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History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

300 episodes

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 (Scott Rank, PhD) absolutely anything (What was it like to be a Turkish sultan with four wives and twelve concubines? If you were sent back in time, how would you kill Hitler?). Second, it features long-form interviews with best-selling authors who have written about everything. Topics include gruff World War II generals who flew with airmen on bombing raids, a war horse who gained the rank of sergeant, and presidents who gave their best speeches while drunk.

Episodes page 3 of 6

  1. America's Pacific Dawn: The Spanish-American War Ushered In Global Reach and Savage Conflict

    · 56 min

    Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, was in Havana in 1898, investigating the terrible conditions endured by Cubans whom the Spanish government had forced into concentration camps, where an estimated 425,000…

  2. The Unhealed Wounds of WW2 POWs and Combat Veterans

    · 50 min

    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 physically and mentally broken for life. There was a 25% death rate in…

  3. Robert McNamara Thought Enough Data Could Win Any War. Instead, It Led America to the Vietnam Quagmire

    · 1 h 00 min

    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 shocking confession in his 1995 memoir. He said “We were wrong, terribly…

  4. The Philistine Connection: Do the Roots of October 7 Go Back 3,000 Years?

    · 36 min

    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 to declare war. The attacks, which included massacres in Israeli…

  5. The Thucydides Trap: How A Rising Athens Made The Peloponnesian War Inevitable

    · 46 min

    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 reshaped the Greek world, but also because its thorough documentation…

  6. The Free French Army in North Africa, 1940-1945

    · 50 min

    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 lies in his role as a key leader of the Free French forces and a…

  7. An Inventor’s Quest to Build a Pneumatic Subway System in 1870s New York

    · 45 min

    Alfred Beach built America’s first operational subway in secret beneath 1860s Manhattan, decades before the city’s official electric subway line in 1904. He designed and commissioned a 300-foot-long,…

  8. Spirited Rivalry: Did Ireland or Scotland Invent Whisky?

    · 49 min

    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 and Shias in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It’s the debate over who…

  9. The Horse That Ate the Legion: Rome’s Cavalry's Triumph Over the Infantry

    · 41 min

    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 encircle enemies in battle. However, at the very beginning of Rome’s…

  10. Beyond Joan of Arc and Agincourt: How the 100 Years War Crushed Medieval Europe and Launched its Global Order

    · 59 min

    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 Arc’s heavenly visions, and a massive death toll from Scotland to…

  11. Reverse Ellis Island: American Migrants Who Fought for Mussolini and Built Stalin’s USSR

    · 39 min

    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 thousands of Americans, including ideologues and workers, moving to…

  12. Don’t Use Rome as a Model of Why Societies Collapse; Use Crime Syndicates and Somalia Instead

    · 50 min

    12,000 years ago, human history changed forever when the egalitarian groups of hunter-gathering humans began to settle down and organize themselves into hierarchies. The few dominated the many, seizing control through…

  13. A Union General Found a Loophole in the Fugitive Slave Act, Causing 1 Million Slaves to Flee North

    · 45 min

    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 brutal punishment or even death upon return to deter others from…

  14. The Civil War’s Brutal Finale: A War of Attrition as Terrible as WW2-Pacific and the Napoleonic Wars

    · 48 min

    In 1864, the American Civil War reached a critical juncture with Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, including the brutal battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, which claimed over 60,000 casualties, surpassing…

  15. Camp David Looks Like a 1970s Lakeside Retreat. Why is it the Site of the World’s Biggest Political Summits?

    · 42 min

    Camp David, nestled in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, spans about 125 acres, making it significantly smaller than other presidential getaways like Lyndon B. Johnson’s sprawling 2,700-acre Texas ranch or the vast…

  16. How British Scientists' Self-Experiments on Underwater Rebreathing Created D-Day Submarine Tech (And Nearly Killed Them in the Process)

    · 53 min

    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 unscathed. The raid failed due to poor planning and lack of…

  17. Over 200,000 Allied Troops Tried and Failed to Crush the Soviet Revolution After World War One

    · 41 min

    The Allied Intervention into the Russian Civil War remains one of the most ambitious yet least talked about military ventures of the 20th century. Coinciding with the end of the first World War, some 180,000 troops…

  18. How the U.S. Occupation of Japan After WW2 Forged the Most Durable Peace of the 20th Century

    · 1 h 00 min

    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 dehumanizing "Tokyo Woe" posters in the U.S. and Japanese depictions…

  19. Homer Couldn't Have Written the Iliad, But He Probably Dictated it Word for Word

    · 53 min

    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 moving, but great questions remain: Where, how, and when was it…

  20. Depression-Era Planners Thought They’d End Poverty with Public Housing. Instead, They Created the Projects

    · 41 min

    In the 1930s, New Deal-era technocrats devised a solution to homelessness and poverty itself. They believed that providing free or low-cost urban housing projects could completely eliminate housing scarcity. Planners…

  21. The Alabaman Jacksonians Who Rejected the Confederacy and Marched with Sherman to the Sea

    · 49 min

    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 little-known for 160 years is the Alabamian Union soldiers who played a…

  22. Frederick Douglass’s Private Writings on Abraham Lincoln, His Strong Critiques and Stronger Praise

    · 49 min

    Frederick Douglass made the strongest arguments for abolition in antebellum America because he made the case that abolition was not a mutation of the Founding Father’s vision of America, but a fulfillment of their…

  23. The Industrial Revolution Was Supposed to Lead to Unlimited Free Time But Only Gave Us Smartphones and Endless Dopamine

    · 31 min

    Free time, one of life’s most important commodities, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty…

  24. James Cook Mapped the Globe Before Dying At the Hands of Hawaiians Who Once Worshipped Him

    · 57 min

    Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan are known for discoveries, but it was Captain James Cook who made global travel truly possible. Cook was an 18th-century British explorer who mapped vast regions of the…

  25. American Anarchists: The Original Domestic Extremists

    · 40 min

    In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were…

  26. 100 Years Before Ford v. Ferrari, a Horse Breeder Revolutionized Thoroughbred Racing Through a Similar Obsession With Progress

    · 1 h 15 min

    Horse racing was the most popular sport in early America, drawing massive crowds and fueling a cultural obsession with horses’ speed and pedigree. In the early 1800s, every town in America with a few thousand people…

  27. Western Rome Fell Due to Germanic Immigration, Mass Inflation, and a Bloated Bureaucracy

    · 39 min

    It took little more than a single generation for the centuries-old Roman Empire to fall. In those critical decades, while Christians and pagans, legions and barbarians, generals and politicians squabbled over dwindling…

  28. Why the Atomic Bombing of Japan is as Justified in 2025 as it was in 1945

    · 52 min

    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 contentious. That wasn't the case in the immediate aftermath: 85% of…

  29. Surviving the Siege of Leningrad with Sawdust Bread and Iron Determination

    · 47 min

    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 a million dead. The capture of the city came tantalizingly close…

  30. Depression-Era Governor Huey Long Wanted to Confiscate Individual Fortunes Over $1 Million, Possibly Leading to His 1935 Assassination

    · 1 h 06 min

    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 individual fortunes exceeding $1 million to fund healthcare, free…

  31. Rope Equals Fire as Humanity’s Most Important Invention: It Allowed Hunting Mammoths and Building Pyramids

    · 56 min

    “‘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 rope, but he was inadvertently commenting on how civilization owes its…

  32. The Scopes Trial Was Entirely Orchestrated But Became an Unintended 1920s Culture War Touchpoint

    · 57 min

    July 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial – a trial that exposed profound divisions in America over religion, education, and public morality. This was a legal case in Dayton, Tennessee, where high…

  33. The Panda Was First Discovered By Theodore Roosevelt’s Sons During a 9-Month Expedition in Himalayan China

    · 42 min

    In the late 1920s, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and his younger brother Kermit, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, wanted fame and glory apart from the family spotlight. They were seeking the “empty spots” on the maps,…

  34. How Do We Really Know What Happened in the Past When Many Historians Were Propagandists and AI is Fabricating Everything Else?

    · 49 min

    “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 an agenda, not for the purposes of informing us. Unfortunately, it…

  35. Eugénie de Montijo: The Spanish Empress Who Built Modern Paris and is Blamed For Imperial France’s Downfall

    · 46 min

    Thirty-three years after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire, his nephew (known as Napoleon III) became the first president of France before becoming emperor himself. Although he was a capable ruler and reformer,…

  36. John Adams: The Most Influential Yet Overlooked Founding Father?

    · 39 min

    John Adams is arguably America’s most underrated Founding Father. He has no currency that bears his image. No national holidays celebrate his birth. He’s nearly never named as anyone’s favorite president. And he has no…

  37. Why Thomas More -- Henry VIII’s Hatchet Man and Heretic Hunter -- Was Himself Executed For Heresy After the English Reformation

    · 49 min

    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 European Renaissance, rising to become Chancellor of England, and…

  38. Don’t Look to 1903s Germany to Understand American Populism. Look to 1830s New York Revivals Instead.

    · 1 h 04 min

    Something strange happened in Upstate New York during the 1830s. This area was called the "Burned-Over District" because so many fiery religious revivals swept through that it was metaphorically burned over. This…

  39. Operation Barbarossa Saw Millions of POW Executions, Civilian Murders, and Starvation Deaths

    · 53 min

    Operation Barbarossa, launched by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941, aimed to swiftly conquer the Soviet Union, targeting key cities like Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv. Hitler reportedly said a meeting with his generals…

  40. Pistol Duels Existed Across the 19th-Century World, But Only the Chaos of the American West Produced Gunfighters

    · 52 min

    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 West, which had the highest murder rate per capita in American history.…

  41. Rome Definitively Eclipsed Greece in 197 BC By Making the Alexandrian Phalanx/Cavalry Obsolete

    · 47 min

    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 Greece was broken, with the Roman Republic rising in its place as the…

  42. Exploring the Wreckage of the Britannic (the Titanic’s Sister Ship) and Discovering Why It Sunk in 50 Minutes

    · 48 min

    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 vessels: The RMS Olympic and Britannic. The Olympic carried passengers…

  43. Did Tariffs Make America a Manufacturing Powerhouse Or Trigger Economic Misery and Stifle Global Trade?

    · 45 min

    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, or can we find parallels in the past? For example, has trade…

  44. Alan Pinkerton: The Private Detective Who Saved Lincoln’s Life and Built America’s Contract Security State

    · 50 min

    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 1850s, the Scottish immigrant busted up a counterfeiting ring, which…

  45. MacArthur’s Plans to Drop 50 Nuclear Bombs During the Korean War

    · 51 min

    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 nuclear primarily to targeting air bases, depots, and supply lines…

  46. The Many Ways That Rome Never Fell and Lives On Today

    · 37 min

    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 billion people speak Latin (or at least a Latin-derived language).…

  47. Hooves of History: How Horses Created Ancient Warfare, Built the Silk Road, and Became the Dividing Line Between Nobleman and Peasant

    · 44 min

    In order to become rich, powerful, and prestigious in the pre-modern world, nothing mattered more than horses. They were the fundamental unit of warfare, enabling cavalry charges, and logistical support. They…

  48. Moonshining Survived (and Thrived) At Least Two Decades After Prohibition Ended

    · 46 min

    The Prohibition era (1920–1933), enacted by the 18th Amendment, birthed an overnight economy of moonshiners who distilled and distributed homemade liquor to meet America’s insatiable demand for alcohol, transforming…

  49. How to Cross the Sahara as a Tenth-Century Cameleer

    · 53 min

    What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile…

  50. How American Slaves Fled By Sea, Whether as Stowaways or Commandeering a Confederate Ship

    · 46 min

    As many as 100,000 enslaved people fled successfully from the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South, finding safe harbor along a network of passageways across North America via the Underground Railroad. Yet many…

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