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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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...
The Scopes Trial Was Entirely Orchestrated But Became an Unintended 1920s Culture War Touchpoint
July 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial – a trial that exposed profound divisions in America over religion, education, and public mo...
The Panda Was First Discovered By Theodore Roosevelt’s Sons During a 9-Month Expedition in Himalayan China
In the late 1920s, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and his younger brother Kermit, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, wanted fame and glory apart from the f...
How Do We Really Know What Happened in the Past When Many Historians Were Propagandists and AI is Fabricating Everything Else?
“History is written by the winners.” This aphorism is catchy and it makes an important point that a lot of what we know about history was written with...
Eugénie de Montijo: The Spanish Empress Who Built Modern Paris and is Blamed For Imperial France’s Downfall
Thirty-three years after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire, his nephew (known as Napoleon III) became the first president of France before becom...
John Adams: The Most Influential Yet Overlooked Founding Father?
John Adams is arguably America’s most underrated Founding Father. He has no currency that bears his image. No national holidays celebrate his birth. H...
Why Thomas More -- Henry VIII’s Hatchet Man and Heretic Hunter -- Was Himself Executed For Heresy After the English Reformation
Thomas More was one of the most famous—and notorious—figures in English history. Born into the era of the Wars of the Roses, educated during the Europ...
Don’t Look to 1903s Germany to Understand American Populism. Look to 1830s New York Revivals Instead.
Something strange happened in Upstate New York during the 1830s. This area was called the "Burned-Over District" because so many fiery religious reviv...
Operation Barbarossa Saw Millions of POW Executions, Civilian Murders, and Starvation Deaths
Operation Barbarossa, launched by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941, aimed to swiftly conquer the Soviet Union, targeting key cities like Moscow, Leningra...
Pistol Duels Existed Across the 19th-Century World, But Only the Chaos of the American West Produced Gunfighters
To understand American history and its deep-seated relationship with violence, we must look to the last three decades of the 1800s in the American Wes...
Rome Definitively Eclipsed Greece in 197 BC By Making the Alexandrian Phalanx/Cavalry Obsolete
The battle of Cynoscephalae represents a key moment in the history of the Greco-Roman world. In this one battle the Macedonian hold over mainland Gree...
Exploring the Wreckage of the Britannic (the Titanic’s Sister Ship) and Discovering Why It Sunk in 50 Minutes
The RMS Titanic is history’s most famous shipwreck, but it wasn’t the only ship of its kind. The White Star Line built two other nearly identical vess...
Did Tariffs Make America a Manufacturing Powerhouse Or Trigger Economic Misery and Stifle Global Trade?
At a time when debates over tariffs, regulation, and the scope of government are back at center stage. Is this time in American history unprecedented,...
Alan Pinkerton: The Private Detective Who Saved Lincoln’s Life and Built America’s Contract Security State
Alan Pinkerton is perhaps the most over-achieving barrel-maker who ever lived. After practicing his trade in rural Illinois for a few years in the 185...
MacArthur’s Plans to Drop 50 Nuclear Bombs During the Korean War
The Korean War came dangerously close to going nuclear, and if would have if Gen. Douglas MacArthur had gotten his way. He proposed using 30 to 50 nuc...
The Many Ways That Rome Never Fell and Lives On Today
Rome’s Western Empire may have fallen 1,600 years ago, but its cultural impact has a radioactive half-life that would make xenon jealous. Over a billi...
Hooves of History: How Horses Created Ancient Warfare, Built the Silk Road, and Became the Dividing Line Between Nobleman and Peasant
In order to become rich, powerful, and prestigious in the pre-modern world, nothing mattered more than horses. They were the fundamental unit of warfa...
Moonshining Survived (and Thrived) At Least Two Decades After Prohibition Ended
The Prohibition era (1920–1933), enacted by the 18th Amendment, birthed an overnight economy of moonshiners who distilled and distributed homemade liq...