History Unplugged Podcast

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 across the neck of Manchuria to create a radioactive barrier and halt Chinese and North Korean advances. This would have killed millions and almost definitely brought the Soviet Union into full-scale war against the Unite...

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). Governments around the world self-consciously copy Roman buildings and create governments that copy the imperial senate.  Every self-aggrandizing leader has compared himself to Caesar, including those with a stro...

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 facilitated the creation of the Silk Road (which could arguably be called the “Horse Road”) since China largely built it to enable the purchase of millions of horses to fight its nomadic neighbors to the north. &nb...

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 rural farmers and opportunists into underground entrepreneurs who supplied speakeasies. But this new economy didn’t disappear after Prohibition was repealed. If anything, it became stronger, at least i...

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 environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of languages, cultures, and livelihoods. But beyond ready-made images of exoticism and squal...

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 escapes took place not by land but by sea.

William Grimes escaped slavery in 1815 by stowing away in a cotton bale on a ship from Savannah to New York, enduring days without food or water before settling in Connecticut...

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 one-dimensional interpretation: the war was a noble crusade against fascism, creating a convenient parable about good and evil. But this depiction ignores a far messier reality. But what went through the minds of the actual h...

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 colonies against Britain. Virginia, the largest, wealthiest, and most populous province in British North America, was led by Lord Dunmore, who counted George Washington as his close friend. But the Scottish earl lacked...

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 have ever known.”

These were the words of the young Marines training to be among the first U.S. troops to enter the Second World War—and the Ma...

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 the Civil War in the 1860s, most soldiers who perished died not on the battlefield but of infected wounds, typhoid, and other diseases. Twenty years later, the outcome might have been different, following one of the m...

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 discovery of radioactivity, setting in motion a series of remarkable and horrifying events. By the early 20th century, a brilliant group of scientists—including Ernest Rutherford, Leo Szilard, Enrico Ferm...

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 required Superfortresses to attack their targets individually, without a formation or escorting fighters for protection. Despite this, Japanese night fighters proved unable to stop the B-29s. This success was a testament ...

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 was able to wield it with lethal effect and with far more effective equipment than before. By contrast, the Wehrmacht had commenced a slow process of decline after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler became increas...

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 for a civilization of any size, whether Chicen Itza in the Mayan Empire or the holy sites of Mecca?

To explore this is today’s guest, Kathryn Hurlock, author of “Holy Places: How Pilgrimages Changed ...

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 England’s growing conditions, there was an English settlement in Bermuda that was wealthier, larger, and more prosperous. It was established in 1612 on an island less than one square mile but grew to the heart of...

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 with a dispute over a pig. From here, it escalated from minor disagreements to violent encounters that spanned decades, nearly sparking a war between the two states.

Today’s guest is Jennifer Bennie, host of the Wa...

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 globe, emigrating to new countries and continents. Less than fifty years after the union of Ireland with the rest of Great Britain, the newly formed United Kingdom—the most powerful country in the ninetee...

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 to Reverend John Rankin’s home for hope. To the slaveholders they fled from, Rankin’s activities as a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad invoked rage. Mobs often pelted Rankin with eggs and...

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 products, spreading from Pennsylvania to England, Italy, and beyond. It was more than just a material object, however—it was also a hypothesis. Franklin was proposing that, armed with science, he could invent ...