History Unplugged Podcast

Parthenon
  • 4.2 (195)
  • History
  • Updated Weekly

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.

  1. A Day at the Gladiatorial Games: Beast Hunts, Mass Slaughter, and Flooding the Colosseum to Reenact Roman Naval Battles

    2 hrs ago

    A Day at the Gladiatorial Games: Beast Hunts, Mass Slaughter, and Flooding the Colosseum to Reenact Roman Naval Battles

    A gladiator named Diodorus defeated his opponent Demetrius in the arena, accepted his submission, discarded his own helmet and shield, and reached for the palm branch that marked his victory. Then the referee refused to honor the submission and ordered the fight to continue. Diodorus was killed. His tombstone, which survives, reads: "Murderous Fate and the cunning treachery of the referee killed me, and leaving the light, I have gone to Hades." Another gladiator named Urbicus, who had once spared a defeated opponent and was later killed by that same man in a rematch, left behind the most chilling last words in Roman history: "I advise that he who defeats a man should kill him." Today's guest is Harry Sidebottom, author of *Those Who Are About to Die: A Day in the Life of a Roman Gladiator*. Structured as a single twenty-four-hour cycle from the gladiators' last supper through the morning beast hunts, midday executions, and afternoon combat, Sidebottom's book dismantles almost everything Hollywood has taught us about the arena. We discuss why gladiators were deliberately fattened on barley stew so their subcutaneous fat would produce spectacular bleeding from non-fatal wounds, how Roman senators kept illegally sneaking into gladiatorial schools despite repeated bans stretching across two centuries, why the Colosseum was built on top of Nero's artificial lake using plunder from the sack of Jerusalem, and how Galen pioneered human surgery by first vivisecting a live monkey and then treating wounded gladiators at Pergamum. We also look at why epileptics drank gladiator blood as medicine (and why Roman doctors reluctantly admitted it might work), how twenty-nine Saxon prisoners strangled each other without a rope rather than fight, and why Constantine did not actually abolish gladiatorial combat despite what every Christian source claims. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    52 min
  2. The Black Death’s Global Ripple Effects, and How They Were Felt Outside Europe

    2d ago

    The Black Death’s Global Ripple Effects, and How They Were Felt Outside Europe

    Of the millions of victims of the Black Death, one was a teenager named Joseph ben Meir Abulafia, who died of the plague in Toledo in 1349 alongside his new wife. His tombstone was inscribed as a conversation with the dead: "I am the man who has seen desolation and destruction, blood and pestilence. The days of my youth were cut short suddenly, in the prime of my life." His unnamed mother survived, left alone and childless, her days filled with "bitter weeping." That inscription is one of seventy-six medieval tombstones from Toledo's Jewish cemetery that preserve the most personal voices of history's deadliest pandemic, a catastrophe that killed an estimated 100 million people in six years and whose aftershocks lasted for centuries. Today's guest is Thomas Asbridge, author of The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity's Most Devastating Pandemic. We discuss how a minor Venetian merchant's business papers, preserved by his widow in a convent, reveal that the medieval trade networks which kept cities fed were also purpose-built to spread epidemic disease across thousands of miles. We look at why the Byzantine emperor wrote about his fourteen-year-old son's death with clinical detachment, how a Franciscan intellectual who had questioned whether other worlds existed died carrying holy water through plague-ravaged Messina, and why the only European king killed by the Black Death was besieging Gibraltar with dreams of marching to Jerusalem when the plague found his camp. The pandemic's most devastating long-term consequences were felt not in Europe but in the Muslim world, where the once-invincible Mamluk Empire was broken by recurrent outbreaks and eventually conquered by the Ottomans, and that this forgotten collapse may have been the true hinge point that set the West on its path to global dominance. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    53 min
  3. The Part of the Declaration of Independence Nobody Reads (Grievances Against King George) Is the Part That Actually Mattered

    Jun 18

    The Part of the Declaration of Independence Nobody Reads (Grievances Against King George) Is the Part That Actually Mattered

    On July 9, 1776, a group of American soldiers listened to the Declaration of Independence read aloud in New York City, then rushed down Broadway and spent several minutes prying a two-ton golden equestrian statue of King George III off its pedestal on Bowling Green. They hacked off the head, sent the body to a Connecticut foundry, and melted it into exactly 42,088 bullets, a number chosen deliberately to evoke the British revolutions of 1642 and 1688. On the road to the foundry, loyalist neighbors in Wilton crept out at night and stole pieces of the statue, burying them in their yards as a quiet counter-protest. Those fragments stayed hidden for centuries until treasure hunters with metal detectors dug them up. Today's guest is Robert G. Parkinson, author of Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence. We look at the 27 grievances that make up the body of the Declaration, the section that Jefferson, Congress, and the British government all considered the essential part of the document but that modern Americans almost never read. We discuss how the very first grievance is secretly about the king vetoing Virginia's attempt to curtail the slave trade, and that the patriots saw themselves not as radical innovators but as the heirs of 1688, conducting the third British revolution in 135 years, and that the Declaration was written not in a moment of triumph but during nine weeks of almost unbelievable catastrophe. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    49 min
  4. Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish–Muslim Relations

    Jun 16

    Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish–Muslim Relations

    For more than 1400 years, the history of Jewish and Muslim engagement has been a complex story of cooperation and conflict. The best known events are hostile encounters (like the 1066 Granada massacre or modern Arab-Israeli wars), they’ve had a multifaceted relationship, from Muhammad’s dealings with Jewish tribes in Arabia in the 600s, Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II sending his navy to rescue Jews from the 1492 expulsion from Spain, to the contemporary tensions currently unfolding in the Middle East. Today’s guest is Marc David Baer: Author of “Children of Abraham:   The 1,400-Year History of Jewish–Muslim Relations.” We discuss how Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East and Europe, more often in cooperation than in conflict, for more than a millennium. When Islam emerged in the seventh century, Muslims and Jews were bound by shared religious tenets and common cultural practices, and for centuries afterward, they were often allies. We also discuss Muslim warriors fighting for a medieval Turkish Jewish kingdom on the Caspian Sea, Jewish viziers leading the Muslim sultan’s troops in Spain, and Jewish literary lights and political party leaders in modern Egypt and Iraq. At the same time, religious tolerance did not mean a lack of hierarchy and discrimination. For most of history, Muslims held power over Jews and Islam was promoted as the superior religion. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    57 min
  5. How 10 Whalers Survived Three Years Shipwrecked in the South Pacific

    Jun 11

    How 10 Whalers Survived Three Years Shipwrecked in the South Pacific

    In 1832, a New Bedford whaleship called the Mentor struck a reef in the remote Pacific archipelago of Palau. The tiny, 100-foot-long ship began sinking immediately, and the 22 men who made up its crew were thrown into one of the most extraordinary survival ordeals in American maritime history. Ten men vanished the night of the wreck and were never seen again. The survivors found themselves stranded among island peoples with their own complex politics, rival confederations, and fifty years of complicated history with Western ships that the castaways knew nothing about. What followed was a story of captivity, starvation, forced tattooing, a rescue that made everything worse, and a years-long scramble across islands and ocean before the last survivors finally made it home. Today's guest is Eric Jay Dolin, author of "The Wreck of the Mentor." We untangle one of the great forgotten stories of the Age of Sail, and explore how fifty years of British guns and gunboat diplomacy warped Palauan politics long before the Mentor arrived, why the men who attacked the castaways with war clubs also cooked them lavish feasts and wept for their dead, and how crewman Horace Holden kept himself alive on a famine-stricken island when almost everything pointed toward death. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    54 min
  6. The Nobels Built Russia’s Oil Industry, Invented Dynamite and the Oil Tanker, But Were Still Crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution

    Jun 9

    The Nobels Built Russia’s Oil Industry, Invented Dynamite and the Oil Tanker, But Were Still Crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution

    The Nobel family (which are the namesake of the Nobel prize), had a rags-to-riches story bigger than the Rockefellers or Morgans. The Nobel patriarch Emanuel fled debtor’s prison  in 1837. He then travelled east and built a foundation for the largest oil empire in Russian history. Three generations of Nobels invented the world's first oil tanker, stopped the Royal Navy cold with undersea mines during the Crimean War, and outmaneuvered both Rockefeller and the Rothschilds in the world's first great corporate oil war. Then the Bolsheviks arrived. Lenin nationalized everything overnight, Stalin personally targeted the family patriarch for arrest, and the man who quietly made the Nobel Prize a reality had to escape revolutionary Russia in a horse-drawn cart wearing a disguise, with forged papers and three borrowed children to complete the ruse. It is one of the great lost stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, overshadowing the very prizes that bear the family name. Today's guest is Douglas Brunt, author of The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel. We discuss how capitalism and Marxism grew up in the same Russian cities before their catastrophic collision, why Emanuel Nobel defied the King of Sweden to ensure his uncle Alfred's will was honored, and what it actually looked like when Lenin's pen stroke erased three generations of Nobel engineering genius in a single day. We explore this story of oil, revolution, and a dynasty that fueled the world and then vanished. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    45 min
  7. The American Revolution Went Way Outside of America, Pulling in Caribbean Colonies, African Forts, and Chinese Trading Houses

    Jun 4

    The American Revolution Went Way Outside of America, Pulling in Caribbean Colonies, African Forts, and Chinese Trading Houses

    The thirteen colonies that became the United States were just half of the British colonies that existed in the 18th century. The empire stretched from New England, south to Georgia and Florida and the islands of the West Indies, east to India, Scotland, and Ireland, and south again to British forts on the West coast of Africa. Because of this, the revolution of 1776 wasn’t isolated to the North American eastern seaboard. It was a world-historical crisis that swept up American Indian nations, Caribbean islands, West African forts, Indian cities, Scottish drawing rooms, German principalities, Cuban harbors, Chinese trading houses, and a fledgling colony in Sierra Leone. The result is a Revolution that was on the one hand a political struggle for the 13 colonies, but it was also a genuinely global catastrophe in which Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans, German soldiers, French philosophes, Caribbean planters, Indian merchants, and Spanish generals all fought for their own competing visions of what "freedom" actually meant. Today’s guest is Sarah Pearsall, author of Freedom Round the Globe. We see how the fight for liberty went far outside the borders of the American colonies. When the British Parliament imposed the Stamp Act in 1765, the protests and violent crowd actions that erupted were not confined to Boston or Virginia,  they broke out with equal fury in St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and other Caribbean colonies. But they chose to stay loyal because they feared slave uprisings more than they resented Parliament. The French alliance that saved American independence at Yorktown drove France itself toward bankruptcy and revolution. And there were at least two would-be fourteenth colonies (British Florida and Quebec) courted by Americans but believed their fortunes were better served in other places than the Revolution. The Revolution was not a contained colonial rebellion. It was a world war, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783 settled the claims of dozens of nations, most of whom had nothing to do with the thirteen colonies. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    53 min
  8. Ford’s Auto Domination Came From a 1909 Race Across America Through Mud-Choked Roads

    Jun 2

    Ford’s Auto Domination Came From a 1909 Race Across America Through Mud-Choked Roads

    In June 1909, five automobiles lined up in front of New York's City Hall to attempt something no car had ever done: drive all the way to Seattle. The Ocean-to-Ocean Race was supposed to be a publicity stunt for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, but it became something far more consequential,  a 4,100-mile brawl through gumbo mud, quicksand, flooded rivers, and snow-choked mountain passes that would help launch the Model T, expose the wretched state of America's roads, and change the trajectory of the automobile industry forever. Henry Ford entered two stripped-down Model Ts priced at $850 against rivals costing five to ten times as much, betting his company's future on the proposition that a lightweight, affordable car could outrun and outlast them all. Today’s guest is Eric Moskowitz, author of The Hardest, Longest Race. We see the real story is far messier than Ford's victory narrative. The Shawmut Motor Company,  a tiny Boston outfit that had lost everything in a factory fire and entered the race as a last-ditch gamble to survive,  battled the Fords neck and neck across twelve states, only to be sabotaged by bribed ferrymen, blocked by armed guards at river crossings, and ultimately cheated by an illegal engine swap that Ford concealed until a small-town fraud investigator from Idaho uncovered the shipping receipts. The Automobile Club of America stripped Ford of the win and awarded the trophy to the Shawmut, but by then nobody was listening, Ford's dealers had already papered the country with victory ads, and the Shawmut Motor Company was dead. We see that the century of the automobile had the most unlikely origin story. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    53 min
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4.2
out of 5
195 Ratings

About

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.

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