History Unplugged Podcast

Cicero—Rome’s Greatest Orator—Saved the Capital From Insurrection, But Couldn’t Save the Republic From Collapse

On December 7, 43 BCE, a sixty-three-year-old man was carried in a litter down a woodland path near the Italian coast, fleeing soldiers who had been sent to kill him. Whe

Do Napoleons or Hitlers Really Matter? Whether Leaders Make History or Their Societies Make Them

On March 13, 1930, Adolf Hitler was sitting in the passenger seat of his chauffeur-driven car when a trailer truck sped through an intersection and struck the vehicle, pu

Washington’s Most Revolutionary Moment Was Surrendering Absolute Power

Washington’s most extraordinary achievement was not winning the Revolutionary War or helping found a new nation. It was something far rarer: He gave up power, twice. Firs

Japan's Military Refused to Surrender Even After Two Atomic Bombs and a Coup Nearly Succeeded

At 1:15 p.m. on April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, when his face suddenly fell forward. He raised his

Is Patton America’s Most Overrated General?

George S. Patton is considered one of America’s greatest generals for his blitzes across Europe in World War 2. He is celebrated for breaking out of Normandy because his

Stalin’s Ordered Killing of Trotsky Created the Playbook for Modern Political Assassination

Ramón Mercader expected to easily kill Leon Trotsky, silently and instantly. He had rehearsed the blow for months, practiced the angle, tailored a pocket into his raincoa

Belisarius Reconquered Africa and Italy for Rome. Why Did Rome Destroy Him for It?

In 533, a twenty-eight-year-old general named Belisarius sailed from Constantinople with 15,000 men to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals, a kingdom that had held it

Summer of Death: America’s Heat Wave of 1936 That Killed 12,000

A coast guardsman named Earl Cunningham froze to death on Lake Michigan trying to rescue five fishermen trapped on a drifting ice sheet. His last words were "I wish I cou

New Archeological Tech Is Rewriting Everything We Know About the Ancient Past

Humanity’s story from 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC (from the end of the ice age to the beginning of civilizations) follows this pattern: primitive hunter-gatherers slowly progre

The AI Jobs Panic of the 1890s: The Linotype Triggered Fears of Mass Layoffs but Created an Explosion in Newspaper Work

One of the most feared inventions ever was the Linotype machine. Debuting in 1886, it was designed to eliminate tens of thousands of newspaper jobs, specifically the hand

April 1945 in Berlin: The Final Month of the Third Reich

When Heinrich Himmler was appointed to command the army group defending Berlin in January 1945, his operations officer described briefing him as "talking about colors wit

Writing Was Invented for Accounting and Scrawled on Baboon Bones

A three-inch baboon bone bearing twenty-nine deliberate incisions was pulled from a South African mountain range in 1970. It is approximately 43,000 years old, and micros

It Took Russia 300 Years To Destroy the Final Pieces of Genghis Khan’s Empire

Before Ivan was the Terrible, he was a young tsar who had tried and failed to destroy the last fragments of Genghis Khan’s Empire in the Volga River Valley. In October of

The Wunderkind George Forster: Voyaging with Captain Cook at 10 and Dining with Benjamin Franklin in Paris in his 20s

 A ten-year-old boy gallops across the Russian steppe on a Kalmyk horse, collecting plants for his father while German settlers starve in earth dugouts along the Volga. S

Every 2 Weeks a Language Dies: Whether By Assimilation or Targeted Extinction

When the 7.8 magnitude earthquake tore through southeastern Turkey in 2023, the government posted that it would provide translation support in seven languages: Turkish, A

The Boston Tea Party Was a Protest Against the East India Company Being Too Big to Fail

The Boston Tea Party is the most misunderstood event in American history. Every schoolchild learns it was an antitax protest, proof that Americans have always hated payin

The 1873 Global Financial Meltdown that Cause 20 Years of Deflation and Destroyed 2 Empires

On May 9, 1873, as the Vienna Stock Exchange collapsed and thousands of speculators were wiped out in a single afternoon, young Salbert von Rothschild and two colleagues

Johnny Appleseed's Trees Were for Booze, Not Pies, and He Dressed Like a Hobo for Marketing Purposes

The Disney version of Johnny Appleseed has a cheerful barefoot man in a tin pot hat scattering apple seeds for grateful pioneers to bake into pies. The real John Chapman

All the World’s Empires Became Nations in Less Than 100 Years, and What That Means for the Next 100

For the last 5,000 years, empires ruled the world — Rome administered hundreds of languages across three continents, and the Ottomans governed Christians, Jews, and Musli

Five Cambridge Graduates Became Soviet Spies and Built Stalin’s Empire

The Cambridge Five did more damage to the Western Bloc than any other intelligence outfit of the Cold War. They were five Cambridge graduates who drank gin at the right c