The Dave Bowman Show

The Dave Bowman Show

After relocating to the PACNORWEST, Dave continues his look at the news, politics, trends, history, religion, sports and even entertainment of the day...

Episodes

January 2, 2026 5 mins
Today we are talking about something older than empires and more stubborn than forgetting. It is the simple act of remembering the people history does not bother to name. Long before textbooks and archives, people poured out libations. Wine, oil, water, a small offering tipped onto the ground to say someone lived, someone mattered, someone was not invisible. We tend to think of that as a strange ancient habit. But the question b...
Mark as Played
Good evening and welcome to the *What The Frock* New Year’s Eve special, an annual ritual in which we pause, take stock, raise a glass, and verify that the planet is still here. It is. We checked. Tonight’s episode is titled **AI Did NOT Destroy The World… This Year, Anyway…**, which is both a statement of fact and a quiet expression of surprise. For twelve months we were promised doom by headline, apocalypse by algorithm, and rep...
Mark as Played
The USS George C. Marshall was never built to be admired. She was built to be trusted. Like her namesake, she existed for moments when patience mattered more than drama and restraint mattered more than applause. In the Cold War Navy, that was not a slogan. It was a job description.
Mark as Played
December 31, 2025 6 mins
George Catlett Marshall is one of those figures whose importance becomes clearer the longer one studies him and more puzzling the more one tries to summarize him neatly. He does not lend himself to slogans or cinematic shorthand. There is no single moment that captures him, no battlefield pose that defines his legacy. Instead there is a long accumulation of decisions, habits, and silences that, taken together, helped shape the Amer...
Mark as Played
December 30, 2025 4 mins
Granada in the winter of 1066 was not supposed to end like this. If you had asked a court poet, a tax collector, or a Jewish merchant counting bolts of cloth in the souk, they would have told you that the age was precarious but workable, dangerous but dazzling. Al-Andalus still wore the reputation of refinement like a borrowed robe, a land where Arabic verse sparkled, Jewish scholarship flourished, and Christian kingdoms loomed at ...
Mark as Played
December 29, 2025 5 mins
December 29, 1876, did not begin as a legend. It began as weather, the sort of Lake Erie weather that has always made honest people glance at the window and reconsider their plans. A blizzard rolled in with the hard confidence of something older than railroads, older than schedules, older than the idea that human beings can bargain with nature if they print the timetable in bold type. Snow came in sheets, wind drove it sideways, an...
Mark as Played
December 28, 2025 54 mins
There are moments in the modern age when one must pause, stare into the middle distance, and ask a question of profound existential importance. Not questions like “Why are we here?” or “Is there life on other planets?” but the truly unsettling ones. Questions such as, “Why does my phone know what I want before I do?” and “When did Christmas become a logistics problem?”
Mark as Played
The USS Woodrow Wilson belonged to a generation of submarines that were never meant to be seen, remembered, or celebrated in the usual way. She was built to disappear, to wait, and to make catastrophe unnecessary by making it inevitable in theory. As a Lafayette-class fleet ballistic missile submarine, she formed part of the original “Forty-One for Freedom,” the silent backbone of America’s sea-based nuclear deterrent during the mo...
Mark as Played
December 28, 2025 5 mins
The first thing to understand about Woodrow Wilson is that he never stopped believing he was the smartest man in the room, and he never doubted that this was a public service. Wilson did not enter politics the way most politicians do, by compromise, instinct, or appetite for power. He entered it as a man convinced that history itself had been waiting for a proper explanation, and that explanation had finally arrived wearing pince-n...
Mark as Played
December 27, 2025 6 mins
In the early winter of 1521, the Protestant Reformation faced a danger far more unsettling than popes or emperors. Its greatest threat came from men who claimed to speak for God directly. With Martin Luther in hiding and Wittenberg without its anchor, three radical preachers arrived from Zwickau insisting that Scripture was no longer enough. The Spirit, they said, spoke straight to them, in visions, certainty, and fire. This episod...
Mark as Played
December 25, 2025 5 mins
The morning of December 26, 1825 (O.S.), opened in St. Petersburg the way Russian winter mornings often do, with cold that does not so much bite as settle in and refuse to leave. Senate Square lay hard and white under the sky, the Neva locked beneath ice thick enough to bear cannon and men, or so it seemed until it did not. By midmorning, roughly three thousand soldiers stood assembled in a rigid square, boots planted, muskets idle...
Mark as Played
December 25, 2025 4 mins
Every nation has a moment when the story almost ends. For the American Revolution, that moment came in December of 1776. The army was shrinking. The government was running. The public was tired. Even George Washington thought the game might be nearly up. What followed was not a miracle and not a legend. It was a gamble made by exhausted men in freezing darkness, guided by bad maps, worse weather, and a single hard truth. If this fa...
Mark as Played
December 24, 2025 4 mins
Christmas Eve, 1944. The war is supposed to be turning in the Allies’ favor. The lights of France are visible from the deck. Home feels close enough to imagine. Then a single torpedo reminds everyone that war does not care about calendars, carols, or confidence. Tonight on Dave Does History, we are telling the story of the SS Léopoldville, a troopship sunk just five and a half miles from safety, taking nearly eight hundred America...
Mark as Played
December 23, 2025 52 mins
Every December we return to A Christmas Carol the way we return to familiar music. We know the notes. We know the ending. We know exactly how it is supposed to make us feel. And that is precisely the problem. In this episode of Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, we pull the story back out of its comfortable holiday wrapping and look at what Dickens was actually doing in 1843. This was not a bedtime story. It was a warning. Dic...
Mark as Played
December 21, 2025 58 mins
Welcome to *What the Frock*, where the holiday cheer comes with footnotes and the goodwill is thoroughly cross examined. In this episode, Dave and Rod wander straight into Victorian England, a place absolutely convinced it had solved humanity, morality, and the correct volume at which joy should be expressed. Spoiler alert, it had not. What starts as a simple question, why Americans say “Merry Christmas” while Brits insist on “Hap...
Mark as Played
December 21, 2025 5 mins
On the morning of December 21, 1826, a flag went up over the Old Stone Fort at Nacogdoches. It was red over white, roughly made, stitched by hands more accustomed to frontier repairs than nation building. It did not rise to the sound of drums or cannon. It was hauled up on a wooden pole by men who looked over their shoulders as often as they looked at their handiwork. Beneath it stood a small crowd, some curious, some committed, mo...
Mark as Played
December 19, 2025 4 mins
The image is familiar even if the story behind it is not. A fighter plane with shark teeth painted on its nose, a grin aimed straight at history. For decades that image has stood in for courage, swagger, and American defiance before Pearl Harbor. But the real story of the Flying Tigers is stranger, rougher, and far more human than the legend suggests. This episode of Dave Does History walks into that space carefully. Not to knock ...
Mark as Played
December 19, 2025 4 mins
The winter encampment that Americans reflexively call “Valley Forge” has become a kind of historical shorthand, a single frozen tableau where virtue shivers nobly and emerges purified. That picture is comforting, and like most comforting pictures, it is incomplete. The army that staggered into Valley Forge in December 1777 had been forming, failing, adapting, and nearly coming apart since the summer of 1775. Valley Forge was not th...
Mark as Played
December 18, 2025 4 mins
There are winters when history stands very still, almost as if the world is bracing for something it already knows it cannot avoid. The winter of 1860 felt like that. One can imagine the heavy December air in Washington settling over the capital like a thick blanket that even the most stubborn stove fires could not quite chase away. The legislators walked through the corridors with forced conversations and polite nods, but there wa...
Mark as Played
December 17, 2025 6 mins
Rome was not a civilization that believed in accidents. It believed in structure, ritual, and the careful management of human behavior. When Romans celebrated Saturnalia each December, they were not indulging in a lapse of discipline. They were engaging in something older, stranger, and far more deliberate. Saturnalia was not a party that got out of hand. It was a pressure release designed by people who understood that a society he...
Mark as Played

Popular Podcasts

    If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

    Dateline NBC

    Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

    The Burden

    The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.

    SmartLess

    "SmartLess" with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, & Will Arnett is a podcast that connects and unites people from all walks of life to learn about shared experiences through thoughtful dialogue and organic hilarity. A nice surprise: in each episode of SmartLess, one of the hosts reveals his mystery guest to the other two. What ensues is a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the SmartLess mind. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of SmartLess ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.

    The Breakfast Club

    The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!

Advertise With Us
Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2026 iHeartMedia, Inc.