Search a title or topic

Over 20 million podcasts, powered by 

Player FM logo

Adam Sultan Podcasts

show episodes
 
"Things work out until they don't." Ain't life a bitch? Maybe we should celebrate it nonetheless. Friends With Deficits is a fun, honest, and sometimes brutal exploration into the human condition, often over drinks. Host Adam Sultan talks with old friends and friends-to-be who are dealing with unusual, rare, or strange predicaments that bring life into focus. After all, we're all gonna die--would you like that with a twist?
  continue reading
 
Artwork

4
History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

icon
Unsubscribe
icon
icon
Unsubscribe
icon
Weekly+
 
For history lovers who listen to podcasts, History Unplugged is the most comprehensive show of its kind. It's the only show that dedicates episodes to both interviewing experts and answering questions from its audience. First, it features a call-in show where you can ask our resident historian (Scott Rank, PhD) absolutely anything (What was it like to be a Turkish sultan with four wives and twelve concubines? If you were sent back in time, how would you kill Hitler?). Second, it features lon ...
  continue reading
 
Loading …
show series
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
Shannon Mouser is the co-founder and visionary of Austin's acclaimed Viva Day Spa. In our conversation, she reflects on her humble and challenging beginnings, and shares some of the life-defining moments that ultimately shaped her journey to becoming a successful businesswoman. Viva Day Spa Support Friends with Deficits!…
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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.…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
“‘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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
“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…
  continue reading
 
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,…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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 …
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
Pseudotumor Cerebrai? Chiari Malformation? No, these aren’t Austin indie bands, but in-demand multi-instrumentalist Chris Nine would be the person to front them if they were. In this episode, we discuss her journey from growing up in a toxic town in Texas to becoming a full-time musician, with a host of maladies (and melodies) along the way! Here’s…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
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…
  continue reading
 
As the American Revolution broke out in New England in the spring of 1775, dramatic events unfolded in Virginia that proved every bit as decisive as the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill in uniting the colonies against Britain. Virginia, the largest, wealthiest, and most populous province in British North America, was led by Lord Dun…
  continue reading
 
He was a gutsy old man.” “A corker,” said another. “You couldn’t find anyone better.” They talked about him in hushed tones. “This Major Carlson,” wrote one of the officers in a letter home, “is one of the finest men I have ever known.” These were the words of the young Marines training to be among the first U.S. troops to enter the Second World Wa…
  continue reading
 
Scientists and enthusiastic amateurs first confirmed the existence of living things invisible to the human eye in the late sixteenth century. So why did it take two centuries to connect microbes to disease? As late as the Civil War in the 1860s, most soldiers who perished died not on the battlefield but of infected wounds, typhoid, and other diseas…
  continue reading
 
The story of the atomic age began decades before Robert Oppenheimer watched a mushroom cloud form over the New Mexico desert at the Trinity nuclear test in mid 1945. It begins in 1895, with Henri Becquerel’s accidental discovery of radioactivity, setting in motion a series of remarkable and horrifying events. By the early 20th century, a brilliant …
  continue reading
 
The B-29 Bomber led the Allied strategic bombing offensive against Japan, succeeding when US Bomber Command switched from high-level daytime precision bombing to low-level nighttime area bombing. The latter tactic required Superfortresses to attack their targets individually, without a formation or escorting fighters for protection. Despite this, J…
  continue reading
 
Throughout the war on the Eastern Front, there were two consistent trends. The Red Army battled to learn how to fight and win, while involved in a struggle for its very survival. But by 1944 it had a leadership that was able to wield it with lethal effect and with far more effective equipment than before. By contrast, the Wehrmacht had commenced a …
  continue reading
 
Pilgrimages are a universal phenomenon, from China’s bustling Tai Shan to the ancient Jewish treks to Jerusalem. But why? What is it about a grueling penitent march to an isolated temple that has become a prerequisite for a civilization of any size, whether Chicen Itza in the Mayan Empire or the holy sites of Mecca? To explore this is today’s guest…
  continue reading
 
Years before Jamestown planters made New World farming profitable by growing tobacco, and years before their countrymen up north in Plymouth Colony managed to overcome their starvation conditions and acclimate to New England’s growing conditions, there was an English settlement in Bermuda that was wealthier, larger, and more prosperous. It was esta…
  continue reading
 
The origins of the Hatfield-McCoy conflict (between the Hatfield family of West Virginia, led by William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield, and the McCoy family of Kentucky, led by Randolph "Old Randall" McCoy) begins with a dispute over a pig. From here, it escalated from minor disagreements to violent encounters that spanned decades, nearly sparking…
  continue reading
 
In 1845, a novel pathogen attacked potato fields across Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia—but only in Ireland were the effects apocalyptic. At least one million Irish people died, and millions more scattered across the globe, emigrating to new countries and continents. Less than fifty years after the union of Ireland with the rest of Great Britain,…
  continue reading
 
Loading …
Copyright 2025 | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | | Copyright
Listen to this show while you explore
Play