North
After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, enslaved people feared running away to the North, as their return was mandated, and they faced br...
The Civil War’s Brutal Finale: A War of Attrition as Terrible as WW2-Pacific and the Napoleonic Wars
In 1864, the American Civil War reached a critical juncture with Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, including the brutal battles of the Wilderness...
Camp David Looks Like a 1970s Lakeside Retreat. Why is it the Site of the World’s Biggest Political Summits?
Camp David, nestled in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, spans about 125 acres, making it significantly smaller than other presidential getaways like Lyn...
How British Scientists' Self-Experiments on Underwater Rebreathing Created D-Day Submarine Tech (And Nearly Killed Them in the Process)
In August 1942, over 7,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, in a largely forgotten landing, with only a small fraction surviving...
Over 200,000 Allied Troops Tried and Failed to Crush the Soviet Revolution After World War One
The Allied Intervention into the Russian Civil War remains one of the most ambitious yet least talked about military ventures of the 20th century. Coi...
How the U.S. Occupation of Japan After WW2 Forged the Most Durable Peace of the 20th Century
During World War II, the U.S. and Japan were locked in bitter hatred, fueled by propaganda portraying each other as ruthless enemies, exemplified by d...
Homer Couldn't Have Written the Iliad, But He Probably Dictated it Word for Word
The Iliad is the world’s greatest epic poem—heroic battle and divine fate set against the Trojan War. Its beauty and profound bleakness are intensely...
Depression-Era Planners Thought They’d End Poverty with Public Housing. Instead, They Created the Projects
In the 1930s, New Deal-era technocrats devised a solution to homelessness and poverty itself. They believed that providing free or low-cost urban hous...
The Alabaman Jacksonians Who Rejected the Confederacy and Marched with Sherman to the Sea
As the popular narrative goes, the Civil War was won when courageous Yankees triumphed over the South. But an aspect of the war that has remained litt...
Frederick Douglass’s Private Writings on Abraham Lincoln, His Strong Critiques and Stronger Praise
Frederick Douglass made the strongest arguments for abolition in antebellum America because he made the case that abolition was not a mutation of the...
The Industrial Revolution Was Supposed to Lead to Unlimited Free Time But Only Gave Us Smartphones and Endless Dopamine
Free time, one of life’s most important commodities, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in th...
James Cook Mapped the Globe Before Dying At the Hands of Hawaiians Who Once Worshipped Him
Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan are known for discoveries, but it was Captain James Cook who made global travel truly possible. Cook was a...
American Anarchists: The Original Domestic Extremists
In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or pri...
100 Years Before Ford v. Ferrari, a Horse Breeder Revolutionized Thoroughbred Racing Through a Similar Obsession With Progress
Horse racing was the most popular sport in early America, drawing massive crowds and fueling a cultural obsession with horses’ speed and pedigree. In...
Western Rome Fell Due to Germanic Immigration, Mass Inflation, and a Bloated Bureaucracy
It took little more than a single generation for the centuries-old Roman Empire to fall. In those critical decades, while Christians and pagans, legio...
Why the Atomic Bombing of Japan is as Justified in 2025 as it was in 1945
It's been 80 years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the question of whether or not those bombings were justified has never been more...
Surviving the Siege of Leningrad with Sawdust Bread and Iron Determination
The first year of the siege of Leningrad that began in September 1941 marked the opening stage of a 900-day-long struggle for survival that left over...
Depression-Era Governor Huey Long Wanted to Confiscate Individual Fortunes Over $1 Million, Possibly Leading to His 1935 Assassination
The most radical piece of legislation in the 20th century was Louisiana Governor Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth Plan,” a bold proposal to confiscate in...
Rope Equals Fire as Humanity’s Most Important Invention: It Allowed Hunting Mammoths and Building Pyramids
“‘Rope!’ muttered Sam[wise Gamgee]. ‘I knew I’d want it, if I hadn’t got it!’” Sam knew in the Lord of the Rings that the quest would fail without ro...