History Unplugged Podcast

Parthenon
Parthenon
  • 4.2 (3.9K)
  • 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. 13h ago

    The Roman Emperor Who Spread Christianity Most Was Arguably Augustus (Even Though He Died in 14 AD)

    Rome seemed fundamentally opposed to Christianity in the first century. After all, the empire fed Christians to lions, taxed their communities, and crucified their followers, making Rome look like the natural enemy of everything the new faith stood for. Christians returned the hostility in the Book of Revelation, where Rome appears as Babylon, "the Mother of Harlots," a doomed empire whose destruction will clear the way for God's eternal kingdom. But what’s surprising is that many ancient Christians argued the exact opposite. Melito of Sardis told Marcus Aurelius that Christian belief "bloomed among your peoples in the time of Augustus," and Paulus Orosius argued that Augustus was literally an agent of God's will. Rome's political revolution was the necessary precursor to Christianity's sacred revolution: the empire cleared the space for Christ's kingdom on earth. Today's guest is Tim Whitmarsh,  author of Rome's Age of Revolution: Augustus, Empire, and the Making of Christianity. We look at why Rome's iron grip on the earth's surface drove people to seek refuge on the vertical axis and how Christianity supplied the most compelling escape route, why the earliest Christians met in private homes because the emperor had monopolized all public space, and how the Book of Revelation managed to be simultaneously the most anti-Roman and the most Augustan text in the New Testament. Whitmarsh argues that Christianity was "paradoxically Augustan": born from the empire's revolution, shaped by its infrastructure, expressed in its propaganda language, and yet imagining itself as the empire's antithesis, a sacred revolution that outlasted the political one by two thousand years. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    The Roman Emperor Who Spread Christianity Most Was Arguably Augustus (Even Though He Died in 14 AD)

  2. 2d ago

    5,000 Years of Punctuation: Why It Terrified Roman Scholars and Started a Russian Revolution

    The first punctuation mark was a triangular symbol pressed into clay somewhere in Mesopotamia. Spaces between words were unknown for millennia, until a group of Irish monks pioneered them in the eighth century.  Flash forward 1200 years, and in 1905, Moscow's typesetters went on strike because a new regulation said they would be paid by alphabetical letter only, excluding commas, full stops, and the spaces between words. Half the work of setting a page is punctuation. The printers refused. Within weeks, the strike had spread to lawyers, teachers, railway workers, and bakers, and the czar was forced to concede a constitution. Leon Trotsky later said: "A strike which started over punctuation marks ended by felling absolutism." Twelve years later, that constitution was swept away by the revolution the printers had set in motion. Today's guest is Florence Hazrat, author of On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World. We discuss how the first punctuation in human history was a wedge pressed into wet Mesopotamian clay 5,000 years ago alongside the invention of writing itself, why the Romans deliberately refused to use punctuation because interpreting unpunctuated text was a privilege reserved for the elite, and how a misplaced pause in the Gospel of John could deny Christ's divinity, which is why early Christians became obsessed with dots. We look at how Irish monks in the eighth century invented spaces between words and may have changed the course of civilization, and that punctuation has never been neutral: it has hoarded power for elites, preserved orthodoxy for the Church, triggered revolutions, determined whether men lived or died, and is now evolving again as screens replace paper and AI generates text without human hands. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    5,000 Years of Punctuation: Why It Terrified Roman Scholars and Started a Russian Revolution

  3. Sep 17

    Charlemagne Dreamed of a Sword With Four Words on It and They Predicted Exactly How His Dynasty Would Fall

    Late at night in his palace at Aachen, Charlemagne had a dream. A mysterious figure approached him carrying a sword engraved with four Germanic words: raht, radoleiba, nasg, and enti. The meaning seemed immediately clear to the emperor, who fancied himself a philosopher as well as a conqueror. There would be four ages of his dynasty: one of abundance, one of sudden failure, one of great disorder, and then the end. The dream is almost certainly a fiction, composed as a warning to a later generation of kings. But it turned out to be perfectly accurate. Within a century of Charlemagne's death, every word on that sword had come true. Today's guest is James Palmer, author of Charlemagne's Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Carolingian Empire. We discuss how the dynasty's founder, Charles Martel, was an unloved son from a failed relationship whose tomb was later found scorched as if a dragon had been inside, why the Battle of Tours may not have been the civilizational turning point that Gibbon and centuries of historians have claimed, and how Pippin III pulled off the most audacious political revolution of the early Middle Ages by deposing the last Merovingian king and making himself the first Carolingian with papal blessing. We look at how Louis the Pious triggered the empire's collapse by publicly confessing his father's sins, why a twelve-year royal divorce scandal involving ordeal by boiling water and papal excommunication became the greatest crisis of the ninth century, and how Charles the Fat reunited the entire empire for the first time since Charlemagne only to be deposed within three years. Palmer argues that the Carolingians were destroyed not by Vikings, Arabs, or Slavs but by their own impossibly high standards: they built a system that demanded moral perfection from its rulers and then punished every ruler who fell short. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Charlemagne Dreamed of a Sword With Four Words on It and They Predicted Exactly How His Dynasty Would Fall

  4. Sep 15

    Cicero—Rome’s Greatest Orator—Saved the Capital From Insurrection, But Couldn’t Save the Republic From Collapse

    On December 7, 43 BCE, a sixty-three-year-old man was carried in a litter down a woodland path near the Italian coast, fleeing soldiers who had been sent to kill him. When they caught up, he ordered his attendants to set down the litter, put his head out, and offered them his neck. They cut it off, along with the hand that had written the fourteen speeches attacking Mark Antony. The head and hand were nailed to the rostra in the Roman Forum, the speaker's platform from which that same voice had held Rome in thrall for nearly four decades. Antony's wife Fulvia took the severed head in her lap, forced open the mouth, and pierced the tongue with her hairpins. The tongue was the weapon that had wounded her husband most. Today's guest is Catharine Edwards, author of Cicero's Tongue: The Life of Rome's Greatest Orator and the End of the Republic. We discuss how a small-town outsider from Arpinum conquered Roman politics with nothing but his voice and was mocked as an upstart for the rest of his life, why the bloodbath of the Marius-Sulla civil wars traumatized a teenage Cicero so deeply that he spent the next forty years trying to prevent it from happening again, and how the trial of the corrupt governor Verres made Cicero the most famous advocate in Rome while revealing the scale of imperial plunder he never fundamentally challenged. We look at why the Catiline conspiracy made him "father of the fatherland" but also planted the seed of his exile, how his fourteen Philippics against Antony were delivered by a man whose lung capacity was failing and who knew the speeches would probably get him killed, and why his fatal miscalculation was betting everything on a nineteen-year-old named Octavian he thought he could control. Edwards argues that Cicero's tragedy is inseparable from the Republic's: a man who believed passionately that persuasion could solve any crisis, confronted by opponents who had discovered that violence was faster. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Cicero—Rome’s Greatest Orator—Saved the Capital From Insurrection, But Couldn’t Save the Republic From Collapse

  5. Sep 10

    Do Napoleons or Hitlers Really Matter? Whether Leaders Make History or Their Societies Make Them

    On March 13, 1930, Adolf Hitler was sitting in the passenger seat of his chauffeur-driven car when a trailer truck sped through an intersection and struck the vehicle, pushing it across the road and stopping just short of crushing it. Everyone survived. Three years later, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Would tens of millions of people still have died if the truck had killed him? To many people, the answer is obviously yes, because Hitler was uniquely evil. To many others, the answer is obviously no, because the Treaty of Versailles and hyperinflation had already created the conditions for catastrophe. Jared Diamond spent decades trying to figure out who is right, and his answer is: it depends on the circumstances, and we can actually test it. Today's guest is Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and now Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter? We discuss how the inbreeding of European royal families created a natural experiment proving that monarchs' intelligence directly affected national outcomes, why Botswana's founding president is the clearest modern example of an irreplaceable leader because only he could have given away his own tribe's diamond rights without starting a civil war, and why Genghis Khan's conquests depended on rainfall patterns revealed by tree rings. We also see that Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs all made a difference but none of them passes what he calls the Hamlet test. Diamond's framework applies across politics, business, sports, and religion, and his conclusion is that leaders matter most when three conditions align: high discretion, genuine choices between balanced alternatives, and no one else who could have made the same decisions. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Do Napoleons or Hitlers Really Matter? Whether Leaders Make History or Their Societies Make Them

  6. Sep 8

    Washington’s Most Revolutionary Moment Was Surrendering Absolute Power

    Washington’s most extraordinary achievement was not winning the Revolutionary War or helping found a new nation. It was something far rarer: He gave up power, twice. First, when he resigned his command after victory. Then again, when he stepped down as president, establishing a precedent no law required and no force could compel. In an age dominated by kings and emperors, Washington chose restraint, and in doing so, he helped define the American experiment.There’s really no comparison to what Washington did, except for Byzantine General Belisarius and Roman general Cincinnatus.  After being granted absolute dictatorial authority to rescue an encircled Roman army, Cincinnatus held it for only 15 days, and immediately resigned his office to return to his small farm across the Tiber. Belisarius was offered the Western Roman imperial crown by the Ostrogoths in 540 but claimed the city for Emperor Justinian, and surrendered command to return home. Washington’s renunciation was harder because, unlike Cincinnatus and Belisarius, he had no emperor above him or proven institutional framework to enforce his departure, instead walking away twice when his own unpaid, loyal army actively urged him to seize supreme power over a fragile, untested nation. Today’s guest is Richard Lim, author of “Refusing a Crown: How George Washington Changed the World.” We place Washington’s decisions within the sweeping Western shift from monarchy to republic, showing why that transition was anything but inevitable.  After all, From Napoleon to Simón Bolívar, revolutionary leaders across the world found themselves compared unfavorably to the American who walked away from power. We see why Washington walking away from power was the most important moment in early American History. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Washington’s Most Revolutionary Moment Was Surrendering Absolute Power

  7. Sep 3

    Japan's Military Refused to Surrender Even After Two Atomic Bombs and a Coup Nearly Succeeded

    At 1:15 p.m. on April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, when his face suddenly fell forward. He raised his left hand to his temple and whispered to his cousin Daisy: "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head." He was dead by 3:35. That evening, Harry Truman, a former farmer and failed haberdasher who had been vice president for eighty-two days and had met with Roosevelt only twice, placed his hand on a Bible and became the thirty-third president of the United States. He had never been briefed on the atomic bomb. Thirteen days later, War Secretary Henry Stimson handed him a three-page memo that began: "Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city." Today's guest is James M. Scott, author of Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War. We discuss how a Hungarian physicist who did his thinking in the bathtub tracked down Einstein by asking a boy on a Long Island street corner to launch the Manhattan Project, why Oak Ridge, Tennessee, became a secret city of 75,000 people who had no idea what they were building, and how the firebombing of Tokyo killed 105,000 people in a single night months before the atomic bombs fell. We look at why Groves wanted to destroy Kyoto for its two thousand temples and Stimson stopped him because he had honeymooned there, how Japan's military leaders refused to surrender even after two atomic bombs and forced an unprecedented intervention by an emperor who had spent the war collecting marine specimens in a palace while his cities burned, and why a group of young officers assassinated the commander of the Imperial Guards and seized the palace on the eve of surrender in a coup that came within hours of succeeding. Scott argues that the historical record supports Truman's decision but lets the last word belong to the survivors, and to a war minister who committed seppuku wearing the white shirt the emperor had personally given him, with a photograph of his dead son folded on top of his dress uniform. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Japan's Military Refused to Surrender Even After Two Atomic Bombs and a Coup Nearly Succeeded

  8. Sep 1

    Is Patton America’s Most Overrated General?

    George S. Patton is considered one of America’s greatest generals for his blitzes across Europe in World War 2. He is celebrated for breaking out of Normandy because his Third Army push out of their holdings along the coast, unleashing a lightning-fast armored blitz across northern France that routed retreating German forces and liberated Paris months ahead of schedule. And following the Third Army’s dramatic relief of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, the American press and public widely lionized Patton as a national hero who spearheaded the drive into Germany. When he returned stateside in June 1945, he received massive ticker-tape parades and hero’s welcomes in Boston, Los Angeles, and Denver, drawing crowds of hundreds of thousands. Officially, the military affirmed his heroism by awarding him two Distinguished Service Crosses—the nation’s second-highest valor award, explicitly citing his "extraordinary heroism" under enemy fire in both world wars. He was immortalized in the George C. Scott movie ‘Patton’, and has persistently been named in polls as the greatest American military commander of all time. But that’s not how some of his fellow generals saw it. In 1947, Omar Bradley, who had commanded all American ground forces in Europe, wrote a single sentence that should have ended the most persistent myth of the war: "Many people give Patton and his Third Army credit for the breakout from Normandy. He had nothing to do with its planning or execution." Patton arrived after the hole had been punched and drove through open country against almost no opposition. First Army veterans had a phrase for it: "He did not break out. He walked out." Today's guest is James Ellman, author of Patton Reconsidered: General George S. Patton Jr. as a Wartime Commander. We look at the mythology of Patton and see there’s an argument to be made his image was wildly inflated as part of a media campaign, and he had serious shortcomings as a strategist. We discuss how the single most important factor in Patton's career was a friendship with a next-door neighbor named Eisenhower who saved him from dismissal at least five times, how Patton's men posed as First Army soldiers to steal fuel convoys in a scheme that almost certainly got other Americans killed, and why four other American army commanders achieved comparable victories without any of the scandals and are completely forgotten today. Ellman argues that calling Patton a military genius does a disservice to every soldier who served under him and every general who performed as well or better without the drama, and that the traits the Patton legend celebrates, recklessness, insubordination, contempt for logistics, and mistreatment of troops, are exactly the ones the modern US military should be discouraging, not enshrining. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Is Patton America’s Most Overrated General?
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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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