At two pivotal moments in American history, waves of religious revival swept across the colonies and the young United States, reshaping faith, politics, reform movements, and the very idea of what it meant to be American. Known as the First and Second Great Awakenings, these movements transformed religion from an elite, church-centered experience into a mass, emotional, and deeply personal force.

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Nicknamed "The Little Magician," Martin Van Buren was one of the most skilled political operators in American history, and one of its most misunderstood presidents. He didn't win power through battlefield glory or soaring rhetoric, but through organization, loyalty, and an almost modern understanding of party politics.

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In this powerful interview, History Shorts welcomes Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, historian, and author Alex Storozynski to discuss his gripping book Spies in My Blood, a deeply personal exploration of espionage, resistance, and family legacy in 20th-century Europe.

Drawing on newly uncovered intelligence files, wartime records, and family history long shrouded in silence, Storozynski reveals how members of his own Polish family waged a hidden war against both Nazi and Communist regimes. The conversation moves between the intimate and the geopolitical: how secrets are passed down through generations, how totalitarian systems rely on fear and betrayal, and how ordinary people are forced into extraordinary moral choices.

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In 1857, the United States Supreme Court issued one of the most devastating rulings in its history: Dred Scott v. Sandford. At its center was Dred Scott, an enslaved man who sued for his freedom after living in free territory, only to be told by the nation's highest court that he had no rights the court was bound to respect.

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In September 1955, the most powerful man in the world, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, suffered a heart attack while in office. The news stunned the nation. At a time when heart disease was poorly understood, rarely discussed, and often treated as a private weakness, Eisenhower's illness became a public reckoning with mortality, leadership, and modern health.

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In the early hours of October 12, 1984, a bomb detonated inside the Grand Hotel in Brighton, ripping through the building just feet from where British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was sleeping. The attack, carried out by the Irish Republican Army, was not random terror. It was a meticulously planned assassination attempt aimed at decapitating Britain's political leadership in a single blow.

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For more than a century, the United States has played a decisive—often secretive—role in the rise and fall of governments around the world. From Cold War coups and covert CIA operations to regime change justified in the name of stability, democracy, or anti-communism, America's global footprint has frequently extended far beyond diplomacy.

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In the early 13th century, a nomadic warrior from the windswept steppes of Central Asia forged the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known. Under Genghis Khan and his successors, the Mongol Empire exploded outward, conquering cities, shattering armies, and redrawing the map of Eurasia in a single lifetime.

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When Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish patriot and Revolutionary War hero, wrote his final will, he entrusted it to one man he believed shared his ideals of liberty: Thomas Jefferson. The will was explicit and radical. Kościuszko directed that his American assets be used to purchase enslaved people, including Jefferson's own slaves, and free them, educate them, and set them up as independent citizens.

Jefferson accepted the role of executor. And then… he did nothing.

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In this episode of History Shorts, we sit down with acclaimed historian Andrew Burstein to discuss his newest book, Being Thomas Jefferson, a deeply human portrait of one of America's most complex founders.

Moving beyond marble statues and textbook myths, Burstein invites us inside Jefferson's inner world: his ambitions and anxieties, his brilliance and blind spots, his ideals and contradictions. Together, we explore how Jefferson understood himself, how he navigated power, friendship, politics, and aging, and how a man who wrote so eloquently about liberty could remain entangled in slavery and silence.

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