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How the Florida of the Roaring Twenties Created Modern America and Triggered the Great Depression

The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse. The decade there produced the largest human migration in American history, far exceeding the settlement of the West, as millions flocked to the grand hotels and the new...

History Has Lots of Great Ideas About What To Do During a Quarantine

Quarantines are nothing new: they’ve been used since at least the Bronze Age to prevent the spread of leprosy. In this episode (rebroadcasted from a Facebook Livestream), we’ll look at the various ways that humans rode out the plague and other disease....

How Does a Nation Have an Identity When Its People Speak Different Languages? Ask Canada (Quebec Specifically)

A listener named Liam requested an episode looking at a deep dive into his hometown of Montreal and how it came to be a center of commerce and culture in North America. We’ll do that, but rather than talk about historical buildings and fountains (and other facts...

The Civil War in the American West: When Multi-Racial Armies Fought Over Gold Mines and Indian Lands

  When people think of the American Civil War, specific images spring to mind—Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Scarlett O’Hara escaping a burning Atlanta in a hoop skirt, and blue and grey uniforms clashing on bloodied battlefields. The war is well researched, but...

St. Patrick Didn’t Get Rid of Any Snakes, But He Is The Patron Saint of Exterminators

Nearly 1,600 years after Patrick arrived on Ireland (first as a slave, then as a missionary who brought Christianity to the island), he is celebrated as the patron saint of the Emerald Isle and apocryphally believed to have eliminated snakes from the island (which he...

Coronavirus is Nothing Compared to the 1918 Spanish Flu

COVID19, aka – the coronavirus, has triggered mass quarantines and spooked markets across the globe. To date, over 3,000 have died and over 100,000 infected. But however dangerous this virus ends up being, it doesn’t belong in the same galaxy as Spanish...

The Lost History of James Madison’s Black Family

“Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president” This was Betty Kearse’s family motto; a way to remember that they were descended from James Madison, but also Coreen, a slave who worked on the Montpelier plantation whom her...

The Cold War — Not WW2 — Was Arguably the Defining Event of the 20th Century

The Cold War existed vaguely in a fifty-year stretch and lacked the defining moments of a major military conflict. However, there is a strong argument to be made that it defined the 20th century. While most point to World Wars One and Two as the most important events...

Fight House: Cutthroat White House Rivalries From Truman to Trump

Some American presidents appear to do their jobs in a more organized way than others, but the White House has always been filled with ambitious people playing for the highest stakes and bearing bitter grudges. There is a myth that staffs all compromise and put aside...

How An American Tank Gunner Successfully Dueled with Panzers in World War Two

When Clarence Smoyer is assigned to the gunner’s seat of his Sherman tank, his crewmates discover that the gentle giant from Pennsylvania has a hidden talent: He’s a natural-born shooter. At first, Clarence and his fellow crews in the legendary 3rd Armored...