PODCAST: HISTORY UNPLUGGED
J. Edgar Hoover’s 50-Year Career of Blackmail, Entrapment, and Taking Down Communist Spies
Podcast episodes from History Unplugged.
“Traitor!” “Failure!” “Bungling fool!” Southern newspapers hurled these sentiments at Confederate General John C. Pemberton after he surrendered the fortress of Vicksburg—the key to controlling the Mississippi River during the Civil War. But were they justified in their accusations? Today I'm talking with Dr. Samuel Mitcham, author of Vicksburg: The…
Long before Thanos snapped his fingers in Avengers: Infinity War, another villain successfully killed half of humanity. Malaria is a simple parasite, transmitted by a mosquito bite. But this deadly disease, which has been around as long as homo sapiens, has killed more than all wars and natural disasters…
Slavery died a long death in the Western World. Abolitionists began mobilizing in the 1700s (chief among them Quakers and other Protestant sects) but took decades of activism, book making, and even armed resistance to succeed. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century America dealt with the contradiction of being founded…
Slavery predates European entry into the Atlantic world in the Age of Exploration, but the system that developed during the 16th and 17th centuries was an arguably more inhumane and racially tinged institution than anything that had previously existed before. The first English colonists in the Americas believed they could…
As the trans-Atlantic slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas flourished in the 1500s, there was another slave trade that operate on an even larger scale. It was the capture of Europeans by north-African Muslims. Barbary Pirates enslaved an estimated 1 million Europeans in the period from 1500 to…
The image of the slave trade is a white slaver capturing African tribesmen, packing them like corkwood into a ship, selling them in the Antebellum South, and having a plantation owner work them to death. All of this took place on a scale of millions in the African slave trade…
This is an anthology episode that looks at the experiences of Winston Churchill and Gen. George S. Patton before and during World War Two. Specifically this episode will explore Patton's experiences in World War One as a tank commander Churchill's wilderness years in the 30s in which many thought his…
Falling comrades, savagery of war, and the intense will to prevail in battle faced young Bill Chapman when he stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. For the following eleven months Chapman served in the most hazardous duty in the Army—dodging Nazi captures and fighting for his…
The D-Day landing of June 6, 1944, ranks as the boldest and most successful large-scale invasion in military history. On June 6, as Operation Overlord went forward, roughly 160,000 Allied troops crossed the English Channel, supported by seven thousand ships and boats, and landed on the coast of Normandy. The seaborne invasion…
Benjamin Franklin was a world traveler, consummate learner, and a polymath extraordinaire; the Founding Father was a printer, scientist, inventor, diplomat, postmaster general, educator, philosopher, entrepreneur, library curator, and America's first researcher to win an international scientific reputation for his studies in electrical theory. He even made contributions to…
