History Ago Go

A rollicking true-crime adventure about a rogue who trades in rare birds and their eggs—and the wildlife detective determined to stop him.

On May 3, 2010, an Irish national named Jeffrey Lendrum was apprehended at Britain’s Birmingham International Airport with a suspicious parcel strapped to his stomach. Inside were fourteen rare peregrine falcon eggs snatched from a remote cliffside in Wales.

So begins a tale almost too bizarre to believe, following the parallel lives of a globe-trotting smuggler who spent two decades capturing endangered raptors worth millions of dollars as race champions—and Detective Andy McWilliam of the United Kingdom’s National Wildlife Crime Unit, who’s hell bent on protecting the world’s birds of prey.

The Falcon Thief whisks readers from the volcanoes of Patagonia to Zimbabwe’s Matobo National Park, and from the frigid tundra near the Arctic Circle to luxurious aviaries in the deserts of Dubai, all in pursuit of a man who is reckless, arrogant, and gripped by a destructive compulsion to make the most beautiful creatures in nature his own. It’s a story that’s part true-crime narrative, part epic adventure—and wholly unputdownable until the very last page.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Red Falcon Premium Ale, Falcon Brewing Company, Ajax, Ontario, Canada

BOOK:  The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird
https://www.amazon.com/Falcon-Thief-Adventure-Treachery-Perfect/dp/1501191888/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1648427880&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

This book tells the history of one of America's most popular soft drinks, Mountain Dew. The 300 page book brings you from the drink's earliest beginnings in 1946 all the way through to today's newer drinks like Mountain Dew LiveWire and Code Red. Learn about the Hatfield/McCoy feud that has been brewing for years over the bragging rights to Mountain Dew. This book gives you detailed information on who invented Mountain Dew, when they did it, and the progress of the drink through the years. We start you in Johnson City, TN where you meet Charlie Gordon, Jim Archer and Bill Kilber of "Charlie, Jim and Bill" fame. Did you know that Mountain Dew started out tasting like 7Up until Bill Bridgforth changed the taste to the flavor we know today? From Tennessee we head to Marion, VA to meet Billy Jones and learn about the Tip Corporation. Then on to Lumberton, NC where you meet the massive Minges clan that still controls Pepsi in North Carolina. And then back to Knoxville on a hillbilly roller coaster ride of who did what and when. Learn about the arm wrestling match (literally) with Pepsi Corporate for fifteen million dollars to win the rights to Mountain Dew. Learn why 900 bottles have different names and how Willy the Hillbilly got his name AND you will even get to meet the real live Willy. This book and historic pictures will definitely tickle yore innards!

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Hard Mountain Dew, PepsiCo and The Boston Beer Company

BOOK:  Mountain Dew: The History
https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Dew-History-Dick-Bridgforth/dp/141966087X/ref=sr_1_2?crid=C1YQY28JICAQ&keywords=mountain+dew+dick+bridgforth&qid=1647834008&sprefix=mountain+dew+dick+bridgforth%2Caps%2C106&sr=8-2

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

Simply put: Everybody came to Polly's. Pearl "Polly" Adler (1900-1962) was a diminutive dynamo whose Manhattan brothels in the Roaring Twenties became places not just for men to have the company of women but were key gathering places where the culturati and celebrity elite mingled with high society and with violent figures of the underworld—and had a good time doing it.
 
As a Jewish immigrant from eastern Europe, Polly Adler's life is a classic American story of success and assimilation that starts like a novel by Henry Roth and then turns into a glittering real-life tale straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She declared her ambition to be "the best goddam madam in all America" and succeeded wildly. Debby Applegate uses Polly's story as the key to unpacking just what made the 1920s the appallingly corrupt yet glamorous and transformational era that it was and how the collision between high and low is the unique ingredient that fuels American culture.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Prohibition Ale, Speakeasy Ales and Lagers, San Francisco, California

BOOK:  Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
https://www.amazon.com/Madam-Biography-Polly-Adler-Icon/dp/0385534752/ref=sr_1_1?crid=17I8OO4WXSDBG&keywords=madam+polly+adler&qid=1646960168&sprefix=madam+polly+ad%2Caps%2C893&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler’s First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich. Fritzsche examines the events of the period—the elections and mass arrests, the bonfires and gunfire, the patriotic rallies and anti-Jewish boycotts—to understand both the terrifying power the National Socialists exerted over ordinary Germans and the powerful appeal of the new era they promised.

Hitler’s First Hundred Days is the chilling story of the beginning of the end, when one hundred days inaugurated a new thousand-year Reich.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Desperate Measures Red IPA, Desperate Times Brewery, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

BOOK:  Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-First-Hundred-Days-Embraced/dp/1541697456/ref=sr_1_1?crid=13GI6OJIPOII0&keywords=hitlers+first+hundred+days+by+peter+fritzsche&qid=1646603021&s=books&sprefix=hitlers+first+hund%2Cstripbooks%2C1927&sr=1-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

From the 1929 Stock Market Crash to the 2008 Financial Crisis, from victory in World War II to ignominious defeat in Afghanistan, from the birth of NATO to today's Ukraine crisis, from President Reagan's "Morning in America" to President Trump's "American Carnage," WE THE PRESIDENTS, objectively and devoid of politics, tells how American presidents from Warren G. Harding to Donald Trump have shaped America and today's world.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Presidential IPA, Diamond Bear Brewing, North Little Rock, Arkansas

BOOK:  We the Presidents: How American Presidents Shaped the Last Century
https://www.amazon.com/We-Presidents-American-Shaped-Century/dp/1737823101/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1FYM6ET9DY3CG&keywords=we+the+presidents&qid=1646008899&sprefix=we+the+president%2Caps%2C325&sr=8-2

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
nesfork.com

The incredible true story of the women who fought America’s Undark danger

The Curies’ newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.

Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these “shining girls” are the luckiest alive — until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.

But the factories that once offered golden opportunities are now ignoring all claims of the gruesome side effects, and the women’s cries of corruption. And as the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America’s early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers’ rights that will echo for centuries to come.

Written with a sparkling voice and breakneck pace, The Radium Girls fully illuminates the inspiring young women exposed to the “wonder” substance of radium, and their awe-inspiring strength in the face of almost impossible circumstances. Their courage and tenacity led to life-changing regulations, research into nuclear bombing, and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives...

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEAURED BREW:  Radioactive Fallout Hazy IPA, El Segundo Brewing Company, El Segundo, California

BOOK:  The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
https://www.amazon.com/Radium-Girls-Story-Americas-Shining/dp/1492650951/ref=sr_1_1?crid=M7L9YXFCEF6N&keywords=radium+girls&qid=1645142142&sprefix=radium+girls%2Caps%2C173&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes.

Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics.

Liberty Is Sweet is a “must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation” (Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin), from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Sweet Liberty Imperial Stout, The Bruery, Placentia, California

BOOK:  Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution
https://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Sweet-History-American-Revolution/dp/1476750378/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1644815180&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war.
 
Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary.
 
McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army.
 
This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.
 
A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the current world order.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Dosvidanya Russian Imperial Stout, Destihl Brewing, Normal, Illinois

BOOK:  Stalin's War: A New History of World War II
https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-War-New-History-World/dp/1541672798/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1643939619&sr=1-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

Two disparate Americas have always coexisted. In this thoroughly researched, engaging and ultimately hopeful story of our nation’s divergent roots, Seth David Radwell clearly links the fascinating history of the two American Enlightenments to our raging political division. He also demonstrates that reasoned analysis and historical perspective are the only antidote to irrational political discourse.

“Did my vision of America ever exist at all, or was it but a myth?” Searching for a fresh and distinctive perspective on the recent corrosion of our civic life, Radwell’s very personal and yet broadly shared question propelled his search back to our nation’s founding for a fresh and distinctive perspective on the recent corrosion of our civic life - and led to a surprising discovery. Today’s battles reflect the fundamentally divergent visions of our country that emerged at our nation’s founding and have been vying for prominence ever since. The founding principles that shaped the United States may be rooted in the Enlightenment era. But the origin of our dual Americas is a product of two distinct Enlightenments - Radical and Moderate.

American Schism begins with a quick reintroduction to the pre-Enlightenment Middle Ages and then takes readers on an in-depth journey through the revolutionary Enlightenment period including the eventual schism that began in Europe but then found its way to American shores. Radwell shows the impact of this schism on American history from the early expansion of the U.S. through Jim Crow and The Age of Trumpism.

In an optimistic and rigorous final section, Radwell lays out an analysis of our current governmental structure and a plan to move forward, demonstrating that it is only by embracing Enlightenment principles that we can build a civilized, progressive, and tolerant society - where Americans can firmly ground their different views in rationality.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Outta Line West Coast IPA, Rogue Ales, Portland, Oregon

BOOK:  American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation
https://www.amazon.com/American-Schism-Enlightenments-Secret-Healing/dp/1626348618/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1643778919&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/

When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history.

Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global phenomenon. Schrad's pathbreaking history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Thomás Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic
socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. Placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, forces us to fundamentally rethink its role in opposing colonial exploitation throughout American history as well. Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk; African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T. Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F.E.W. Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Progressives rather than puritans, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory “liquor machine” that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States.

Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have
been led to believe.

HOST:  Rob Mellon

FEATURED BREW:  Blah, Blah, Blah West Coast IPA, 21st Amendment Brewery, San Leandro, California

BOOK:  Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition
https://www.amazon.com/Smashing-Liquor-Machine-History-Prohibition/dp/0190841575/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1BBARE9VWUYKL&keywords=smashing+the+liquor+machine+a+global+history+of+prohibition&qid=1642555938&sprefix=smashing+the+li%2Caps%2C398&sr=8-1

MUSIC:  Bones Fork
https://bonesfork.com/