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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How 10 Whalers Survived Three Years Shipwrecked in the South Pacific
In 1832, a New Bedford whaleship called the Mentor struck a reef in the remote Pacific archipelago of Palau. The tiny, 100-foot-long ship began sinkin...
The Nobels Built Russia’s Oil Industry, Invented Dynamite and the Oil Tanker, But Were Still Crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution
The Nobel family (which are the namesake of the Nobel prize), had a rags-to-riches story bigger than the Rockefellers or Morgans. The Nobel patriarch...
The American Revolution Went Way Outside of America, Pulling in Caribbean Colonies, African Forts, and Chinese Trading Houses
The thirteen colonies that became the United States were just half of the British colonies that existed in the 18th century. The empire stretched from...
Ford’s Auto Domination Came From a 1909 Race Across America Through Mud-Choked Roads
In June 1909, five automobiles lined up in front of New York's City Hall to attempt something no car had ever done: drive all the way to Seattle. The...
Al Capone’s Missing $100 Million, and the TV Journalist Who Embarrassed Himself to Find It
On the night of April 21, 1986, an estimated 30 million Americans sat in front of their televisions waiting for a moment that almost no one alive had...
How the Dollar Created America (Part 2)
Part 2 of our exploration of how the U.S. dollar is older than the United States itself and has a level of power beyond the Federal Reserve and even b...
How the Dollar Created America (Part 1)
The U.S. dollar's origin story begins not in Philadelphia or Washington, but in a half-frozen mining valley in 16th-century Bohemia, where Saxon miner...
From Patriot to Pirate: How Revolutionary War Hero Sam Mason Became a River Outlaw
One of the greatest threat to early America was piracy, but it wasn’t found in the Caribbean or Gulf Coast. It was pirates on the Ohio and Mississippi...
Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs
When Russia's Dowager Empress was pregnant with the future Tsar Nicholas II in 1868, she dreamed that a peasant would one day kill her son. The idea t...
The Revolutionary War’s Charlie Wilson: A Spanish Spy Chief Funded the Siege of Yorktown, Helping Washington Win
Everyone knows the American Revolution was won at Yorktown in 1781, when Cornwallis’s Army was trapped, but almost no one knows that victory depended...
Europe Dominated Because It Never Stopped Fighting Itself
Why did the West dominate all rivals on Earth? How did a group of states that were nearly wiped out in the late Middle Ages by enemies to the south an...
A Land Flowing with Pork and Beef: Colonial America’s Rise to the World’s Meat Consumption Capital
When European settlers arrived in North America, they enjoyed a level of meat consumption that was absolutely unimaginable in the Old World. An averag...
Passenger Pigeons Once Numbered in the Billions and Blotted Out the Skies for Days. They Went Extinct in 30 Years.
In America’s first hundred years, the animal you were most likely to see was a passenger pigeon. And you saw a lot of them. Flocks were so numerous th...
Tooth Enamel Tells All: Genetic Testing and Why It’s Rewriting Our Understanding of Early Medieval Migration
Europe's borders in the Middle Ages were created by one man, and he wasn't even born in the Middle Ages, nor was he Christian. It was Emperor Diocleti...
95% of Ancient Greek Theater Is Gone. Here's How One Classicist Resurrected 500 Lost Playwrights
Of the estimated 1,500 plays written in ancient Greece, only 33 complete works survive today—the rest were lost because medieval scribes deemed low-br...
How Medieval Monks Used the 7 Deadly Sins to Map Human Behavior…and LinkedIn Weaponized them Against Us
When medieval historian Peter Jones found himself spiraling into depression while teaching at a frigid Siberian university with icicles sprouting from...
1,000% Profit Per Voyage: The Economics of Civil War Smuggling and Blockade Running
In August 1863, as Lee's army retreated from Gettysburg and Vicksburg fell to Grant, the Union's Anaconda Plan deployed hundreds of ships to strangle...
The Lost Voices of Pompeii: Lives Cut Short When Vesuvius Erupted, Including a Fish Sauce Tycoon and an Isis Priest
Pompeii's story is usually told through the lens of catastrophe—perfectly preserved bodies frozen in ash, a civilization erased in hours, sort of like...
The Body Worth Stealing: Why Medieval Cities Fought Over Francis of Assisi’s Corpse
When St. Francis of Assisi was near death in 1226, he joked with companions that his corpse would be practically as valuable as gold. And he was right...
The Alphabet as Artifact: How Egyptian Pictograms Became Your ABCs
The alphabet you're reading right now is a 3,800-year-old archaeological artifact, preserving ancient decisions in plain sight—from the upside-down ox...
Greenland is Nothing: American Nearly Acquired El Salvador, Canada, and the Kamchatka Peninsula
America’s desire to expand its borders has existed since its first colonies – from attempts to settle beyond the Appalachian Mountains in the 18th cen...
From Big Village to Global Power: The Thousand-Year Rise of Moscow, Russia's Fortress Capital
When St. Petersburg nobility mockingly called Moscow a "big village," in the 19th century – a time when they lived in all the excess found in a Tolsto...
American Civilians Caught Behind Enemy Lines After Pearl Harbor, and How They Were Repatriated
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, more than ten thousand Americans living abroad became trapped in Japanese-controlled territories, and with rumors of ill...
Washington's Crossing from the Other Side: Three Hessian Soldiers' Stories of Defeat and Capture at the Battle of Trenton
Emanuel Leutze's iconic painting Washington Crossing the Delaware shows the general standing heroically at the bow of his boat, staring toward an unse...
From Bronze to Blood: How the Sword Became Humanity's First Murder Weapon
For nearly two thousand years, swords reigned as humanity's weapon of choice—the first tools designed exclusively to kill other humans rather than hun...
Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right
Science progresses through breakthrough discoveries, but behind many of the field's greatest advancements lies a darker history of scientific dysfunct...
How Two California Wines Shattered Centuries of French Supremacy in a Blind Taste Test
In 1976, nine French wine judges did the unthinkable: they blindly selected two California wines over France's most elite vintages in what became know...
How an Italian Engineer with 700 Knights Defeated 100,000 Ottoman Troops at the Siege Rhodes
Throughout the 16th century, one man stood between the Ottoman Empire and European domination, yet his name has been largely forgotten. Gabriele Tadin...
Why America's Military Never Became a Threat to Democracy
America's Founding Fathers feared a standing army would inevitably threaten civilian governance. Yet 250 years later, the U.S. military remains a stra...
How Christianity Shaped America's 500-Year Mission to Become a Holy Land
Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists famously described the First Amendment as building a "wall of separation between church and Sta...
Every Communication Breakthrough—From Cave Art to AI Video—Exists to Tell Stories
There’s an argument to be made that every technology advance in communication – from cave paintings to fake AI movie trailers – is at its root an atte...
The East’s Auschwitz: How Imperial Japan’s Secret Experimenters Escaped Justice
During the Holocaust, Josef Mengele discarded every medical ethic to perform horrific human experiments at Auschwitz, including non-consensual vivisec...
The Chemistry of Conquest: Behind the USSR’s State-Sponsored (and Steroid-Powered) Olympic Glory
Since the era of Joseph Stalin, Moscow’s rulers have sent Russian athletes into the Summer and Winter Olympics with one command: you must win. These c...
Daniel Boone’s Life as a Frontiersman and Adopted Son of a Shawnee Chief
Daniel Boone is considered one of the United States' first folk heroes for his exploration beyond the thirteen colonies into Kentucky. His exploits ar...
The Loss and Re-Discovery of the $20 Billion Imperial Spanish Treasure Ship
The most valuable shipwreck of all time is the San José galleon—an 18th century Spanish ship that carried 11 million gold coins, silver, and emeralds—...
Thomas Willing: The Revolutionary War Arms Dealer Who Led the First Bank of the United States
America’s revolutionary war would have almost certainly been lost if not for the colony’s wealthiest merchant. Thomas Willing was a prominent Philadel...
The Man Who Sold the War: Tom Paine's Journey from Common Sense to Global Firebrand
Most of us only know Thomas Paine for one thing: writing Common Sense in 1776, which helped kickstart the Revolution by selling hundreds of thousands...
The Original Body Builders: How Greek Halteres and Celtic Gabal Stone Lifts Built the World's First Strongmen
Fad workouts have been with us for decades, but they go back much further than we realize. Long before CrossFit, Zumba, P90X, Tae Box, Jazzercise or J...
Truman’s Deep Regret at the Atomic Age He Created
In the eight decades since the United States deployed the most destructive weapon ever used, conventional wisdom has held that American leaders were f...
How Soccer Created African and Latin American Nations
National pride often comes from shared heritage—like a common language or ethnic background. Religious Nationalism can be seen in historical Russia, w...