Good morning and welcome back to Dave Does History, where the past is not dead, not even sleeping, and occasionally still smells like smoke.

Today we pick up the Liberty 250 series at the moment when grievances stop being theoretical and start leaving people homeless. Long before the Declaration was signed, long before independence was inevitable, British policy chose fire as its argument. Towns burned. Harbors closed. Governors ruled from cannon decks instead of capitols. And the colonies took notes.

This episode walks through the winter of 1775 and 1776, when Lord Dunmore’s choices in Virginia did more to unite the colonies than any speech or pamphlet ever could. Norfolk burns. Society fractures. Reconciliation quietly dies without a press release.

Jefferson would later compress all of this into one sentence. We are here to unpack what that sentence really cost.

History rarely announces the moment when compromise becomes impossible. It just lights the match and waits.

Good morning and welcome back to Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, where the past is not dead, not even sleeping, and occasionally still smells like smoke.

Today we pick up the Liberty 250 series at the moment when grievances stop being theoretical and start leaving people homeless. Long before the Declaration was signed, long before independence was inevitable, British policy chose fire as its argument. Towns burned. Harbors closed. Governors ruled from cannon decks instead of capitols. And the colonies took notes.

This episode walks through the winter of 1775 and 1776, when Lord Dunmore’s choices in Virginia did more to unite the colonies than any speech or pamphlet ever could. Norfolk burns. Society fractures. Reconciliation quietly dies without a press release.

Jefferson would later compress all of this into one sentence. We are here to unpack what that sentence really cost.

History rarely announces the moment when compromise becomes impossible. It just lights the match and waits.

For eighty years, USS Harder lived in a strange place in American memory. She was famous, admired, and deeply respected, yet she was also missing. Her story ended in silence, somewhere off the coast of the Philippines, with no wreck, no coordinates, and no certainty. Only patrol reports, witness accounts, and the names of seventy nine men carved into stone.

Harder was commanded by Sam Dealey, a Texan who failed out of the Naval Academy, fought his way back in, and became one of the most aggressive submarine commanders of the Second World War. He did not simply sink ships. He hunted destroyers, the very vessels designed to kill submarines, and he did it at point blank range. Senior admirals said his fifth war patrol was the most brilliant of the war. They also said his record would never be equalled.

In May 2024, that long silence finally broke. The wreck of USS Harder was found, resting upright on the seabed, its damage matching the historical record. For the first time, the story had a place to end.

This is not a tale about glory polished smooth by time. It is about risk, responsibility, and the cost of victory. It is about a captain, his crew, and a boat that went down fighting, and was finally found.

For eighty years, USS Harder lived in a strange place in American memory. She was famous, admired, and deeply respected, yet she was also missing. Her story ended in silence, somewhere off the coast of the Philippines, with no wreck, no coordinates, and no certainty. Only patrol reports, witness accounts, and the names of seventy nine men carved into stone.

Harder was commanded by Sam Dealey, a Texan who failed out of the Naval Academy, fought his way back in, and became one of the most aggressive submarine commanders of the Second World War. He did not simply sink ships. He hunted destroyers, the very vessels designed to kill submarines, and he did it at point blank range. Senior admirals said his fifth war patrol was the most brilliant of the war. They also said his record would never be equalled.

In May 2024, that long silence finally broke. The wreck of USS Harder was found, resting upright on the seabed, its damage matching the historical record. For the first time, the story had a place to end.

This is not a tale about glory polished smooth by time. It is about risk, responsibility, and the cost of victory. It is about a captain, his crew, and a boat that went down fighting, and was finally found.

This episode begins with a question that refuses to stay buried in the past. Who will remember me when I am gone. Not who will write my name in a book, not who will record a date or a statistic, but who will pause long enough to acknowledge that I lived.

Long before history was written, people poured out libations. Wine, oil, water, a simple offering tipped onto the ground to honor the dead. It was not about superstition. It was about memory. Someone stood there. Someone remembered. Someone refused to let a life vanish without notice.

Today, we rely on history to do that work for us. We build archives, monuments, timelines, and grand narratives. History is very good at telling us what happened. It is far less capable of remembering who paid the price. Kings and generals survive. Ordinary people fade into numbers.

This video explores that gap. The space between history as a record and remembrance as a human act. It asks why cultures across the world developed rituals to honor the forgotten dead, and why modern society often struggles to do the same.

This is not an argument against history. It is a reminder that history alone is not enough.

History explains the past. Remembrance keeps it human.

Let us begin.

Today we are talking about something older than empires and more stubborn than forgetting. It is the simple act of remembering the people history does not bother to name. Long before textbooks and archives, people poured out libations. Wine, oil, water, a small offering tipped onto the ground to say someone lived, someone mattered, someone was not invisible.

We tend to think of that as a strange ancient habit. But the question behind it never went away. Who will remember me. Who will pause long enough to say my name, or at least admit that I was here.

History is very good at big stories. Wars, plagues, kings, and generals. It is far less interested in the ordinary people who carried the weight of those stories on their backs. Tonight, we are going to talk about that gap. About what history can do, what it cannot do, and why pouring out the libations of history still matters now.

George Catlett Marshall is one of those figures whose importance becomes clearer the longer one studies him and more puzzling the more one tries to summarize him neatly. He does not lend himself to slogans or cinematic shorthand. There is no single moment that captures him, no battlefield pose that defines his legacy. Instead there is a long accumulation of decisions, habits, and silences that, taken together, helped shape the American century. He was the only American to serve as Army Chief of Staff, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense, and he did so without ever behaving as though history owed him attention. That alone should give modern audiences pause.

George Catlett Marshall is one of those figures whose importance becomes clearer the longer one studies him and more puzzling the more one tries to summarize him neatly. He does not lend himself to slogans or cinematic shorthand. There is no single moment that captures him, no battlefield pose that defines his legacy. Instead there is a long accumulation of decisions, habits, and silences that, taken together, helped shape the American century. He was the only American to serve as Army Chief of Staff, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense, and he did so without ever behaving as though history owed him attention. That alone should give modern audiences pause.

Granada in the winter of 1066 was not supposed to end like this. If you had asked a court poet, a tax collector, or a Jewish merchant counting bolts of cloth in the souk, they would have told you that the age was precarious but workable, dangerous but dazzling. Al-Andalus still wore the reputation of refinement like a borrowed robe, a land where Arabic verse sparkled, Jewish scholarship flourished, and Christian kingdoms loomed at a safe distance, for the moment. The brochures had not yet been printed, but the legend was already forming. A Golden Age, people would later call it, a time of convivencia, the sort of word that sounds better the further away one gets from the blood.

Granada in the winter of 1066 was not supposed to end like this. If you had asked a court poet, a tax collector, or a Jewish merchant counting bolts of cloth in the souk, they would have told you that the age was precarious but workable, dangerous but dazzling. Al-Andalus still wore the reputation of refinement like a borrowed robe, a land where Arabic verse sparkled, Jewish scholarship flourished, and Christian kingdoms loomed at a safe distance, for the moment. The brochures had not yet been printed, but the legend was already forming. A Golden Age, people would later call it, a time of convivencia, the sort of word that sounds better the further away one gets from the blood.