File 47: Investigative History Podcast

M.T. Bevis

Every story leaves a record. Every record leaves clues. File 47 is an investigative history podcast hosted by historian and author M.T. Bevis. Each episode opens a forgotten file from the past, examining the evidence, myths, decisions, and consequences that shaped history. From ancient civilizations and legendary figures to wars, political crises, and historical mysteries, File 47 investigates the stories we thought we knew. The file is open.

  1. Thomas Jefferson: The Draftsman

    1h ago

    Thomas Jefferson: The Draftsman

    Yesterday, this series told you the real history of the document. Today, it's about the man who wrote most of it. Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three years old when Congress handed him the job of drafting the Declaration of Independence — not because he was the most senior delegate in the room, but because, by John Adams's own account, he could write better than almost anyone else there. What he produced contains what may be the single most consequential sentence in American political history: the claim that all men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This episode follows Jefferson's full public life — the brilliant, restless mind behind the Declaration, the architect of the Louisiana Purchase that doubled the size of the country in a single transaction, and the man who spent his retirement years personally founding a university from nothing. We also touch, briefly, on the documented contradiction between Jefferson's own writing and his lifelong status as an enslaver — a subject this show has already covered in full in a separate, dedicated series, and will return to again in the future. Today's focus is Jefferson's public record and what it actually built. This is Day 5 of The Unfinished Founding — a File 47 daily series running through July, leading up to America's 250th anniversary of independence.

    11 min
  2. The Real History of the Declaration of Independence

    1d ago

    The Real History of the Declaration of Independence

    Happy 250th. Here's what actually happened. The vote for independence happened on July 2, 1776 — not July 4th. John Adams was so certain that date would become the holiday that he wrote his wife predicting Americans would celebrate it for generations with "Pomp and Parade... Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations." He was right about everything except which day. July 4th is the day Congress approved the final text of the document explaining that vote — the Declaration of Independence. It was printed that night by a Philadelphia printer named John Dunlap, working through the dark, producing somewhere around two hundred copies that went out to the colonies, the army, and eventually back across the Atlantic to Britain itself. Those copies bore exactly two names: John Hancock's, as President of Congress, and Charles Thomson's, as Secretary. The version everyone pictures — the parchment with fifty-six signatures, the one John Trumbull's famous painting shows everyone crowding around — wasn't even ordered into existence until July 19th. Most of the men whose names are on it signed it on August 2nd. A full month later. Some signed even after that. This episode follows the real timeline of America's founding document, from Thomas Jefferson's seventeen days alone with a writing desk in June, through the Committee of Five's quiet revisions, through Congress's brutal three-day editing session that cut roughly a quarter of what Jefferson had written — including a passage on the slave trade that Jefferson blamed on the king and that delegations across the colonies, for various and sometimes overlapping reasons, were unwilling to let stand. We also clear up exactly what did and didn't happen with John Hancock's famously oversized signature, what John Adams predicted about which date Americans would celebrate, and why the document everyone calls "signed on July 4th" really wasn't — not by most of the people whose names are now permanently attached to it. This is the flagship episode of The Unfinished Founding — a File 47 daily series running through July, leading up to America's 250th anniversary of independence. Tomorrow, the series turns to the people themselves.

    23 min
  3. The Last Door Closes: Lexington, Concord, and the Petition the King Refused to Read

    2d ago

    The Last Door Closes: Lexington, Concord, and the Petition the King Refused to Read

    For two days, this series has covered why the relationship between Britain and its colonies broke down — the debt, the taxes, the constitutional argument. Today, we cover the narrow, specific window in which it broke completely, and irreversibly. On April 19, 1775, British troops and colonial militia exchanged fire outside Boston — at Lexington first, then at Concord. Nobody, then or now, can say with certainty who fired the first shot. What's not in dispute is what happened after: eight colonial militiamen dead at Lexington, a British column harassed and bloodied all the way back to Boston, and a colonial siege of the city that didn't lift for nearly a year. And yet — and this is the detail most people skip entirely — even after actual blood had been spilled, the Second Continental Congress tried one more time for peace. In July 1775, they sent King George III a document called the Olive Branch Petition: a genuine, good-faith final appeal, affirming loyalty to the Crown and asking the king to intervene against what they still believed was a rogue Parliament and bad ministers, not the king himself. The king never read it. By the time it reached London, he had already decided the colonies were in open rebellion — and some historians believe the petition was never even formally presented to him at all. This episode follows that exact window — from the first shots at Lexington to the king's August 1775 proclamation that ended any realistic hope of reconciliation — and lands you right at the doorstep of tomorrow's flagship episode on the Declaration itself. This is Day 3 of The Unfinished Founding — a File 47 daily series running through July, leading up to America's 250th anniversary of independence.

    16 min
  4. As Englishmen: The Real Argument Behind "No Taxation Without Representation"

    3d ago

    As Englishmen: The Real Argument Behind "No Taxation Without Representation"

    Yesterday, we covered the bill — the war debt, the taxes, the sequence of acts that pushed the colonies toward rebellion. Today, we cover the argument the colonists actually made about why they didn't owe it, at least not like this. Here's the precise picture most retellings get wrong: in the 1760s and early 1770s, the overwhelming majority of American colonists were not radicals plotting independence. They were British subjects making a constitutional argument — one grounded not in revolutionary new philosophy, but in rights they believed they already possessed, dating back over five centuries to a single document signed on a field outside London in 1215. This episode follows that argument from its legal roots in Magna Carta, through a specific and almost-forgotten 17th-century legal theory that colonial assemblies leaned on heavily, into the philosophy of John Locke that would eventually give Thomas Jefferson the language for the Declaration itself. We also examine Parliament's actual counter-argument — a concept called "virtual representation" — and why it failed so completely that even some of its defenders in London considered it close to indefensible. This is not a story about colonists inventing rebellion out of nothing. It's the story of how a legal and philosophical argument, repeated and refined and rejected for over a decade, became the only path left when every other one had been tried. This is Day 2 of The Unfinished Founding — a File 47 daily series running through July, leading up to America's 250th anniversary of independence.

    10 min
  5. The Bill Comes Due: Why Britain Actually Taxed the Colonies

    4d ago

    The Bill Comes Due: Why Britain Actually Taxed the Colonies

    Before there's a Declaration, before there's a war, before there's a single shot fired at Lexington — there's a bill. In 1763, Great Britain finished fighting the Seven Years' War — a global conflict that, in North America, colonists knew as the French and Indian War. Britain won. It also nearly tripled the size of its North American territory overnight. And it did both of those things while running up a national debt that had climbed to somewhere around £122 to £140 million — an almost incomprehensible sum for the period, with annual interest payments alone eating up a massive share of the government's budget. Somebody had to pay for that. Parliament's answer was the American colonies — the territory the war had been fought to protect and expand. Over the next decade, in a sequence most people can recite without ever understanding why it happened in that order — Sugar Act, Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, Tea Act — Britain tried, repeatedly, to get the colonies to help cover the bill. The colonists said no. Not randomly. Not out of simple greed or rebelliousness. They built a specific, escalating constitutional argument — one this series will spend tomorrow's episode examining in full — about representation, consent, and what it actually meant to be an Englishman with rights, three thousand miles from London. This episode opens the case file on the decade before the Revolution most people skip past on the way to 1776. We follow the actual money — what the war cost, what Britain decided the colonies owed, and the specific sequence of taxes that turned a financial dispute into the first act of a revolution. This is Day 1 of The Unfinished Founding — a File 47 daily series running through July, leading up to America's 250th anniversary of independence.

    20 min
  6. 50 Million People Are Enslaved Right Now. Here Is How and Why. | Part 3 of 3: The Global History of Slavery

    Jun 26

    50 Million People Are Enslaved Right Now. Here Is How and Why. | Part 3 of 3: The Global History of Slavery

    This is Part 3 — the final episode — in File 47's three-part investigation into the global history of slavery. Part 1 examined the ancient world and the Barbary slave trade. Part 2 examined the Arab and Indian Ocean trade and the transatlantic system, including the specific institutional character of American chattel slavery and the abolition movement's genuine but incomplete achievements. If you haven't heard them, they're worth starting there. This episode is where the full arc of the investigation lands. Here is the finding that the previous two parts were building toward: there are more people living in conditions of modern slavery today than were alive in the entire enslaved population of the United States at the peak of American chattel slavery in 1860. The International Labour Organization estimates that 50 million people were living in conditions of modern slavery in 2021. That figure — based on surveys conducted across 68 countries by the ILO, Walk Free, and the International Organization for Migration — encompasses forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, and forced marriage. It had increased by 10 million since the 2016 estimate. It is getting worse, not better. In this episode, we examine what modern slavery actually is — how it operates, where it operates, and who it operates on. We examine the specific industries and supply chains in which forced labor is most concentrated, including industries that produce goods consumed throughout the developed world. We examine the specific forms modern slavery takes — debt bondage, document confiscation, fraudulent work contracts, trafficking — and how each of these mechanisms replicates the fundamental logic of the institution's historical forms while operating below the legal threshold of formal slavery. We examine why abolition did not end the institution — what the gap between legal prohibition and operational reality looks like, why it persists, and what the historical record tells us about the conditions under which slavery has actually been reduced rather than merely renamed. And we close with what the full three-part investigation — from the clay tablets of Babylon to the present — actually tells us. Not a political conclusion. Not a guilt assignment. A forensic finding: the institution is human, it is durable, it exploits weakness and it profits from invisibility, and the only responses that have ever meaningfully reduced it are the ones that made it visible, made it costly, and removed the conditions of vulnerability that made it possible. The case is not closed. But the investigation has findings. This is where they land. A companion article expanding the investigation is available on Medium at medium.com/file-47. Subscribe to File 47: Investigative History for new episodes every week. If this episode left something with you, leave a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts — it's the primary way we reach new listeners.

    23 min
  7. The Slave Trade That Lasted 1,300 Years — and the One That Shaped the Modern World | Part 2 of 3: The Global History of Slavery

    Jun 19

    The Slave Trade That Lasted 1,300 Years — and the One That Shaped the Modern World | Part 2 of 3: The Global History of Slavery

    This is Part 2 of a three-part File 47 investigation into the global history of slavery. Part 1 examined the ancient world — from the clay tablets of Babylon through the silver mines of Athens, from the crucified thousands on the Appian Way to the corsair raids on the coastlines of Europe. If you haven't heard it, it's worth starting there. This episode builds on that foundation. Today we examine two of the largest and most consequential slave trading systems in human history — one that the Western curriculum has largely overlooked, and one that it tends to center so exclusively that its full dimensions are frequently misunderstood. The Arab and Indian Ocean slave trade is the longest-running institutionalized slave trading system in the documented historical record. It operated for more than 1,300 years — from before the rise of Islam until the twentieth century. It transported an estimated 12 to 17 million people across the Sahara Desert and the Indian Ocean to the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and beyond. It included specific practices — the systematic castration of male enslaved people — that produced mortality rates and demographic consequences that distinguish it from the transatlantic system in specific and documented ways. And it is the subject of far less scholarly attention and far less public awareness than its scale and duration warrant. The transatlantic slave trade is the most extensively documented forced migration in history. It transported approximately 12.5 million people from Africa to the Americas over roughly three and a half centuries. Of those, 1.8 million did not survive the crossing. The distribution of those who did — overwhelmingly to Brazil and the Caribbean, with roughly 4 percent going to North America — is documented with a precision that most people who discuss the trade never encounter. And the specific legal and institutional character of American chattel slavery — hereditary, racially codified, and legally comprehensive — is examined here on its own terms, including a chapter of American history that the standard curriculum omits almost entirely: that slavery existed in every original Northern state, that Northern banks financed it, Northern insurers insured it, Northern manufacturers depended on it, and that this participation lasted until slavery ended in 1865. The institution was American. The record does not support the geographic division the standard account draws. We also examine abolition — the genuine moral achievement of the nineteenth century anti-slavery movement, and its specific incompleteness. Cuba did not abolish slavery until 1886. Brazil not until 1888. The Arabian Peninsula not until the 1960s. Mauritania not until 2007. And we close with the thread that connects both systems to Part 3: the 50 million people the International Labour Organization counts in modern slavery today are not an aberration. They are the current expression of an institution whose roots run deeper than any single chapter of this history. A companion article expanding the investigation is available on Medium at medium.com/file-47. Subscribe to File 47: Investigative History for new episodes every week. If this episode left something with you, leave a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts — it's the primary way we reach new listeners.

    33 min
  8. FIFA Made $7.5 Billion. The Workers Who Built the Stadiums Are Still Waiting to Find Out How Many of Them Died. | Bonus: Qatar 2022

    Jun 13 ·  Bonus

    FIFA Made $7.5 Billion. The Workers Who Built the Stadiums Are Still Waiting to Find Out How Many of Them Died. | Bonus: Qatar 2022

    This is a bonus episode — released because the timing made it impossible not to. The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicked off this week across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Billions of people are about to spend a month watching it. Before they do, this episode goes back to the most recent prior tournament — Qatar, 2022 — and opens the case file on the system that built it. The kafala system is a form of labor sponsorship that has existed across the Gulf states for decades. Under Qatari law as it stood for most of the twelve years between the 2010 award of the World Cup and the 2022 tournament, a migrant worker's legal right to leave the country or change jobs depended on the permission of their employer. Combined with passport confiscation, recruitment debts, and a workforce drawn overwhelmingly from some of the poorest countries in South Asia, this produced — according to multiple human rights organizations, the International Labour Organization, and Qatar's own eventual reform process — conditions that met the legal definition of forced labor. The system was not fully dismantled until 2020 — two years before the tournament it helped build. The death toll connected to that twelve-year construction period is the most disputed number in this story, and this episode does not pretend otherwise. Qatar's own organizing committee has documented 37 deaths connected to stadium construction specifically. A 2021 Guardian investigation, using government mortality data from five South Asian countries, counted 6,500 deaths among migrant workers in Qatar across the same period — a figure Qatari officials have called misleading because it includes all causes of death across the entire migrant workforce, not just construction-related fatalities. In late 2022, Qatar's own World Cup chief gave reporters a third number: "between 400 and 500." Three numbers. Three sources. None of them agree. This episode presents all three, with their sourcing, and lets the disagreement speak for itself. We also examine what FIFA's own commissioned investigation — released in November 2024 — concluded about FIFA's responsibility, and what happened to the $100 million "legacy fund" that was supposed to address it. This is not a comparison to any other tournament. It is the documented record of one. A companion article is available on Medium at medium.com/file-47. Subscribe to File 47: Investigative History for new episodes every week.

    18 min
See All (16)

About

Every story leaves a record. Every record leaves clues. File 47 is an investigative history podcast hosted by historian and author M.T. Bevis. Each episode opens a forgotten file from the past, examining the evidence, myths, decisions, and consequences that shaped history. From ancient civilizations and legendary figures to wars, political crises, and historical mysteries, File 47 investigates the stories we thought we knew. The file is open.

Information