Dave Does History

In the autumn of 1862, Robert E. Lee took the war north into Maryland, hoping to shake the Union and win foreign recognition for the Confederacy. What he did not count on was losing his battle plan, wrapped around a set of cigars, and having it fall into George McClellan’s hands. That stroke of luck set the stage for a clash in the mountain passes above the Maryland countryside.

On September 14, the Union Army fought its way through Crampton’s, Fox’s, and Turner’s Gaps in the Battle of South Mountain. The fighting was brutal, the casualties high, and two future presidents, Rutherford Hayes and William McKinley, were in the thick of it. South Mountain is often overshadowed by Antietam, fought just three days later, but it was a pivotal Union victory. It showed that Lee could be stopped, and it gave Lincoln the opening to redefine the war.

In September of 1759, two armies faced each other on a plateau outside Quebec City, on land that belonged to a farmer named Abraham Martin. History remembers it as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

James Wolfe, the young British general already dying of illness, gambled everything on a nighttime landing and a climb up a cliff the French thought was impassable. By dawn, four thousand redcoats stood ready. Montcalm, the French commander, chose to attack immediately rather than wait for reinforcements.

The French fired too soon. The British waited, then unleashed a crushing volley at close range. Within minutes the French line collapsed. Wolfe was shot three times and died hearing of his victory. Montcalm was mortally wounded and died the next day.

The battle lasted less than an hour, but it ended French Canada, gave Britain control of the St. Lawrence, and set the colonies on the road toward revolution.

In September 1857, the SS Central America set out from Havana on what should have been a routine run to New York. She carried more than five hundred souls and a fortune in California gold, the kind of voyage that symbolized American progress and prosperity. But the Atlantic had other plans. For three days a hurricane tore at the ship, stripping away her sails, drowning her boilers, and reducing her passengers to bucket brigades and desperate prayers. Miners tossed away money belts heavy with gold, the decks littered with coins kicked aside in the struggle to survive. On September 12 the Ship of Gold went down, taking nearly six hundred lives and sparking a financial panic on land. Her captain, William Lewis Herndon, became a legend for standing on the bridge, bareheaded, as women and children were saved first. His ship was lost, but his duty was not.

Today we are traveling deep into the forests of Germania, back to the year 9 CE, where Rome suffered one of its most shocking defeats. For decades the Roman Empire had marched across Europe, building roads, planting forts, and convincing itself that nothing could stand in its way. But arrogance has a way of blinding even the most powerful empires.

At Teutoburg Forest, three entire Roman legions vanished. They were led by Publius Quinctilius Varus, a governor more comfortable collecting taxes than commanding troops, and betrayed by a man who knew Rome inside and out, the German chieftain Arminius. Over four days of rain, mud, and ambush, the legions were destroyed. When the news reached Augustus, the most powerful man in the world cried out for his lost soldiers.

This is the story of the day Rome learned it was mortal.

On September 10, 1898, Europe lost one of its most mythologized figures in the most unexpected way. Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known to the world as Sisi, was walking along the lakeside in Geneva. She was sixty years old, dressed in black as she had been since the death of her son, and she was about to board a steamship for what should have been a quiet journey.

Instead, an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni lunged at her with a sharpened file, striking her in the chest. At first she didn’t realize she had been mortally wounded. Her corset was so tight it slowed the bleeding, and she managed to walk back to the pier and board the ship. Moments later she collapsed. By two in the afternoon, the restless Empress was dead.

What happened that day in Geneva was more than an act of violence. It was the moment Elisabeth of Austria stopped being a controversial figure at court and became an enduring legend.

This morning on Bill Mick Live we heard Senator Tim Kaine declare that our rights come from government, not from God or from nature. That claim rattles me because it cuts against the very foundation of the American idea. History is not just about dates and battles. It is how we pass down the virtues we want our children to carry. When we stop teaching those lessons, societies begin to slip.

The Romans knew this. Cicero wrote of Scipio Africanus speaking to his grandson in a dream, urging him to seek justice and serve the Republic. That was a warning to Romans not to confuse power with virtue. In this episode I imagine my own dream, the Somnium Holtianum, where my Revolutionary forefather Charles Holt reminds me, and reminds us all, what liberty cost and why we must guard it.

On this episode of Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live we took a hard look at a statement from Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia that deserves more than a passing shrug. Kaine declared that our rights do not come from God or from nature, but from government.

That claim cuts right into the heart of the American idea. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence begins with the opposite truth, that we are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. Government exists to secure those rights, not to invent them. If rights are created by government, then they are nothing more than privileges that can be withdrawn the moment power shifts.

Jefferson refuted that view in 1776 and again in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Today we ask the same question he did: do rights belong to us by nature, or are they favors handed out by politicians?

Michelangelo’s David is one of those works of art that we think we know. We see him on postcards, posters, and T-shirts. He is reproduced so often that it is easy to forget what he really is. In Florence, standing seventeen feet tall, the marble figure looks less like a souvenir and more like a revelation.

This was not a statue carved from perfect stone. It came from a massive block that other sculptors had abandoned as too flawed to use. Michelangelo, only twenty-six years old, took on the challenge and spent three years chiseling away until the figure he saw inside was finally free. What emerged was not just a biblical hero, but a symbol of a city’s defiance, a republic daring to stand against powerful enemies.

Special guests Lena and Graham from Patrol reports, sit in today to bring you the story of the Turtle...

In September of 1776, New York Harbor was the stage for one of the most unusual moments in the American Revolution. The British fleet, anchored in force and confident of its dominance, faced a new kind of threat that no navy had ever encountered before. It came not from a ship bristling with cannon, but from beneath the water in a wooden contraption no larger than a barrel.

This strange invention was called the Turtle, the world’s first combat submarine, designed by David Bushnell and operated by Sergeant Ezra Lee. Their mission was simple in theory but almost impossible in execution: sneak under the British flagship HMS Eagle and attach a timed explosive charge to its hull. What followed was a mixture of daring, failure, and lasting legacy. Tonight, we tell the story of the Turtle’s attack on the Eagle, a moment where desperation, courage, and invention collided in the fight for independence.

On September 6, 1901, the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo was filled with excitement. Crowds gathered to see President William McKinley, a leader at the height of his popularity, who delighted in greeting ordinary Americans face to face. It was supposed to be a celebration of progress and prosperity, but history had other plans.

Among those waiting in line was Leon Czolgosz, a disaffected young man who had lost faith in the system and embraced anarchist ideas. Concealing a revolver in a handkerchief, he stepped forward and fired two shots that would change the course of American history.

This episode of Dave Does History takes you into that moment, the desperate week that followed, and the lasting legacy of McKinley’s assassination. It is a story of optimism cut short, of a nation in mourning, and of the sudden rise of Theodore Roosevelt.