Dave Does History

On December 21, 1826, a small and easily forgotten flag rose over the Old Stone Fort at Nacogdoches. It was red over white, roughly sewn, and carried more ambition than support. The men who raised it believed they had created a nation. They called it the Republic of Fredonia.

It would last barely a month.

Most people have never heard of Fredonia, and that is understandable. It failed quickly, collapsed quietly, and left no heroic las...

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 th...

When people hear the words Valley Forge, they tend to think they already know the story. Snow, suffering, and a noble army that somehow emerges purified on the other side. It is a powerful image, and like many powerful images, it hides as much as it reveals.

The winter at Valley Forge was not the beginning of the Continental Army’s struggle, and it was not the worst winter of the war. It was the moment when years of failure, improvi...

Valley Forge has become a kind of historical shorthand. Say the name and people picture snow, suffering, and noble endurance, as if the American Army was tested once, passed the test, and emerged fully formed. That story is comforting. It is also incomplete.

What happened at Valley Forge did not begin in the winter of 1777, and it did not end when the army marched out in June of 1778. This was the turning point of a much longer stru...

The winter of 1860 arrived with a sense of pressure that no one in Washington could quite hide. The Union was splintering. South Carolina had taken the first step toward secession, and other states were close behind. The halls of Congress echoed with the polite conversations of people who knew that something far larger than politics was beginning to slip out of their control. It was a moment when the old tools of negotiation were b...

Rome was built on discipline, hierarchy, and an unshakable belief in order. Every person had a place, every rule had weight, and public life was governed by ritual and restraint. It was not a society designed for comfort. It was designed for control.

And yet, once a year, Rome deliberately stepped away from its own rules.

Saturnalia was the moment when the empire loosened its grip. Masters served slaves. Gambling became legal. The to...

This week on Dave Does History, we step backward before we move forward. Long before July of 1776, long before Jefferson put pen to parchment, there was another moment when ordinary people decided that silence was no longer an option. They wrote their grievances down and dared the system to listen.

In this episode of Liberty 250, we travel to England in December of 1640, to the Root and Branch Petition, a document most Americans hav...

The ice cream cone feels eternal. It feels like something that has always existed, as if summer itself would collapse without it. We hold one in our hand and never stop to wonder who decided that ice cream should be portable, edible all the way to the last bite, and slightly dangerous if you hesitate.

Most people know the legend. The hot day at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The ice cream vendor who ran out of dishes. The waffle m...

There are moments in history when the past feels close enough to touch, as if the air still carries the weight of decisions made by men who believed honor was worth more than life. The story of the forty seven ronin is one of those moments. It begins in a peaceful Japan where samurai were expected to follow rules more often than battlefields, and it ends on a winter night when a group of loyal retainers chose to restore balance in ...

Nanking in 1937 is one of those moments when history forces us to look at the world without any comforting illusions. A capital city stood in the path of a modern army that believed its victory was inevitable and that its anger was justified. The result was a collapse that left civilians and soldiers trapped together inside a city that could not protect them.

When the Japanese army entered Nanking, the violence that followed reveale...

The story of the Root and Branch Petition begins with a crowd of ordinary Londoners who had finally reached the limits of their patience. In December 1640 they walked to Westminster with a document that called for the complete removal of the bishops and every office connected to them. They believed the Church had grown tangled, corrupt, and dangerous, and they wanted the whole system pulled out by the roots. It was a bold request, ...

Indiana entered the Union on a cold December day in 1816, but its story did not begin with the signing of a document in Washington. It began in the quiet rise of ancient mounds, in the footsteps of hunters along the White River, and in the long echo of cultures that shaped the land long before anyone called it a state. By the time Congress approved Indiana’s admission, the region had already lived through French traders, British am...

The loss of Force Z on December 10, 1941 stands as one of those moments when history shifts so sharply that everyone involved feels the ground tilt beneath them. Two British capital ships, proud and imposing in silhouette, sailed into a world that had already left them behind. They were sent out in the hope that tradition might still hold the line in the Pacific. Instead, they found a sky that had become the real battlefield and an...

There are moments in the American story that do not bother with ceremony. They do not unfurl themselves across years or announce their importance with the loud clatter of famous names. Instead, they arrive in the quiet places, on narrow roads and wooden bridges, carried by men who had very little and stood their ground anyway. The Battle of Great Bridge is one of those moments. It passed in less than an hour on a cold December morn...

There are moments in the Second World War that feel almost too strange to be true. Operation Frankton is one of them. It began with a handful of Royal Marines climbing out of a submarine with collapsible canoes and a plan that sounded like something dreamed up by a tired novelist who had run out of sensible ideas. Their mission was to paddle more than seventy miles through German controlled waters, slip into Bordeaux, and cripple t...

There are moments when history slips out of dusty books and shows up in places no one expects. In 1956 it arrived in a pool in Melbourne during what should have been an ordinary Olympic water polo match. Hungary had just been crushed by the Soviet Union. Tanks rolled through Budapest. Thousands fled. Hope burned bright for a moment, then collapsed under heavy treads. Into that grief stepped a team of young Hungarian athletes who fo...

George Armstrong Custer has lived in the American imagination for far longer than he lived on the American frontier. A century and a half after his death on a Montana hillside, he still strides through our history with that unmistakable blend of bravado, brilliance, and baffling judgment. He was born on December 5, 1839, in a quiet Ohio town that could not have known it was sending a future icon into the world. By the time he fell ...

There are moments in military history when a decision is made so quickly and with such instinctive devotion that it feels almost otherworldly, as if a crack opened in the ordinary fabric of events and revealed what human beings can be at their very best. In the frozen chaos of the Chosin Reservoir, on a December afternoon in 1950, an unassuming pilot from Massachusetts made one of those decisions. The United States Navy had seen co...

The election of 1800 is one of those moments that reminds us how fragile the American experiment once was and how easily it could have cracked under pressure. It was a year filled with anger, suspicion, and political maneuvering that pushed the young republic to a breaking point. Yet it also became the first real proof that power in the United States could shift peacefully, even when the factions involved could hardly stand the sig...