PODCAST: HISTORY UNPLUGGED
J. Edgar Hoover’s 50-Year Career of Blackmail, Entrapment, and Taking Down Communist Spies
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.
Steppe nomads plagued the ancient world with their cavalries, but nobody perfected this form of warfare like the Mongols. A horse archer had such a deep kinesthetic relationship with his steed he could feel when all four hooves were off the ground, allowing for a perfect shot. Chroniclers say they…
Genghis Khan was an orphaned child who grew up in one of the world's most inhospitable climates despised by his tribe and family. He assembled an empire that conquered China, Iran, the Abbasid Caliphate, Russia, Eastern Europe, and successfully united both ends of the Silk Road. Learn how he did…
Welcome to part one of Mongol Week(s). In this multi-part series, we will look at the Mongolian Empire from multiple perspectives, including its unprecedented level of brutality (so many died from their attacks that untended farmland returned to forrest, scrubbing the atmosphere of carbon and causing global cooling). But we…
Chester A. Arthur, America's 21st president, lands on the lists of the most obscure chief executives. Few know anything about him besides his trademark mutton-chop sideburns. Moreover, he fell into the position unexpectedly when Garfield was assassinated; the political pros though he would be a failure as president. Maybe Arthur…
Fighting over scarce resources have fueled wars back to the Sumerian city-states squabbling over water-use rights of the Euphrates river. Did the same drive fuel America's entrance into Vietnam to take its tin? Listener Toby asks if there's any truth to the the conspiracy theory that only reason the Vietnam war…
Some disasters hurt society (Hurricane Katrina in 2005). Bigger ones permanently alter it (the Black Death in the 1300s; Mao's Great Leap Forward). The worst of disasters completely destroy a civilization and leave behind so few they take centuries to recover (the Mongolian slaughter of Iran in the…
The death of thirty percent of Europe's population in the fourteenth century permanently altered the medieval social order, and many scholars credit the Black Plague with ushering in the Renaissance. But this is not the whole story—after all, plagues have ravaged the ancient world throughout human history without a…
Fascism is loved by few, but many at least credit Mussolini's heavy-handed rule for making Italy's notoriously disastrous train system operate effectively. Was this actually true or was it more of Il Duce's propaganda?
In the year 1884, four months after Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother died, there was still a Wild West; and though it would end soon, there was yet room for one more man who had lost everything. Roosevelt boarded a train in the middle of the night. The engine chugged…
The origins of some cultural practices are lost to the mists of time. Not so the high five. We can trace it back to a specific day at a specific baseball game. From then on the world was never the same.
