History Unplugged Podcast

By Scott Rank, PhD

Society & Culture History

What's History Unplugged Podcast 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.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/3101278/advertisement

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Joe McCarthy, the Hydrogen ...

09.28.2023

There’s a good argument to be made that the entire trajectory of the Cold War was set off by ten fateful months of American and global history, between the first Soviet atom bomb test in the late summer of 1949 ...

History Unplugged Podcast episodes:

09.28.2023 Joe McCarthy, the Hydrogen Bomb, and Ten Fateful Months That Kicked Off the Cold War There’s a good argument to be made that the entire trajectory of the Cold War was set off by ten fateful months of American and global history, between the first Soviet atom bomb test in the late summer of 1949 ...
09.26.2023 The SAS Began as a Lie but Became Britain’s Most Elite WW2 Commando Unit Created during the World War II, the SAS was a small band of men brought together in the North African desert. They were the toughest and brightest of their cohort, the most resilient, most capable in close combat and most ...
09.22.2023 Eyewitnesses of History Share Stories of the 1980 Miracle on Ice, Pablo Escobar, Jonestown, and Much More In this special compilation episode, Josh Cohen of Eyewitness History shares his favorite interview moments and stories from people who witnessed some of history’s most extraordinary events.First up, revisit his conversation with Frank DeAngelis, former principal of Columbine High School, ...
09.21.2023 In 1864, Nine Union Officers Escaped from a POW Camp and Trekked 300 Miles to the North At the height of the Civil War in November 1864, nine Union prisoners-of-war escaped from a Confederate Prison known as Camp Sorghum in Columbia, South Carolina. They scrambled north on foot in rags that had once been uniforms of blue. ...
09.19.2023 Teddy Roosevelt Nearly Died in a Cavalry Charge Against German Machine Guns in WW1 Teddy Roosevelt faced many challenges at the end of his life. Racked by rheumatism, a ticking embolism, pathogens in his blood, a bad leg from an accident, and a bullet in his chest from an assassination attempt. But none of ...
09.14.2023 Beyond the Wall: What Life Was Really Like in East Germany When the Iron Curtain fell in 1990, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a radically different Germany ...
09.12.2023 How An Unlikely Cohort of Black Nurses at a New York Sanatorium Helped Cure Tuberculosis Nearly a century before the COVID-19 pandemic upended life as we know it, a devastating tuberculosis epidemic was ravaging hospitals across the country. In those dark, pre-antibiotic days, the disease claimed the lives of 1 in 7 Americans; in the ...
09.07.2023 The Mississippi Was First Mapped by a Polyglot Priest and a College Dropout-Turned-Fur Trapper Perhaps the most consequential expedition in North American history wasn’t the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It was one that happened 130 years earlier and undertaken by a Catholic priest fluent in multiple Indian languages and a philosophy-student-drop-out-turned fur trapper. This ...
09.05.2023 The Eurasian Steppes Gave Us Atilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, Global Trade and Hybrid Camels The barbarian nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their impact has gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, ...
08.31.2023 Decades of Turbulent Decolonization After WW2 Launched With The Dutch-Indonesian Wars of 1945-49 The Dutch–Indonesian War was one of the first postwar struggles that followed the Japanese surrender in September 1945, which left a power vacuum in the colonial Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The infant nation didn’t have a normal standing army but ...
08.29.2023 Could the Pacific War of WW2 Have Been Entirely Avoided if Not For U.S. Diplomats in Over Their Heads? It’s November 1941. Japan and the US are teetering on a knife-edge as leaders on both sides of the Pacific strive to prevent war between them. But failed diplomacy, foiled negotiations, and possible duplicity in the Roosevelt administration thwart their ...
08.24.2023 The WW2 Pacific Theatre of January-May 1942: When Japan Was Omnipotent and America Was a Fearful Underdog After the devastating Japanese blows of December 1941, the Allies found themselves reeling with defeat everywhere in the Pacific. Although stripped of his battleships and outnumbered 10:3 in carriers, the US Navy commander-in-chief Admiral Ernest J. King decided to hit ...
08.22.2023 The History of America’s Ice Obsession: Why The U.S. Loves Frozen Drinks and Ice Rinks Ice is everywhere: in gas stations, in restaurants, in hospitals, in hotels via noisy machines, and in our homes. Americans think nothing of dropping a few ice cubes into tall glasses of tea to ward off the heat of a ...
08.20.2023 Introducing Mark Vinet's New Show: Historical Jesus This is a preview of the new Parthenon Podcast Network show "Historical Jesus," hosted by Mark Vinet. This show explores the question of who was Jesus Christ and why did he inspire such admiration, fervor, and devotion? Join Mark as ...
08.17.2023 Leyte Gulf: The Largest Naval Battle in History and the Downfall of the Japanese Navy The WW2 battle of Leyte Gulf was the largest naval encounter in history and probably the most decisive naval battle of the entire Pacific War, and one that saw the Imperial Japanese Navy eliminated as an effective fighting force and ...
08.15.2023 Britain Controlled the Globe by Farming Out Colonial Governance to the East Indian Company and other Corporations How did Britain – an island nation the same size as Oregon – manage to control most of the world through its colonial empires? The answer is that it didn’t, at least not directly. Britain farmed out control to its ...
08.10.2023 How the Monroe Doctrine Led to America Occupying Cuba, Panama, Hawaii, and Haiti Following the Napoleonic Wars, a tidal wave of independence movements hit the Western Hemisphere. The United States was afraid that expansionist powers—namely Britain, France, Germany, and Japan—might extend their empires into these regions, threatening the growth of fledgling republics in ...
08.08.2023 A 1943 Translation Blunder Saved FDR, Churchill, and Eisenhower From Being Assassinated In a recently bombed, spy-infested Casablanca, Morocco, the architects of Allied victory in World War Two meet. It is January 1943, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and more assemble secretly ...
08.03.2023 James Garfield – Overlooked for his Short Presidency – Was the Most Beloved Politician of Reconstruction James Garfield was the last president born in a log cabin, and was raised by a poor widow on Ohio’s rugged Western Reserve. By his late twenties, he had become a respected preacher, state senator, and college president, and, after ...
08.01.2023 Road Tripping with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison Through Rural America In Beat-Up Model Ts Some of the most important moments in the lives of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison weren’t their inventions or business successes. It was their road trips through the most remote, rustic parts of America. Between 1916 and 1924, Ford, Edison, ...
07.27.2023 Did the South Lose the Entire Civil War Because One General Got Lost at the Battle of Gettysburg? Did the Confederacy lose the entire Civil War on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 because one of their generals showed up late to a battle site? That’s a very simple answer to a very complicated ...
07.25.2023 Alexander the Great’s Final Battle Nearly Killed Him with Drowning and War Elephants In the years that followed Alexander the Great’s victory at Gaugamela on October 1, 331 BC, his Macedonian and Greek army fought a truly ‘Herculean’ series of campaigns in what is today Iran, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But it was ...
07.20.2023 In 1938, America Underwent a 7-Year Transformation From an Weak, Pacifist Nation to the Arsenal of Democracy Nobody would have thought that the United States could fight in a world war in 1938, let alone be a major reason for victory. That year, it was so politically isolationist and pacifist that its defense forces were smaller than ...
07.19.2023 Exploring the Aztec Empire and Indigenous Mexico This is a preview of Mark Vinet's "History of North America." Explore one of the most glorious Mesoamerican societies and encounter the Pre-Hispanic Mexico ancient culture & civilization that was the Aztec Empire with this special episode from the History ...
07.18.2023 The First War on Terror: How Europe Fought Anarchist Suicide Attacks, From 1850 to WW1 At the end of the nineteenth century, the world came to know and fear terrorism. Much like today, this was a time of progress and dread, in which breakthroughs in communications and weapons were made, political reforms were implemented, and ...
07.13.2023 The Italian Squad: A Group of 1920s NYPD Immigrant Detectives Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia The story begins in Sicily, on Friday, March 12th, 1909. Three gunshots thundered in the night, and then a fourth. Two men fled, and investigators soon discovered who they had killed: Giuseppe Petrosino, the legendary American detective whose exploits in ...
07.11.2023 Conspiracy Theories Haunt the Assassination of MLK 55 Years After His Death Doubts about James Earl Ray, Dr. Martin Luther King’s lone assassin, arose almost immediately after the civil rights leader was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. From the start, his aides ...
07.06.2023 Early 1800s Newspaperman William Hunter Was a British Soldier’s Son Who Built Early America In June 1798, President John Adams signed the now infamous Alien & Sedition Acts to suppress political dissent. Facing imminent personal risks, a gutsy Kentucky newspaper editor ran the first editorial denouncing the law's attempt to stifle the freedom of ...
07.04.2023 Long Before Seabiscuit, a Civil War-era Racehorse Smashed Records and Sired Thousands of Colts The early days of American horse racing in the pre-Civil War era were grueling. Four-mile races, run two or three times in succession, were the norm, rewarding horses who brandished the ideal combination of stamina and speed. The stallion Lexington, ...
06.29.2023 How the 1910 Return of Halley's Comet (Almost) Destroyed Civilization Halley’s Comet visits the earth every seventy-five years. Since the dawn of civilization, humans had believed comets were evil portents. In 1705, Edmond Halley liberated humanity from these primordial superstitions (or so it was thought), proving that Newtonian mechanics rather ...
06.27.2023 The Coronation of Charles III and the Meaning Behind His Vestments, 5-Pound Crown, and the "Sovereign Orb" Charles III was crowned king of England on May 6, 2023, the first of its kind in 70 years. He wore regalia that look straight out of a portrait of Charlemagne: the St. Edward’s Crown, which wegiths five pounds and ...
06.22.2023 Why Did WW2 Advance Civil Rights When WW1 Reversed Them? Here's What WEB DuBois Said Many of us think that we know all there is to know about W.E.B Du Bois was the early 20th century’s most significant thinker, writer, and philosopher of the U.S. civil rights movement. He saw an extraordinary opportunity during World ...
06.20.2023 What It Was Like to be a WW2 Paratrooper When General Douglas MacArthur fled the Phillipines in the beginning of World War Two, he swore to return, and did so in 1944 in an epic battle in which the Allies faced banzai charges, jungle warfare, and the block-by-block battle ...
06.15.2023 Vlad the Impaler is the (Partial) Inspiration for Count Dracula Vampire lore goes back to the ancient world (revenant legends abound from Rome to China) but vampire mythology doesn't come into its own until at least the Renaissance period. Was the inspiration for it all the bloodthirsty Wallachian ruler Vlad ...
06.13.2023 In the Premodern Era, Survival Meant Overcoming Earthquakes, Sieges, Global Cooling, Asteroid Strikes, and Cannibalism Have you ever wondered if you could have survived the eruption at Pompeii, escaped San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake, found a seat on Titanic's lifeboats, outrun the Goths in the Sack of Rome, or lived through the apocalyptic Chicxulub asteroid strike?Surprisingly, ...
06.08.2023 The Time in 1943 That Eleanor Roosevelt Disappeared for 10 Days in the South Pacific Eleanor Roosevelt is undisputedly one of America’s most influential First Ladies. She used the office to promote international initiatives that stabilized global peace after the hellish destruction of World War Two, doing such things as securing the passage of the ...
06.06.2023 "Witches" Weren't Burned During The Middle Ages. That Actually Happened in the Renaissance Period. At the height of the witch burning craze, thousands people, largely women, were falsely accused of witchcraft. Many of them were burned, hanged, and executed, typically under religious pretense. But this phenomena largely didn’t happen in the Middle Ages, and ...
06.01.2023 Pandemics Cause Misery and Death, But They Also Created Agriculture and Put Humans on Top of the Food Chain Three years into a global pandemic, the fact that infectious disease is capable of reshaping humanity is obvious. But seen in the context of sixty thousand years of human and scientific history, COVID-19 is simply the latest in a series ...
05.30.2023 The 1920s Female Hungarian Murder Ring That Left 160 Dead The horror occurred in a rustic farming enclave in 1920s Hungary. Investigators would discover that a murder ring of women was responsible for the deaths of at least 160 men. It was an unlikely lineup of killers—village wives, mothers, and ...
05.25.2023 How a Flying Ace Survived 24 Days Lost at Sea on the Pacific Eddie Rickenbacker shouldn’t have survived—his childhood, his auto racing career, the first World War as he became America’s greatest ace, the many plane crashes that had taken others’ lives but yet, not his. A Medal of Honor recipient, he became ...
05.25.2023 Civil War Barons: The Tycoons, Entrepreneurs, and Inventors and Visionaries Who Forged Victory and Shaped a Nation The American Civil War brought with it unprecedented demands upon the warring sections—North and South. The conflict required a mobilization and an organization of natural and man-made resources on a massive scale.In this episode I talk with Jeffry Wert, author ...
05.23.2023 The Forage War of 1777 Saw George Washington Launch Numerous Hit-and-Run Assaults on the British that Crippled the Army In late December 1776, the American War of Independence appeared tobe on its last legs. General George Washington’s continental forces hadbeen reduced to a shadow of their former strength, the British Armyhad chased them across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, ...
05.18.2023 Medieval Gender Roles Were Much More -- and Less -- Strict Than We Can Imagine The Middle Ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings: a patriarchal society which oppressed and excluded women. But when we dig a little deeper into the truth, we can see that the “dark” ages were ...
05.17.2023 Firsthand Account of the Vietnam War from a "Tunnel Rat" In this snippet from Josh Cohen's "Eyewitness History," Vietnam War veteran & "tunnel rat" Nick Sanza discusses his experience overseas, what it's like coming from a long lineage of military service, and what he learned from the tunnels in this ...
05.16.2023 Why Do We Consider Assyria The Most Sadistically Violent Empire When Oftentimes It Wasn't? At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. Assyria’s wide-ranging conquests have long been known from the Hebrew Bible ...
05.11.2023 Moral Panics and Mass Hysteria: The Dancing Plague, Salem Witch Trials, and The Tulip Market Bubble One person's psychosis can be easily dismissed, but how do we account for collective hysteria, when an entire crowd sees the same illusion or suffer from the same illness? It's enough to make somebody believe in dark magic and pick ...
05.09.2023 A French Archeologist – Considered the Female Indiana Jones – Saved Dozens of Ancient Egyptian Temples From Flooding In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: Fifty countries contributed nearly a billion dollars to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples, built during the height of the pharaohs’ rule, from drowning in the ...
05.04.2023 Eugenics is Considered a Form of Scientific Fascism Today, But 100 Years Ago It Was Universally Popular Inspired by Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution, the theory of eugenics arose in Victorian England as a proposal for ‘improving’ the British population. It quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and ...
05.03.2023 James Early Launches New Series: The Second World War in Europe The roots of the Second World War in Europe lie within the First World War. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles formally ended the war between Germany and the western Allies, but the geopolitical situation it created was far from stable. ...
05.02.2023 Light-Horse Harry Lee: A Founding Father's Journey From Glory to Ruin The history of the American Revolution is written by and about the victors like Washington, Jefferson, and Adams. But separating the heroes from the villains is not so black and white.So how should we remember a man like Major General ...

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