Dave Does History

Josiah Bartlett does not always get the fanfare of the larger revolutionary names, yet his fingerprints are all over the birth of the nation. He was a frontier doctor who challenged the medical habits of his day and saved lives by trusting observation over superstition. He was a legislator who refused to bow to royal pressure. When the moment of truth came in July of 1776, he was the first delegate called and the first to vote for independence. His signature followed right after John Hancock on the Declaration, a quiet reminder that courage often arrives without spectacle.

In this episode we look at how a shoemaker’s son from Amesbury became a founding governor, a key voice in the Continental Congress, and one of the earliest advocates for professional medicine in America. His life shows how steady character can shape a country just as much as fiery speeches or battlefield glory.

The story of the American Revolution usually unfolds with images of muskets, marches, and men debating the future of a continent. Yet the fight for liberty also lived in quieter rooms where spinning wheels hummed and tea went untouched. The Daughters of Liberty stepped into that space and turned ordinary domestic life into a political force that Parliament never saw coming.

Their work pulled women into a struggle that claimed to speak for all Americans while giving them no formal voice. They answered this slight with resolve. They controlled the household purse, so they made the boycotts real. They spun cloth when British imports dried up. They brewed liberty tea from herbs and leaves. Some carried intelligence for Washington. Some fought. Many organized. All left a mark.

Their efforts carried the Revolution forward. Their legacy reminds us that liberty depends on the courage of people who refuse to sit quietly while history unfolds around them.

In the quiet backcountry of South Carolina, a small trading village called Ninety Six became the unlikely center of a civil war within the American Revolution. It was a crossroads of trails and tempers, where Loyalists and Patriots clashed not just over independence, but over who truly represented justice and order.

In this episode, we look at the two sieges that defined Ninety Six: the first in 1775, when neighbors turned their guns on each other at Savage’s Old Fields, and the second in 1781, when General Nathanael Greene tried to break the British Star Fort. These battles tell a story of courage, confusion, and divided loyalties that tore the South apart.

Ninety Six reminds us that the Revolution was never just fought on distant battlefields. It was fought in backyards, in friendships, and in the hearts of ordinary people choosing between rebellion and the crown.

Welcome to another captivating episode of Dave Does History, recorded live on Bill Mick LIVE on November 18, 2025.

After a five-week recovery from shoulder surgery, historian Dave Bowman makes a triumphant return to explore a profound and often overlooked influence on America's founding: Virgil's ancient epic, The Aeneid.

Far from mere mythology to the Founding Fathers, this Roman masterpiece shaped their understanding of liberty as dutiful obedience to a higher moral order, not unchecked personal desire. Dave reveals how Aeneas's sacrifices mirror the Declaration of Independence, where duty triumphs over temptation, and ordered freedom demands virtue above all.

Join Bill Mick and Dave as they connect classical wisdom to today's challenges, reminding us why forgetting these roots leaves a nation adrift. Essential listening for anyone who loves history that matters.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, when Chicago was bursting with industry and ambition, a man named H. H. Holmes built something far darker than a business empire. Behind his polite smile and bowler hat was a mind that turned murder into method and fraud into daily practice.

This episode of Dave Does History examines the life and crimes of Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as H. H. Holmes, often called America’s first serial killer. From his eerie “Murder Castle” near the World’s Fair to the insurance scheme that finally brought him down, Holmes left behind a trail of deceit, death, and mystery that still unsettles historians today.

Join us as we follow the twists that led from Chicago’s booming streets to a Philadelphia prison, and finally to a concrete grave that tried—and failed—to bury the legend of the man who killed for profit and lied for pleasure.

In this episode of Dave Does History, we ride back to the early 1820s, when the American frontier was not yet a land of settlers but of merchants chasing profit across a sea of grass. The story begins with William Becknell, a man drowning in debt who set out from Missouri and ended up opening the Santa Fe Trail. His daring 1822 expedition proved that wagons could cross the Great Plains, carrying trade goods and transforming a lonely wilderness into a bustling highway of commerce.

We’ll follow Becknell’s near-fatal journey across the Cimarron Cutoff, the desperate search for water, and the miraculous rescue that turned failure into triumph. This is the birth of the Santa Fe Trail—the road that carried two nations’ fortunes westward and forever changed the map of American trade.

In the frozen silence of the Barents Sea, two submarines from rival nations crossed paths on November 15, 1969. One was the USS Gato, a sleek American attack sub built for stealth. The other was the Soviet K-19, a ballistic missile boat already haunted by disaster and known among sailors as “the Widowmaker.” When their steel hulls collided 200 feet below the surface, the world nearly brushed nuclear catastrophe.

This episode tells the story of that collision—the secret confrontation between the hunter and the hunted that almost ignited a Cold War inferno. We’ll explore the shadowy tactics of submarine espionage, the sheer nerve of the crews who lived through it, and how both sides quietly buried the truth for decades. What happened that day reminds us how perilously close the world once came to annihilation, not by intention, but by accident beneath the sea.

On November 14, 1969, the crew of Apollo 12 rode a pillar of fire into a gray and rain-soaked Florida sky. Just thirty-six seconds after liftoff, lightning struck the massive Saturn V, knocking out power, blinding the instruments, and filling the command module with flashing warning lights. A second strike followed, threatening to end the mission before it had even cleared the clouds.

Inside the capsule, three Navy men—Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean—fought to make sense of chaos while Mission Control scrambled to understand what had gone wrong. Then a calm voice offered a strange instruction: “Try SCE to Aux.” With that single command and one quick hand on the right switch, Apollo 12 was saved.

This is the story of the launch that almost failed, the people who refused to panic, and the moment when quick thinking kept America’s second moon landing alive.

John Dickinson was called the Penman of the Revolution, but his story is more complicated than that. He was a patriot who resisted British authority with his pen long before most dared, yet when independence came to a vote, he stood against declaring it too soon. His caution earned him scorn from some and respect from others. He believed in liberty, but he also believed that liberty without order was just chaos dressed up in slogans.

In this episode, we explore the life of John Dickinson, the man who helped shape America’s first arguments for freedom, wrote its earliest laws, freed his slaves, and still managed to confound both radicals and reactionaries. From his letters that stirred a continent to his quiet work building a nation that could endure, Dickinson’s legacy reminds us that true revolution begins not with passion, but with principle.

On November 12, 1928, the SS Vestris slipped beneath the gray Atlantic roughly two hundred miles off the Virginia Capes. She had sailed from New York two days earlier, overloaded and poorly maintained, bound for Buenos Aires on what should have been a routine voyage. Instead, she became a floating indictment of negligence and pride. The captain delayed his distress call, the crew mishandled lifeboats, and “women and children first” turned into a bitter joke as every child aboard was lost.

The tragedy shocked the world and forced long-overdue reforms to maritime safety. It also revealed unlikely heroism, most notably from Lionel Licorish, a young Barbadian quartermaster who saved as many as twenty lives. In this episode of Dave Does History, we return to that storm-tossed morning when the Atlantic taught another lesson about human failure, courage, and the high price of ignoring simple truth.