History Shorts

Welcome back to THE HISTORIANS — the series here on History Shorts where I sit down with two leading historians for an unscripted conversation about the questions that have shaped how we understand our past.

We love turning history into a one-man show. One name on the cover. One figure on the horse. One genius who saw it all and did it alone.

But look two inches to the left and there is almost always a crowd.

In this episode of The Historians, H.W. Brands and Hampton Sides take up that tension. Brands has written the biographies we reach for when we want the man himself — Roosevelt, Grant, Franklin, Reagan. Sides has put us inside the moments that get remembered as one person's story — Kit Carson, Captain Cook, the Marines at Chosin. Both of them know how a cover gets made, and both of them know what the cover leaves out.

The conversation asks whether the lone-hero story still mostly holds, or whether we keep giving one person credit for a sergeant, a translator, a wife, a ship's crew, a supply line, a Native nation, a political machine. They talk about what is already waiting in the sources when you sit down to write, what you have to embrace or resist to make the story move, and why readers still buy the one-man version.

No script. No debate. No panel. Just two writers who have lived with these figures, talking about the myth and the crowd.

H.W. Brands is the author of biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, among many other books on American history.

Hampton Sides is the author of Blood and Thunder, Ghost Soldiers, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, On Desperate Ground, and The Wide Wide Sea.

🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian and author of Eight Days in August, Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.

⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

From 1877 to 1881, the White House served no alcohol — not at state dinners, not at receptions. For more than a century, the credit and the blame went to First Lady Lucy Hayes, remembered as "Lemonade Lucy." But the decision belonged to her husband, Rutherford B. Hayes, fresh off one of the most disputed elections in American history and determined to hold on to temperance voters. In this episode, we explore the politics behind the dry White House, the rumor of rum-spiked punch at state dinners, and how Lucy Hayes ended up with a nickname nobody seems to have used while she was alive.

🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian and author of Eight Days in August, Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.

⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast

One name on the cover. One figure on the horse. One genius who saw it all and did it alone.

This Friday, H.W. Brands and Hampton Sides sit down for The Historians to ask whether that story still holds — or whether we keep giving one person credit for the crowd standing next to him.

A short preview of the full conversation, dropping November 6 on History Shorts.

Listen to the complete episode this Friday wherever you get your podcasts, or at historyshortspodcast.com.

We remember the Statue of Liberty as a gift from France. The reality was a decade-long scramble for money on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, ordinary citizens paid for the statue through banquets, concerts, and a national lottery. In America, nobody wanted to pay for the pedestal. Congress wouldn't help, New York's governor vetoed state funds, and the statue's arm spent years as a tourist attraction charging admission. In this episode, we tell the story of the 19th-century crowdfunding hustle — and how Joseph Pulitzer, his newspaper, and more than a hundred thousand small donors finally got Lady Liberty off the ground.

🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian and author of Eight Days in August, Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.

⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

Violet Jessop was a stewardess for the White Star Line, and she was aboard for three of its worst days at sea. In 1911, the Olympic collided with a British warship. In 1912, she watched the Titanic go down from Lifeboat 16, holding a stranger's baby. In 1916, as a wartime nurse, she survived the sinking of the hospital ship Britannic by jumping from a lifeboat being dragged toward the propellers. In this episode, we meet the working woman behind the "Miss Unsinkable" legend — the toothbrush she refused to leave behind, a mysterious phone call years later, and the thirty more years she spent at sea.

🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.

⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

In this episode of History Shorts, I sit down with John Monsky, the creator, writer, and narrator of the American History Unbound series.

Monsky has developed a distinctive way of telling American history. Rather than focusing on debate, his productions immerse audiences in the lives of the people who lived through major moments. He combines live orchestras, Broadway performers, archival film and photography, historic flags and artifacts, and personal stories into large-scale performances that have filled Carnegie Hall, Boston's Symphony Hall, the Kennedy Center, and even the White House.

On November 10, PBS premieres his latest production, We Chose to Go to the Moon. Filmed live at Carnegie Hall, the special retells the Apollo era through the perspectives of the astronauts, engineers, and families who experienced it—set to the music of the 1960s and '70s and featuring flags that actually traveled to the Moon. It includes a special introduction by Ron Howard and appears on the eve of Veterans Day.

🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.

⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

July 15, 1410. Before one of the largest battles of medieval Europe, the Teutonic Knights sent two naked swords to the King of Poland as an insult. By nightfall, their Grand Master was dead and their army destroyed. But the borders barely moved. In this episode, we tell the story of the Battle of Grunwald — and of the six-hundred-year fight over what it meant, from Matejko's canvas to a German victory named for revenge in 1914, to a postage stamp Nazi Germany refused to tolerate.

🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.

⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

In 1545, the Spanish found a mountain in the Andes that seemed to be made of silver. For the next century, Spain pulled more precious metal out of the Americas than anyone in history. And yet its king went bankrupt four times. In this episode, we follow the silver from the mines of Potosí — where Indigenous workers paid the true price — through Seville, to the bankers of Genoa and the markets of China, and ask how the richest nation on earth ended up so poor.

🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.

⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

Ulysses S. Grant is remembered as the general who saved the Union, and a growing number of historians rank him among the better presidents for what he tried to do during Reconstruction. John Reeves is here to complicate that picture.

Reeves is the author of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee, A Fire in the Wilderness, and Soldier of Destiny, his account of Grant's rise and his break with slavery. His new book is Grant's Betrayal: Power, Corruption, and the Theft of the Black Hills (Pegasus Books). It argues that inside Grant's White House there was a secret plan to take the Black Hills from the Lakota, land the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty had set aside as theirs, and land the Lakota called Paha Sapa, the heart of everything that is.

We get into the Peace Policy and whether it was ever real, the 1874 Custer expedition and the gold strike, the claim that the treaty was being subverted from the start, the roles of Orvil Grant, Philip Sheridan, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Eagle Woman, the Great Sioux War and the 1877 seizure, and how this story sits next to the recent rehabilitation of Grant's presidency. A century later a U.S. Court of Claims looked back at Grant's course and the pressure put on the starving Sioux and said a more rank case of dishonorable dealing would probably never be found in our history.

Grant's Betrayal is out November 3, 2026.

John Reeves: https://john-reeves.com

🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.

⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

When Cleopatra died in 30 BC, she left behind a ten-year-old daughter named for the moon. Cleopatra Selene was marched through Rome as a prisoner, raised by the woman her father had abandoned, and watched her brothers disappear from history. Then she became a queen. In this episode, we tell the story of the forgotten daughter who survived — and who, in a kingdom created by Rome, quietly kept her mother's Egypt alive on her coins, in her court, and in the name of her son.

🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian and author of Eight Days in August, Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.

⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com