PODCAST: HISTORY UNPLUGGED
J. Edgar Hoover’s 50-Year Career of Blackmail, Entrapment, and Taking Down Communist Spies
Edith Wilson is a name that may have a hollow echo in the halls of astute history buff's minds. However, it is likely a name not known, or at least, not as known as it should be among the rest of us. Mrs. Wilson might strike many as simply a…
Deborah Mitford was the youngest of the Mitford sisters, as well as the last surviving. She was known as "Debo" to her friends and family and she was born March 31, 1920, in Oxfordshire, England. Deborah wasn't in search of the diametrically opposed political bluster that would plague the communist…
Nancy Mitford's life was a soap opera, a comedy of manners, and a romantic tragedy. She and her five sisters were the scandalous “it” girls of London society in the turbulent 1920s and ’30s, The Mad, Mad Mitfords” as a 1938 newspaper headline called them, famous for being infamous. The…
Unity Mitford might be the least likely of her sisters to be forgiven when one examines the history. It can be so difficult to tell the Mitford sisters apart. As Laura Thompson points out in her steller book, "The Six", "some people may have thought that Nancy was the Fascist…
Being referred to as a "friend of Hitler" could well be the most unforgiving moniker history could bestow. Diana Mitford was indeed an uncompromising friend of Adolf Hitler's, as well the wife of Sir Oswald Mosely, the head of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). One of, and arguably the…
Jessica Mitford brought a much-needed wit and excitement to "serious" work such as politics and journalism. As the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, who interviewed Mitford in 1988, stated that through Jessica Mitford, he learned that "It's possible to write as a radical and as a committed person, without ever being…
Stanislav Petrov saved the world in 8 minutes. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration. He quite literally saved the world in 8 minutes. The following post is by guest contributor Dan McEwen, a Canadian novelist [A Force of Nature] and former corporate wordsmith who ventures into the pages of history with endless fascination. He was not…
The Velvet Revolution was one in a wave of Revolutions that preoccupied the year 1989 and that amounted to the decimation of Communist sentiment in Europe. This particular revolution greeted the world from Czechoslovakia. It was on November 16th, 1989 where 16 students in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, gathered for a peaceful…
The saga of Vaclav Havel and the non-violent overthrowing of a totalitarian regime is a wonderful and little-studied 20th-century story. It was October 5th, 1936 that Havel was born in the Czech Republic in the city of Prague. Unlike many revolutionaries, Havel was born into privilege with a celebrated family.…
By all accounts, Clemens August Graf von Galen was an exemplary figure in his life who now seems somewhat lost to history. His loud and vituperative opposition to the Nazis placed him well on the right side of history and was a great example of charming defiance. Galen was born…
