Best Doing the project the day before its due Podcasts (2025)

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The Unhealed Wounds of WW2 POWs and Combat Veterans 50:10

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4d ago50:10

50:10

Nearly 16.4 million Americans served in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II, and for millions of survivors, the fighting left many of them physically and mentally broken for life. There was a 25% death rate in Japanese POW camps like Bataan, where starvation and torture were rampant, and fierce battles against suicidal Imperial Japanese forces, l…

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Robert McNamara Thought Enough Data Could Win Any War. Instead, It Led America to the Vietnam Quagmire 1:00:21

6d ago1:00:21

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Robert S. McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense during JFK and LBJ’s administrations, and one of the chief architects of the Vietnam war, made a shocking confession in his 1995 memoir. He said “We were wrong, terribly wrong.” McNamara believed this as early as 1965, that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. Yet, instead of urging U.S. forces to exit, h…

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The Philistine Connection: Do the Roots of October 7 Go Back 3,000 Years? 36:24

11d ago36:24

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The October 7th attacks of Hamas on Israel were an unprecedented, surprise incursion by land, sea, and air that stunned the world and prompted Israel to declare war. The attacks, which included massacres in Israeli communities and a music festival, resulted in the deaths of over 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and the capture of some 251 hosta…

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The Thucydides Trap: How A Rising Athens Made The Peloponnesian War Inevitable 46:29

13d ago46:29

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The Peloponnesian War is considered one of the most famous wars of the ancient world not only because it was a massive and devastating conflict that reshaped the Greek world, but also because its thorough documentation by the historian Thucydides transformed how we understand history and war. On the face of it, the Peloponnesian War, fought over 20…

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The Free French Army in North Africa, 1940-1945 49:37

14d ago49:37

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One of the principal architects of Allied Victory in North Africa during World War Two was French General Louis Dio. His importance in North Africa lies in his role as a key leader of the Free French forces and a trusted subordinate to General Philippe Leclerc. He participated in every battle from Douala to the Fezzan Campaigns in the early 1940s. …

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An Inventor’s Quest to Build a Pneumatic Subway System in 1870s New York 45:11

20d ago45:11

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Alfred Beach built America’s first operational subway in secret beneath 1860s Manhattan, decades before the city’s official electric subway line in 1904. He designed and commissioned a 300-foot-long, eight-foot-diameter tunnel 20 feet underground, built with a tunneling machine he invented for this purpose. The car moved quietly and silently, pushe…

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Spirited Rivalry: Did Ireland or Scotland Invent Whisky? 48:53

25d ago48:53

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There’s a divide between Scotland and Ireland as fierce as the Protestant/Catholic split during the Thirty Years’ War or the battles between Sunnis and Shias in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It’s the debate over who invented whisky. Both Ireland and Scotland claim to have originated the spirit. Ireland cites its early monastic traditions and the …

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The Horse That Ate the Legion: Rome’s Cavalry's Triumph Over the Infantry 41:21

27d ago41:21

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The cavalry 'wings' that probed ahead of the Roman Army played a key role in its campaigns of conquest, masking its marching flanks and seeking to encircle enemies in battle. However, at the very beginning of Rome’s history, it didn’t even have a cavalry, and relied on Greek-style phalanx formations instead. It began as a small cavalry arm provided…

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Beyond Joan of Arc and Agincourt: How the 100 Years War Crushed Medieval Europe and Launched its Global Order 58:41

1M ago58:41

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Modern France and Britain were forged in the fires of the Hundred Years War, a century-long conflict that produced deadly English longbowmen, Joan of Arc’s heavenly visions, and a massive death toll from Scotland to the Low Countries. The traditional beginning and end of the Hundred Years' War are conventionally marked by the start of open conflict…

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Reverse Ellis Island: American Migrants Who Fought for Mussolini and Built Stalin’s USSR 38:33

1M ago38:33

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By History Unplugged

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Don’t Use Rome as a Model of Why Societies Collapse; Use Crime Syndicates and Somalia Instead 49:42

1M ago49:42

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12,000 years ago, human history changed forever when the egalitarian groups of hunter-gathering humans began to settle down and organize themselves into hierarchies. The few dominated the many, seizing control through violence. What emerged were “Goliaths”: large societies built on a collection of hierarchies that are also terrifyingly fragile, col…

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A Union General Found a Loophole in the Fugitive Slave Act, Causing 1 Million Slaves to Flee North 45:21

1M ago45:21

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After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, enslaved people feared running away to the North, as their return was mandated, and they faced brutal punishment or even death upon return to deter others from escaping. But that changed during the Civil War. Black slaves in Confederate Virginia began hearing rumors that they could receive their …

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The Civil War’s Brutal Finale: A War of Attrition as Terrible as WW2-Pacific and the Napoleonic Wars 47:55

2M ago47:55

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In 1864, the American Civil War reached a critical juncture with Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, including the brutal battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, which claimed over 60,000 casualties, surpassing Gettysburg as the Americas’ deadliest clash. Abraham Lincoln faced a contentious re-election against George B. McClellan, while Confe…

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Camp David Looks Like a 1970s Lakeside Retreat. Why is it the Site of the World’s Biggest Political Summits? 41:42

2M ago41:42

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Camp David, nestled in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, spans about 125 acres, making it significantly smaller than other presidential getaways like Lyndon B. Johnson’s sprawling 2,700-acre Texas ranch or the vast 1,000-acre Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. Compared to grand diplomatic venues like the White House or international summit …

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How British Scientists' Self-Experiments on Underwater Rebreathing Created D-Day Submarine Tech (And Nearly Killed Them in the Process) 53:29

2M ago53:29

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In August 1942, over 7,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, in a largely forgotten landing, with only a small fraction surviving unscathed. The raid failed due to poor planning and lack of underwater reconnaissance, which left the Allies unaware of strong German coastal defenses and underwater obstacles. Inadequate submersible…

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Over 200,000 Allied Troops Tried and Failed to Crush the Soviet Revolution After World War One 41:20

2M ago41:20

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The Allied Intervention into the Russian Civil War remains one of the most ambitious yet least talked about military ventures of the 20th century. Coinciding with the end of the first World War, some 180,000 troops from several countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Italy, Greece, Poland, and Romania, among others…

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How the U.S. Occupation of Japan After WW2 Forged the Most Durable Peace of the 20th Century 1:00:19

2M ago1:00:19

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During World War II, the U.S. and Japan were locked in bitter hatred, fueled by propaganda portraying each other as ruthless enemies, exemplified by dehumanizing "Tokyo Woe" posters in the U.S. and Japanese depictions of Americans as barbaric invaders. After the war, the feelings seemed to turn 180 degrees overnight. By the early 1950s, American se…

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Homer Couldn't Have Written the Iliad, But He Probably Dictated it Word for Word 52:53

2M ago52:53

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The Iliad is the world’s greatest epic poem—heroic battle and divine fate set against the Trojan War. Its beauty and profound bleakness are intensely moving, but great questions remain: Where, how, and when was it composed and why does it endure? To explore these questions is today’s guest, Robin Lane Fox, a scholar and teacher of Homer for over 40…

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Depression-Era Planners Thought They’d End Poverty with Public Housing. Instead, They Created the Projects 41:02

2M ago41:02

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In the 1930s, New Deal-era technocrats devised a solution to homelessness and poverty itself. They believed that providing free or low-cost urban housing projects could completely eliminate housing scarcity. Planners envisioned urban communities that would propel their residents into the middle class, creating a flywheel of abundance where poverty …

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The Alabaman Jacksonians Who Rejected the Confederacy and Marched with Sherman to the Sea 49:01

2M ago49:01

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As the popular narrative goes, the Civil War was won when courageous Yankees triumphed over the South. But an aspect of the war that has remained little-known for 160 years is the Alabamian Union soldiers who played a decisive role in the Civil War, only to be scrubbed from the history books. One such group was the First Alabama Calvary, formed in …

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Frederick Douglass’s Private Writings on Abraham Lincoln, His Strong Critiques and Stronger Praise 49:05

2M ago49:05

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Frederick Douglass made the strongest arguments for abolition in antebellum America because he made the case that abolition was not a mutation of the Founding Father’s vision of America, but a fulfillment of their promises of liberty for all. He had a lot riding on this personally – Douglas was born into slavery in Maryland around 1818, escaped to …

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The Industrial Revolution Was Supposed to Lead to Unlimited Free Time But Only Gave Us Smartphones and Endless Dopamine 31:11

3M ago31:11

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Free time, one of life’s most important commodities, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty minutes? Despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it.…

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James Cook Mapped the Globe Before Dying At the Hands of Hawaiians Who Once Worshipped Him 56:56

3M ago56:56

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Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan are known for discoveries, but it was Captain James Cook who made global travel truly possible. Cook was an 18th-century British explorer who mapped vast regions of the Pacific, including New Zealand and Australia’s eastern coast, with unprecedented accuracy. He meticulously conducted soundings to measure…

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American Anarchists: The Original Domestic Extremists 39:37

3M ago39:37

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In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were heroes to many working-class immigrants. But to many others, anarchism was a terrifyingly foreign ideology. Determined to crush it, gover…

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100 Years Before Ford v. Ferrari, a Horse Breeder Revolutionized Thoroughbred Racing Through a Similar Obsession With Progress 1:14:41

3M ago1:14:41

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Horse racing was the most popular sport in early America, drawing massive crowds and fueling a cultural obsession with horses’ speed and pedigree. In the early 1800s, every town in America with a few thousand people had a horse racing track, with major cities drawing crowds of up to 50,000. In the midst of this was Alexander Keene Richards (1827–18…

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Western Rome Fell Due to Germanic Immigration, Mass Inflation, and a Bloated Bureaucracy 39:05

3M ago39:05

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It took little more than a single generation for the centuries-old Roman Empire to fall. In those critical decades, while Christians and pagans, legions and barbarians, generals and politicians squabbled over dwindling scraps of power, two men – former comrades on the battlefield – rose to prominence on opposite sides of the great game of empire. R…

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Why the Atomic Bombing of Japan is as Justified in 2025 as it was in 1945 52:29

3M ago52:29

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It's been 80 years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the question of whether or not those bombings were justified has never been more contentious. That wasn't the case in the immediate aftermath: 85% of the American public approved the decision to bomb the cities in 1945, but this has dropped to 56% in more recent years, particularl…

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Surviving the Siege of Leningrad with Sawdust Bread and Iron Determination 46:54

3M ago46:54

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The first year of the siege of Leningrad that began in September 1941 marked the opening stage of a 900-day-long struggle for survival that left over a million dead. The capture of the city came tantalizingly close late that year, but Hitler paused to avoid costly urban fighting. Determined to starve Leningrad into submission, what followed was a w…

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Depression-Era Governor Huey Long Wanted to Confiscate Individual Fortunes Over $1 Million, Possibly Leading to His 1935 Assassination 1:05:41

3M ago1:05:41

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The most radical piece of legislation in the 20th century was Louisiana Governor Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth Plan,” a bold proposal to confiscate individual fortunes exceeding $1 million to fund healthcare, free college education, and a guaranteed minimum income for families struggling through the Great Depression—a plan so radical it sparked the…

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Rope Equals Fire as Humanity’s Most Important Invention: It Allowed Hunting Mammoths and Building Pyramids 55:36

3M ago55:36

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“‘Rope!’ muttered Sam[wise Gamgee]. ‘I knew I’d want it, if I hadn’t got it!’” Sam knew in the Lord of the Rings that the quest would fail without rope, but he was inadvertently commenting on how civilization owes its existence to this three-strand tool. Humans first made rope 50,000 years ago and one of its earliest contributions to the rise of ci…

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The Scopes Trial Was Entirely Orchestrated But Became an Unintended 1920s Culture War Touchpoint 56:43

4M ago56:43

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July 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial – a trial that exposed profound divisions in America over religion, education, and public morality. This was a legal case in Dayton, Tennessee, where high school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution, violating the state's Butler Act. The Butler Act was a 1925 Tennessee l…

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The Panda Was First Discovered By Theodore Roosevelt’s Sons During a 9-Month Expedition in Himalayan China 42:05

4M ago42:05

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In the late 1920s, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and his younger brother Kermit, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, wanted fame and glory apart from the family spotlight. They were seeking the “empty spots” on the maps, the areas that had yet to be explored and described by Westerners. From these remote places, they hoped to bring back exotic animals t…

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How Do We Really Know What Happened in the Past When Many Historians Were Propagandists and AI is Fabricating Everything Else? 48:46

4M ago48:46

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“History is written by the winners.” This aphorism is catchy and it makes an important point that a lot of what we know about history was written with an agenda, not for the purposes of informing us. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. There are many times that the so-called “losers” wrote the histories remembered today. After the American Civil War, Sou…

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Eugénie de Montijo: The Spanish Empress Who Built Modern Paris and is Blamed For Imperial France’s Downfall 45:45

4M ago45:45

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Thirty-three years after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire, his nephew (known as Napoleon III) became the first president of France before becoming emperor himself. Although he was a capable ruler and reformer, Napoleon III’s failed military campaigns, especially France’s loss to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, led to his defeat, capture,…

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John Adams: The Most Influential Yet Overlooked Founding Father? 38:38

4M ago38:38

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John Adams is arguably America’s most underrated Founding Father. He has no currency that bears his image. No national holidays celebrate his birth. He’s nearly never named as anyone’s favorite president. And he has no dedicated memorial in Washington, D.C. Despite this, he was perhaps the most influential early American, rivaling Washington, Jeffe…

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Why Thomas More -- Henry VIII’s Hatchet Man and Heretic Hunter -- Was Himself Executed For Heresy After the English Reformation 49:11

4M ago49:11

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Thomas More was one of the most famous—and notorious—figures in English history. Born into the era of the Wars of the Roses, educated during the European Renaissance, rising to become Chancellor of England, and ultimately destroyed by Henry VIII, he hunted Protestants for heresy and had them burnt at the stake in the final years of Catholic England…

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Don’t Look to 1903s Germany to Understand American Populism. Look to 1830s New York Revivals Instead. 1:03:45

4M ago1:03:45

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Something strange happened in Upstate New York during the 1830s. This area was called the "Burned-Over District" because so many fiery religious revivals swept through that it was metaphorically burned over. This region became a key source of the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant revival movement marked by emotional preaching and mass conversion…

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Operation Barbarossa Saw Millions of POW Executions, Civilian Murders, and Starvation Deaths 52:35

4M ago52:35

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Operation Barbarossa, launched by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941, aimed to swiftly conquer the Soviet Union, targeting key cities like Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv. Hitler reportedly said a meeting with his generals before the campaign began "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down," With German forces …

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Pistol Duels Existed Across the 19th-Century World, But Only the Chaos of the American West Produced Gunfighters 51:30

5M ago51:30

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To understand American history and its deep-seated relationship with violence, we must look to the last three decades of the 1800s in the American West, which had the highest murder rate per capita in American history. And it all boils down to one place: Texas. Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to …

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Rome Definitively Eclipsed Greece in 197 BC By Making the Alexandrian Phalanx/Cavalry Obsolete 46:35

5M ago46:35

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The battle of Cynoscephalae represents a key moment in the history of the Greco-Roman world. In this one battle the Macedonian hold over mainland Greece was broken, with the Roman Republic rising in its place as the pre-eminent power in the Greek East. At Cynoscephalae, the proud Macedonian kingdom of Antigonid monarch Philip V was humbled, its arm…

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Exploring the Wreckage of the Britannic (the Titanic’s Sister Ship) and Discovering Why It Sunk in 50 Minutes 48:25

5M ago48:25

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The RMS Titanic is history’s most famous shipwreck, but it wasn’t the only ship of its kind. The White Star Line built two other nearly identical vessels: The RMS Olympic and Britannic. The Olympic carried passengers until 1935 and can be visited today. The Brittanic sank only four years after her sister ship the Titanic off the Greek island of Kea…

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Did Tariffs Make America a Manufacturing Powerhouse Or Trigger Economic Misery and Stifle Global Trade? 44:55

5M ago44:55

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At a time when debates over tariffs, regulation, and the scope of government are back at center stage. Is this time in American history unprecedented, or can we find parallels in the past? For example, has trade “hollowed out” U.S. manufacturing—or have fact tariffs like the Corn Laws in Britain hurt working-class families the most? Was the Great D…

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Alan Pinkerton: The Private Detective Who Saved Lincoln’s Life and Built America’s Contract Security State 50:07

5M ago50:07

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Alan Pinkerton is perhaps the most over-achieving barrel-maker who ever lived. After practicing his trade in rural Illinois for a few years in the 1850s, the Scottish immigrant busted up a counterfeiting ring, which got the attention of Chicago’s police department, offering him a job as a detective. From here he worked as an intelligence agent in t…

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MacArthur’s Plans to Drop 50 Nuclear Bombs During the Korean War 50:45

5M ago50:45

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The Korean War came dangerously close to going nuclear, and if would have if Gen. Douglas MacArthur had gotten his way. He proposed using 30 to 50 nuclear primarily to targeting air bases, depots, and supply lines across the neck of Manchuria to create a radioactive barrier and halt Chinese and North Korean advances. This would have killed millions…

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The Many Ways That Rome Never Fell and Lives On Today 37:16

5M ago37:16

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Rome’s Western Empire may have fallen 1,600 years ago, but its cultural impact has a radioactive half-life that would make xenon jealous. Over a billion people speak Latin (or at least a Latin-derived language). Governments around the world self-consciously copy Roman buildings and create governments that copy the imperial senate. Every self-aggran…

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Hooves of History: How Horses Created Ancient Warfare, Built the Silk Road, and Became the Dividing Line Between Nobleman and Peasant 44:28

5M ago44:28

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In order to become rich, powerful, and prestigious in the pre-modern world, nothing mattered more than horses. They were the fundamental unit of warfare, enabling cavalry charges, and logistical support. They facilitated the creation of the Silk Road (which could arguably be called the “Horse Road”) since China largely built it to enable the purcha…

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Moonshining Survived (and Thrived) At Least Two Decades After Prohibition Ended 45:47

6M ago45:47

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The Prohibition era (1920–1933), enacted by the 18th Amendment, birthed an overnight economy of moonshiners who distilled and distributed homemade liquor to meet America’s insatiable demand for alcohol, transforming rural farmers and opportunists into underground entrepreneurs who supplied speakeasies. But this new economy didn’t disappear after Pr…

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How to Cross the Sahara as a Tenth-Century Cameleer 53:08

6M ago53:08

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What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of lang…

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How American Slaves Fled By Sea, Whether as Stowaways or Commandeering a Confederate Ship 46:06

6M ago46:06

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As many as 100,000 enslaved people fled successfully from the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South, finding safe harbor along a network of passageways across North America via the Underground Railroad. Yet many escapes took place not by land but by sea. William Grimes escaped slavery in 1815 by stowing away in a cotton bale on a ship from Sav…

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Did WW2 Heads of State Want to Preserve Their Empires As Much as Defend Their Homelands? 47:51

6M ago47:51

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2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of Germany’s surrender and the fall of the Third Reich. Likewise, World War II is the single most studied conflict in human history. But most Western accounts offer a one-dimensional interpretation: the war was a noble crusade against fascism, creating a convenient parable about good and evil. But this depiction…

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