Podcast Episodes
Scroll down to see the latest episodes in our podcast History Unplugged. You can also subscribe to the show on iTunes or Android by clicking here.
Scroll down to see the latest episodes in our podcast History Unplugged. You can also subscribe to the show on iTunes or Android by clicking here.
Vikings went everywhere! Scandinavia has always been a world apart and for a millennia Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Swedes lived a remote and rugged existence among the fjords and peaks of the land of the midnight sun. But when they finally left their homeland in search of opportunity, these wanderers—including…
During the roaring twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. H Ford and Edison’s “Detroit…
No decade transformed Western Civilization like the 1490s. Before then, Europe was a gloomy continent split into factions, ripe for conquest by the Islamic world. It had made no significant advances in science or literature for a century. But after a Spanish caravel named Nina returned to the Old World…
Pundits on both the left and right proclaim our democracy is in crisis. This can be characterized by an eroding of civil institutions or politicians completely ignoring democratic norms by doing whatever is necessary to seek power and asking “where are the nuclear launch codes?” However, these challenges may not…
Of all the WW2 spies who stole atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project, none were as successfully, or as unassuming as George Koval. He was a kid from Iowa who played baseball, and loved Walt Whitman’s poetry. But he was also from a family of Russian immigrants who spent years…
For the last third of the nineteenth century, Union General Stephen Gano Burbridge, also known as the “Butcher of Kentucky,” enjoyed the unenviable distinction of being the most hated man in Kentucky. From mid-1864, just months into his reign as the military commander of the state, until his death in…
He was young, handsome, highly educated in the best English schools, a respected professional, and a first-class amateur athlete. He was also a serial killer, the Victorian equivalent of the modern-day Ted Bundy. His name was Montague Druitt—also known as “Jack the Ripper.” Druitt’s handiwork included the slaughter of at…
The United States is fraught with angst, fear, anger, and divisiveness due to our current political climate. How did we get here? And where are we headed? Before the American Revolutionary period, Americans thought that the British constitution was the best in the world. Under the British system and their…
Not many people have heard about Alfred Hubbard but he was one of the most intriguing people from the 20th Century. His story begins in 1919 when he made his first newspaper appearance with the exciting announcement that he had created a perpetual-motion machine that harnessed energy from the Earth's…
The Norman’s conquering of the known world was a phenomenon unlike anything Europe had seen up to that point in history. Although best known for the 1066 Conquest of England, they have left behind a far larger legacy. They emerged early in the tenth century but had disappeared from world…