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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 4 of 6

  1. Did WW2 Heads of State Want to Preserve Their Empires As Much as Defend Their Homelands?

    · 48 min

    2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of Germany’s surrender and the fall of the Third Reich. Likewise, World War II is the single most studied conflict in human history. But most Western accounts offer a…

  2. How a British Governor of Virginia Raised an Ex-Slave Regiment in 1776 to Fight Patriots and Triggered the Revolutionary War

    · 55 min

    As the American Revolution broke out in New England in the spring of 1775, dramatic events unfolded in Virginia that proved every bit as decisive as the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill in uniting the…

  3. How a Marine Embedded with Mao Zedong’s Guerrillas in the 30s Became WW2’s Most Celebrated Special Forces Leader

    · 56 min

    He was a gutsy old man.” “A corker,” said another. “You couldn’t find anyone better.” They talked about him in hushed tones. “This Major Carlson,” wrote one of the officers in a letter home, “is one of the finest men I…

  4. Microbes Were Discovered in the 1600s. Why It Take 200 Years For Doctors To Start Washing Their Hands?

    · 54 min

    Scientists and enthusiastic amateurs first confirmed the existence of living things invisible to the human eye in the late sixteenth century. So why did it take two centuries to connect microbes to disease? As late as…

  5. From Einstein’s Chalkboard to Oppenheimer’s Nuclear Test: The 50-Year Path to the Atomic Bomb

    · 48 min

    The story of the atomic age began decades before Robert Oppenheimer watched a mushroom cloud form over the New Mexico desert at the Trinity nuclear test in mid 1945. It begins in 1895, with Henri Becquerel’s accidental…

  6. Japan’s Desperate Air Battles Against the US in the Final Months of WW2

    · 37 min

    The B-29 Bomber led the Allied strategic bombing offensive against Japan, succeeding when US Bomber Command switched from high-level daytime precision bombing to low-level nighttime area bombing. The latter tactic…

  7. D-Day From the East: The Soviet Operation Bagration Crippled the Wehrmacht in Late 1944

    · 42 min

    Throughout the war on the Eastern Front, there were two consistent trends. The Red Army battled to learn how to fight and win, while involved in a struggle for its very survival. But by 1944 it had a leadership that…

  8. Pilgrimages Involved Penitent Marches, Visiting Holy Places, and Watching Drunken Emperors Go on Chariot Rides

    · 45 min

    Pilgrimages are a universal phenomenon, from China’s bustling Tai Shan to the ancient Jewish treks to Jerusalem. But why? What is it about a grueling penitent march to an isolated temple that has become a prerequisite…

  9. Britain Learned How to Set Up Its Global Empire on a Tiny Bermudan Island

    · 44 min

    Years before Jamestown planters made New World farming profitable by growing tobacco, and years before their countrymen up north in Plymouth Colony managed to overcome their starvation conditions and acclimate to New…

  10. The Hatfield-McCoy Feud Started Over a Pig and Nearly Escalated Into a Regional War

    · 45 min

    The origins of the Hatfield-McCoy conflict (between the Hatfield family of West Virginia, led by William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield, and the McCoy family of Kentucky, led by Randolph "Old Randall" McCoy) begins…

  11. The 1845 Potato Blight Struck Across Northern Europe. Why Did Only Ireland Starve?

    · 49 min

    In 1845, a novel pathogen attacked potato fields across Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia—but only in Ireland were the effects apocalyptic. At least one million Irish people died, and millions more scattered across the…

  12. A Simple Tennessee Preacher Transformed Abolitionism from a Deeply Unpopular Radical Movement to a Centrist Cause

    · 51 min

    Sitting high above the small community of Ripley, Ohio, a lantern shone in the front window of a small, red brick home at night. It was a signal to slaves just across the Ohio River. Anyone fleeing bondage could look…

  13. How Benjamin Franklin’s Stove Invention Kept Early America From Freezing

    · 42 min

    The biggest revolution in Benjamin Franklin’s lifetime was made to fit in a fireplace. Assembled from iron plates like a piece of flatpack furniture, the Franklin stove became one of the era's most iconic consumer…

  14. Roman Churches Had No Involvement in Marriage. How Did It Become a Holy Sacrament by the Middle Ages?

    · 38 min

    For much of Christian history, the Church had little involvement in marriage, which was primarily a contract between families. It wasn’t until the fourth century that church weddings emerged, and even then, they were…

  15. How a Mess Cook Saved Dozens of Sailors from Shark Infested Waters Off the Coast of Guadalcanal

    · 28 min

    On the night of September 5, 1942, the USS Gregory (APD-3), a converted destroyer turned high-speed transport, was caught in a deadly ambush near Guadalcanal. The ship had been supporting U.S. Marine forces, ferrying…

  16. Humanity’s Past Suggests We Only Have 10,000 Years to Change or Go Extinct

    · 53 min

    We are living through a period that is unique in human history. For the first time in more than ten thousand years, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. In the middle of this century population growth…

  17. The 16th Century Ottomans Nearly Conquered Europe. Why Did European Kingdoms Make So Many Alliances With Them?

    · 51 min

    The determined attempt to thwart Ottoman dominance was fought by Muslims and Christians across five theaters from the Balkans to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, from Persia to Russia. But this is not merely the…

  18. Fort Stanwix and the Forgotten Revolutionary War Siege That Convinced France to Help the US

    · 42 min

    After a series of military defeats over the winter of 1776–1777, British military leaders developed a bold plan to gain control of the Hudson River and divide New England from the rest of the colonies. Three armies…

  19. Enough is Enuf, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell

    · 39 min

    No language is as inconsistent in spelling and pronunciation as English. Kernel and colonel rhyme, but read changes based on past or present tense. Ough has many pronunciations: ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (drought), ‘uff’…

  20. Did Haiti’s First and Last King Squander the Revolution or Succeed in Underappreciated Ways?

    · 51 min

    Slave, revolutionary, king, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow the British in North…

  21. What Ancient Greeks and Victorian Explorers Thought Was at the North Pole

    · 42 min

    The North Pole looms large in our collective psyche—the ultimate Otherland in a world mapped and traversed. It is the center of our planet’s rotation, and its sub-zero temperatures and strange year of one sunset and…

  22. Nothing Healed America’s Wounds After the Civil War Like Baseball

    · 51 min

    The nineteenth century was a time of rapid growth and development for the game of “base ball,” and players George Wright and Albert Spalding were right in the thick of it. These two young men, the first superstars of…

  23. How an 1870 Murder Created San Francisco

    · 38 min

    Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck.…

  24. Failed Futures: If Alexander The Great Hadn’t Died, He Might Have Conquered Europe, Circumnavigated Africa, and Built His Own Silk Road

    · 34 min

    And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer. That’s a quote from Hans Gruber in Die Hard, which is a very convoluted paraphrase from Plutarch’s essay collection Moralia. There’s plenty of truth in…

  25. Why the Anabasis is the Second-Most Influential Greek Epic (After Homer’s Works)

    · 49 min

    Imagine being stranded thousands of miles deep in enemy territory with 10,000 soldiers, no allies, no clear way home, and the only means of escape was by foot. This was the predicament faced by Xenophon and the Greek…

  26. The American Revolution Would Have Been Lost Without a Ragtag Fleet of Thousands of Privateers

    · 1 h 00 min

    Privateers were a cross between an enlisted sailor and an outright pirate. But they were crucial in winning the Revolutionary War. As John Lehman, former secretary of the navy under President Ronald Reagan, observed,…

  27. Did Lincoln Save Global Democracy or Undermine It Using Wartime Powers?

    · 57 min

    Did Abraham Lincoln preserve democracy during the Civil War, or did he endanger it in the process? To explore this paradox, we’re joined by renowned historian and Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo, author of Our Ancient…

  28. The 1541 Spanish Expedition Down the Amazon to Find the Imaginary “El Dorado” and Valley of Cinnamon

    · 41 min

    As Spanish conquistators slowly moved through Latin America, they encountered levels of wealth that were unimaginable. Most famously, Incan Emperor Atahualpa was captured by Francisco Pizarro and paid a ransom of a…

  29. Everyday Life for the 500K German POWs House in America During World War Two

    · 1 h 03 min

    During World War II, approximately half a million German prisoners of war were held in the United States, housed in 700 camps spread across the country, from Florida to Maine. These POWs were treated in accordance with…

  30. The Arsenal of Democracy: How the Revolver and Repeating Rifle Democratized Gun Ownership and Armed the United States

    · 56 min

    The United States is the most heavily armed nation in the world, with an estimated 400 million guns in private hands. But few know that this legacy can be directly traced back to a handful of gunmakers who worked in…

  31. Owning Land Was The Best – and Usually Only – Way to Be Rich in the Ancient World

    · 44 min

    For millennia, humans eked out survival atop the surface of the Earth and land had no unique value. Eventually, however, humans turned land into an advantage. For several thousand years, control of land meant control…

  32. Benjamin Franklin – In the 200 Years After His Death – Funded New Businesses, Supported Boston and Philadelphia, and Play Pranks

    · 38 min

    When Benjamin Franklin died on April 12, 1790, he made a final bet on the future of the United States -- a gift of 2,000 pounds to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to…

  33. When American Gilded Elite Bought Up English Country Houses, It Create an Epic Transatlantic Clash of Cultures

    · 44 min

    For generations, the great palaces of Britain were home to living histories, noble families that had reigned for centuries. But by the end of the nineteenth century, members of elite society found themselves, for the…

  34. The Untold History of Earth: Hobbits Really Existed, Dinosaurs Had Feathers, and Yetis Roamed Our Planet

    · 1 h 09 min

    The Old English poem Beowulf is a vital source of information on history, language, story and belief from the darkest of the Dark Ages. Only one copy is known to exist (it’s in the British Library), and that was…

  35. How Did Gold Beat Out Every Other Precious Metal To Become Humanity’s Dominant Currency For the Last 2,600 Years?

    · 36 min

    Why has gold reigned as the world’s go-to precious metal for over 2,600 years? It’s not as rare as platinum, durable as diamonds, or malleable as copper. What is it about this metal that made it the standard unit of…

  36. The 160-Minute Race to Save the Titanic

    · 47 min

    One hundred and sixty minutes. That is all the time rescuers would have before the largest ship in the world slipped beneath the icy Atlantic. There was amazing heroism and astounding incompetence against the backdrop…

  37. 200 Years Before the French Revolution, German Peasants Tried to Overthrow The Holy Roman Empire

    · 54 min

    The German Peasants’ War of 1524-1525 was the largest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. Somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants—roughly 2% of the male population—were…

  38. What the Middle Ages Can Teach Us About Pandemics, Mass Migration, and Tech Disruption

    · 53 min

    The medieval world – for all its plagues, papal indulgences, castles, and inquisition trials – has much in common with ours. People living the Middle Ages dealt with deadly pandemicsmass migration, and controversial…

  39. Did Orson Welles’s 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast Really Cause a Mass Panic?

    · 48 min

    On a warm Halloween Eve, October 30, 1938, during a broadcast of H G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Orson Welles held his hands up for radio silence in the CBS studio in New York City while millions of people ran out into…

  40. A Talk With The Polar Geographer Who Discovered Shackleton’s Endurance Under 10,000 ft of Frozen Water

    · 43 min

    On August 1, 1914, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton and his crew sailed from England, set on making history as the first to cross Antarctica. Their ship never returned from her maiden voyage. On November 22,…

  41. The Founding Fathers Were 20 and 30-Somethings. Why Is America Now a Gerontocracy?

    · 42 min

    A house on the Florida coast. An assisted living program. A lively retirement community. Medicare. Our modern concept of old age—and even the idea of old age as a distinct stage of life—are products of our recent past.…

  42. A Pre-WWI French Philosopher Was More Popular Than Elvis and Possibly Entered the US Into the Great War

    · 43 min

    In New York City, 1913, French philosopher Henri Bergson gave a lecture at Columbia University, resulting in fanfare, traffic jams, and even fainting spells among the thousands of people clamoring for a seat. But this…

  43. While Starving at Besieged Leningrad, Scientists Hid Drought-Resistant Crop Seeds That Could Prevent Future Famines

    · 41 min

    In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—and began the longest blockade in recorded history, one that would ultimately claim the lives of nearly three-quarters of…

  44. Surviving Nearly 2 Years of Shipwreck on a South Pacific Island in the 1880s

    · 43 min

    Today, half of the world’s population lives around the Pacific Rim. This ocean has been the crossroads of international travel, trade, and commerce for at least 500 years. The economy was driven by workers in rickety…

  45. How Did 450 Boers Defeat 15,000 Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838?

    · 49 min

    By the 1830s, the Zulu kingdom was consolidating its power as the strongest African polity in the south-east, but was under growing pressure from British traders and hunters on the coast, and descendants of the early…

  46. Key Battles of the Barbary Wars, Episode 9: The End of North African Piracy and the Beginning of American Global Naval Hegemony

    · 59 min

    In this final episode of our series on the Barbary Wars, we look at the fates of the Barbary States. After 1815, the Barbary States lost their independence, with Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco succumbing to…

  47. When Did Americans Become Americans? 1945, 1865, 1787, or 1776?

    · 47 min

    When news reached Parliament of the Boston radicals’ destruction of the Royal East India Company’s tea, it passed the Coercive Acts, a collection of punitive measures designed to rein in that insubordinate seaport…

  48. Key Battles of the Barbary Wars, Episode 8: The Second Barbary War (1815)

    · 39 min

    The conclusion of the War of 1812 elevated America's naval reputation and marked the start of the "Era of Good Feelings," a period of national pride. With peace restored, President Madison redirected attention to the…

  49. How Much of a Nation’s Fate is Bound Up In Its Geography?

    · 42 min

    Napoleon Bonaparte is reported to have said. “The policies of all powers are inherent in their geography. Is he correct? How much does geography determine the character of a nation in its politics and culture? To…

  50. Key Battles of the Barbary War, Episode 7: An Uneasy Peace -- The Interbellum Period and the War of 1812

    · 44 min

    The 1807 Treaty with Tripoli ended the First Barbary War, allowing American ships to sail freely in the Mediterranean without tribute payments. This victory spurred national pride, with many Americans viewing the war…

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