History Unplugged Podcast

Parthenon
Parthenon
  • 4.2 (3.9K)
  • History
  • 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. 22h ago

    Was Robin Hood Actually an Anglo-Saxon Hitman

    Contrary to popular belief, Robin Hood may not have been the merry medieval outlaw of Sherwood Forest. Rather, a look at real historical figures who inspired the legend are narrowed down to the most unlikely suspect: an Anglo-Saxon hitman who may have assassinated the King of England.Today’s guest, Peter Staveley, proposes that Robin Hood lived during the time of William II (near the time of the Norman conquest of England in 1066), rather than Richard I and Prince John of the late 1100s. He argues that Robin was responsible for the death of William II, also known as Rufus, in what was long considered a hunting accident in the New Forest in 1100. This act conveniently paved the way for William’s brother to ascend the throne as Henry I. Staveley places Robin deep within the geography of South Yorkshire, with strong ties to historic Hallamshire, Loxley, Bradfield, and Ecclesfield, challenging the traditional narrative and the long-held association with Nottingham.We explore how Yorkshire, particularly Sheffield, might reclaim the legacy of Robin Hood from Nottingham and reveal the true, rougher man behind the legend.Staveley is author of “Robin Unhooded, And the Death of a King.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Was Robin Hood Actually an Anglo-Saxon Hitman

  2. 2d ago

    Andrew Mellon Nearly Ended Big Government Forever. FDR Destroyed Him For It

    When Andrew Mellon arrived in Marion, Ohio, for his interview with President-elect Warren Harding in December 1920, nobody met him at the train station. The third-richest man in America picked up his worn leather valise and his cane and walked a mile down the road to Harding's house, mounted the reinforced front porch where fifty thousand supporters had gathered that summer, and told an aide: "Tell the senator I am here at his bidding. I know he's busy. Whenever he's ready I'm here." Harding appointed him Treasury Secretary. Over the next twelve years, Mellon slashed the top tax rate from 73 percent to 25 percent, balanced the budget, cut the national debt by a third, and was hailed as the greatest treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton. Then the economy crashed, Roosevelt was elected, and everything Mellon had built was turned against him. Today's guest is Greg Steinmetz, author of The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government. We discuss how Roosevelt ordered his attorney general to find dirt on Mellon and build a tax fraud case even though his own advisers told him it was flimsy, why Mellon's father divided the world into "tax payers and tax eaters" and raised his son to believe that the income tax was un-American and immoral, and how the young Roosevelt was a shallow aristocrat who ignored the Triangle Shirtwaist fire until polio taught him what suffering felt like. We look at how Mellon secretly bought twenty-one masterworks from the Soviet Hermitage for $6.6 million and planned to give them to the nation, how the tax case generated 10,000 pages of testimony and was decided in Mellon's favor after he was already dead, and why Roosevelt attended the dedication of the National Gallery that Mellon built and praised his generosity without acknowledging that he had spent four years trying to put the donor in prison. Steinmetz argues that the Roosevelt-Mellon clash was the last serious fight over whether America would be a big-government or small-government country, and that Roosevelt won so completely that no president since, not even Reagan, has seriously reversed the expansion of federal power that Mellon spent his career trying to prevent. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Andrew Mellon Nearly Ended Big Government Forever. FDR Destroyed Him For It

  3. Oct 29

    The Mongols on the High Seas: The Yuan Dynasty's Massive Navy

    Genghis Khan built a formidable land empire, but he never crossed the sea. Yet by the time his grandson Kublai Khan had defeated the last vestiges of the Song empire and established the Yuan dynasty in 1279, the Mongols controlled the most powerful navy in the world. How did a nomad come to conquer China and master the sea?  Kublai Khan is one of history's most fascinating characters. He brought Islamic mathematicians to his court, where they invented modern cartography and celestial measurement. He transformed the world's largest land mass into a unified, diverse and economically progressive empire, introducing paper money. And, after bitter early setbacks, he transformed China into an outward looking sea-faring empire. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    The Mongols on the High Seas: The Yuan Dynasty's Massive Navy

  4. Oct 27

    Amazon Won’t Destroy Bookshops Because 600 Years of Disruptions Haven’t Either

    In 1784, a young German immigrant named Bernard Quaritch walked into the London office of Henry George Bohn, one of the largest booksellers in England, and told him: "Mr Bohn, you are the first bookseller in England. I mean to become the first bookseller in Europe." Bohn hired him as an assistant. Within a few years, Quaritch had opened his own shop, issued a catalogue called "Quaritch's Cheap Book Circular," and begun bidding at auctions with a ferocity that alarmed every dealer in the room. When a rival complained that Quaritch was watching him at a sale and driving up prices, Quaritch replied: "My opponents I naturally cripple as much as I can at sales." By the time he died, Disraeli and Gladstone were regular customers, his final catalogue ran to 4,066 pages with a 427-page index, and he had fulfilled his promise. Today's guest is Andrew Pettegree, author of The Bookshop: A History. We discuss how almost nothing about the modern bookshop existed before 1800, from window displays to browsing to dust jackets to paying in cash, why itinerant booksellers were burned alive for smuggling Protestant books while elderly women were arrested in London for selling sedition, and how the railway created an entirely new retail model when W. H. Smith opened the first station bookstall at Euston in 1848. Finally, we see Amazon was not the first great disruptor in the history of bookselling but merely the latest in a series stretching back to the printing press itself. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Amazon Won’t Destroy Bookshops Because 600 Years of Disruptions Haven’t Either

  5. Oct 22

    The Ancient World's Best Military Technology Was Constantinople's City Walls

    On May 29, 1453, Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II captured Constantinople, bringing an end to over a thousand years of Byzantine rule. The city's formidable walls, which had stood nearly impenetrable for eight centuries, finally fell to hisforces. With its conquest, Constantinople was declared the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. Some historians marked this conquest as the end of the Middle Ages. Built by Theodosius II to safeguard the "New Rome," these walls stretched from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara, marking the borders of ancient Istanbul. Through centuries of earthquakes, sieges, and urban expansion, their gates and fortifications have endured, preserving the legacy of the city's past. To discuss the world-history importance of this conquest is today’s guest, Alexander Christie-Miller, author of “To The City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    The Ancient World's Best Military Technology Was Constantinople's City Walls

  6. Oct 20

    Edgar Allen Poe’s Self-Sabotage, Early Death, and Path to Becoming America’s Greatest Poet

    In the summer of 1849, Edgar Allan Poe knocked on the door of his friend John Sartain's Philadelphia workshop, wild-eyed and without luggage. He had fled a train in New Jersey after overhearing passengers plotting to kill him. His senses had grown so acute, he said, that he could hear whispers from miles away. He asked for a razor to shave off his mustache so his assassins would not recognize him. Sartain, who was not about to hand his friend a blade, cut it off with scissors instead. That night, Sartain followed Poe on a midnight walk to a rickety platform high above the Schuylkill River and stood between him and the drop, hoping the man beside him could pull himself back from the edge. A few weeks later, Poe was found delirious outside a Baltimore polling place wearing clothes that were not his own. He died four days after that. He was forty years old. Today's guest is Emily Ogden, author of Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe. We discuss how Poe was orphaned at two, raised by a foster father who disinherited him, and married his thirteen-year-old first cousin, whose five-year death from tuberculosis drove the most productive and most desperate period of his career. We look at why Poe’s compulsive self-sabotage, from quitting steady jobs to destroying his chances for a government sinecure by getting drunk and insulting everyone at the party. We see that Poe's genius was to turn toward darkness rather than away from it, and that in doing so he created a space where the rest of us can tolerate ourselves as we actually are: limited, cruel, perverse, and mortal, but still glittering with a heavenly light. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Edgar Allen Poe’s Self-Sabotage, Early Death, and Path to Becoming America’s Greatest Poet

  7. Oct 15

    England's Last Knights Fought in Armor Until the 1640s

    The 17th-century battlefield ushered in a new era, with formed musketeers and pistol-wielding cavalry gradually taking over from the knights and men-at-arms that had dominated the European battlefield. But knights could still be found on these battlefields as late as the 1640s, proudly donning their full-plated armor as their lightly clad compatriots looked on in a mix of envy and confusion. What were they doing fighting 17th-century battles?Today’s guest is Myke Cole, author of “Steel Lobsters: Crown , Commonwealth, and the Last Knights in England.” We examine the life and times of Sir Arthur Hesilrige and his Regiment of Horse, known as "the Lobsters" as they were encased in plate armor. We cover the full history of England's last knights, from the seeds of their creation in Hesilrige’s experience as a young cavalry officer, to their final defeat at Roundway Down in July 1643, and the decision to abandon their armor. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    England's Last Knights Fought in Armor Until the 1640s

  8. Oct 13

    Vikings Went from Christendom’s Terror to Its Best Crusaders

    In 1861, an archaeologist named James Farrer broke into a grass-covered Neolithic tomb on the Orkney Islands expecting to find ancient bones and treasure. The tomb was empty. But its walls were covered with runic inscriptions, dozens of them, carved by Norse visitors centuries earlier. Most were mundane: "Arnfinnr Food carved these runes." Some were lewd: Two were extraordinary: "Crusaders broke into this barrow." "Jerusalem-men broke this mound." The worlds of the Viking north and the Crusades are artificially separated in the popular imagination, but Scandinavians were among the most enthusiastic, brutal, and consequential crusaders in history – working as the shock troops of the first four crusades, and single-handedly converting pagan Baltic Europe to Christianity in a couple of centuries. Today's guest is Thomas Williams, former curator at the British Museum and author of God's Hammer: A History of the Viking Crusades. We discuss how Scandinavians went from being Christianity's most terrifying enemies to some of its most enthusiastic holy warriors within two centuries, why Harald Hardrada served as a Byzantine mercenary across the Mediterranean and may have policed the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem sixty years before the First Crusade, and how Vladimir of Kyiv chose Byzantine Christianity over Islam partly because "drinking is the joy of the Russes." We look at how the Norwegian King Sigurd fought his way through the entire Mediterranean six years after the First Crusade to help capture the port of Sidon and received a splinter of the True Cross, and why the Danish conquest of a pagan temple fortress on the Baltic island of Rügen established the template for centuries of northern holy war. Williams argues that crusading gave the violence that had always defined Norse culture a new legitimacy and a new set of enemies, and that they had found a way to be Vikings and Christians at the same time. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Vikings Went from Christendom’s Terror to Its Best Crusaders
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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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