History Unplugged Podcast

The WW2 battle of Leyte Gulf was the largest naval encounter in history and probably the most decisive naval battle of the entire Pacific War, and one that saw the Imperial Japanese Navy eliminated as an effective fighting force and forced to resort to suicide tactics.Leyte was a huge and complex action, actually consisting of four major battles. And much of the accepted wisdom of the battle has developed from the many myths that surround it, myths that have become more firmly established over time, such as the “lost victory” of the Japanese advance into Leyte Gulf that never happened. To explore this battle is today’s guest, Mark Stille, author of “Leyte Gulf: A New History of the World’s Largest Sea Battle.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How did Britain – an island nation the same size as Oregon – manage to control most of the world through its colonial empires? The answer is that it didn’t, at least not directly. Britain farmed out control to its imperial holdings by granting land rights to joint-stock corporations. And many of them, like the East India Company, were sovereign nations in all but name.Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan—a legal fiction with very real power.Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, today’s guest, Philip Stern (author of Empire, Incorporated) argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Following the Napoleonic Wars, a tidal wave of independence movements hit the Western Hemisphere. The United States was afraid that expansionist powers—namely Britain, France, Germany, and Japan—might extend their empires into these regions, threatening the growth of fledgling republics in the Americas. This kicked off a century of American launching well-intentioned but bloody imperialism in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, with the annexation of Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, and military occupations of Cuba, Haiti, Panama, and other countries as a firewall against European expansion.Only after making these preemptive incursions to restore order and support democracy in its “mortal combat” against imperialism, as Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan put it, did the U.S. get bogged down in interventionist quagmires.Today’s guest is Sean Mirski, author of “We May Dominate the World: Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus.” Mirski examines a lost chapter of American foreign policy, the century following the Civil War in which the United States carved out a sphere of influence and became the only great power in modern history to achieve regional hegemony.By understanding what drove the United States’ behavior, it offers a window into the trajectory that other regional powers—including China, Russia, and Iran—may take in the coming decades.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a recently bombed, spy-infested Casablanca, Morocco, the architects of Allied victory in World War Two meet. It is January 1943, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and more assemble secretly at a resort hotel. Here, they will put together the plan to end the war – if they can make it out of the country alive. One word to the Germans, and it would be a bloodbath. Turns out, one word really was all they needed… to escape assassination. A spy in the Spanish division of German intelligence informs Berlin about the meeting at Casablanca. A wooden German officer, seemingly unfamiliar with Spanish or geography or both, translates “Casablanca” as “White House.” A slip-up that meant Hitler and his goons missed the singular chance to bomb the entire Allied command as they all assembled in one small spot. To talk about this incident and many more at the 1943 conference that determined the Allied course of the war (and the post-war world after that) is today’s guest Jim Conroy, author of “The Devilss Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan that Won the War.” We recount the the Casablanca Conference – a meeting that many historians now view as one of the most crucial conclaves directly associated with the Allied victory of World War II.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

James Garfield was the last president born in a log cabin, and was raised by a poor widow on Ohio’s rugged Western Reserve. By his late twenties, he had become a respected preacher, state senator, and college president, and, after the Civil War broke out, joined the Union Army to help eradicate the “monstrous injustice of human slavery.” Soon Garfield was the youngest general fighting for the Union, and before war’s end was its youngest Congressman—as well as one of its most progressive. He helped establish equal citizenship and voting rights for Black Americans, and became one of the most powerful leaders of the postwar Republican Party. By 1880, Garfield was not only Minority Leader of the House, but also a practicing Supreme Court attorney, the founder of the Department of Education, the creator of a proof of the Pythagorean theorem, a Senator-elect, and (unwillingly) the Republican nominee for President. A more compelling “American Dream” story among Presidents does not exist.Garfield’s personal achievements are even more notable given the turmoil surrounding his ascent to power. He was the only major American politician who held national office for all of Reconstruction and the start of the Gilded Age. A crucial pragmatist of a divided era, he even brokered the peaceful but controversial settlement of the country’s first disputed Presidential election in 1876. “To be an extreme man is doubtless comfortable,” Garfield once remarked before his assassination. “It is painful to see so many sides to a subject.” The parallels between his time and our own are easy to spot. To explore forgotten aspects of Garfield’s life is today’s guest, C.W. Goodyear, author of “President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Some of the most important moments in the lives of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison weren’t their inventions or business successes. It was their road trips through the most remote, rustic parts of America. Between 1916 and 1924, Ford, Edison, Harvey Firestone went on a number of camping trips. Calling themselves the Vagabonds, they set up campsites, took photographs, and fixed cars themselves. They were also joined by famous naturalist John Burroughs, an elderly writer with a large white beard who looked like a gold prospector.The relationship began in 1913 between Burroughs, then 75, and Ford, nearly 50, and enjoying a banner year for the Model T. Both men were influenced by the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but they disagreed about the role of the automobile in American life.To Ford’s chagrin, Burroughs wrote in an article in Atlantic Monthly that the automobile “was going to kill the appreciation of nature”; Ford believed it would open up facets of America that most people could not access. In response, Ford sent Burroughs a new Model T, which indeed changed the old naturalist’s life by prompting him to set out on wide-ranging road trips beyond his Hudson River homestead. Meanwhile, Ford and Edison, who had both “imbibed” the rural values of the Midwest, and Firestone, “the head of the largest tire manufacturing concern in the country,” were long-standing friends, busy plotting numerous new business ventures.Their road trips became increasingly ambitious to San Francisco, the Adirondacks of New York, and the Green Mountains of Vermont. Davis chronicles the memorable road trip of summer 1918, when the fast friends—who held wildly different views about the impending war—drove from the Allegheny range through West Virginia and into the “rustic magic of the Great Smoky Mountains,” all in the spirit of curiosity and exploration.To discuss these journeys, and the long-lasting impact it had on Ford, Edison, and 20th-century America, is today’s guest Wes Davis, author of “American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and John Burroughs.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Did the Confederacy lose the entire Civil War on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 because one of their generals showed up late to a battle site? That’s a very simple answer to a very complicated question, but as early as the 1870s, former Confederate generals like Jubal Early offered such an explanation, laying the war’s loss at the feet of Lt. General James Longstreet, who was hours late to a battle because of faulty intelligence delivered to him by Captain Samuel Johnston. Longstreet’s countermarch and Samuel Johnston’s morning reconnaissance are two of the most enigmatic events of the Battle of Gettysburg. Both have been viewed as major factors in the Confederacy’s loss of the battle and, in turn, the war. Yet much of it lies shrouded in mystery. To explore this event, and determine whether or not the war was really lost in one day, is today’s guest Allen Thompson, author of In the Shadow of the Round Tops. Though the Battle of Gettysburg is one of the most well-documented events in history, the vast majority of knowledge comes from the objective words and memories of the veterans and civilians who experienced it. In the Shadow of the Round Tops focuses on individual memory, rather than collective memory. It takes a personal psychological approach to history, trying to understand the people and explain why the historiography happened the way it did with new research from previously unused sources.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the years that followed Alexander the Great’s victory at Gaugamela on October 1, 331 BC, his Macedonian and Greek army fought a truly ‘Herculean’ series of campaigns in what is today Iran, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But it was in the Indus Valley, on the banks of the Hydaspes River (known today as the Jhelum) in 326 BC that Alexander would fight his last major battle against King Poros.Alexander used feints and deception to transport a select force from his army across the swollen River Hydaspes without attracting the enemy’s attention, allowing his troops the crucial element of surprise. There was a fascinating array of forces that clashed in the battle, including Indian war elephants and chariots, and horse archers and phalanx formations. Although a tactical masterpiece, the Hydaspes was the closest that Alexander the Great came to defeat, and was one of the costliest battles fought by his near- exhausted army. To examine this battle is today’s guest, Nic Fields, author of “The Hydaspes 326 BC: The Limit of Alexander the Great’s Conquests.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nobody would have thought that the United States could fight in a world war in 1938, let alone be a major reason for victory. That year, it was so politically isolationist and pacifist that its defense forces were smaller than Portugal’s, and Charles Lindbergh was so forceful in his public praise of Nazi air power that Göring decorated him with the German. But while this was going on, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the federal government to spark a dramatic expansion in domestic airplane production, and this minor effort — three years before Pearl Harbor — would in time become the arsenal of democracy, the full-throttle unleashing of American enterprise that was the secret weapon for victory in World War II. Combined with Roosevelt’s public fight with Lindbergh -- known as the Great Debate — victory at land and sea and air across the globe began at home in America. Today’s guest is Craig Nelson, author of “V is for Victory: Franklin Roosevelt’s American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II.” Revealing an era when Detroit was Silicon Valley, Ford was Apple, and Sears Roebuck was Amazon, we see how during the war years, America built 2.5 million trucks, 500k jeeps, 286k aircraft, 86k tanks, and 2.6 million machine guns. More importantly, Roosevelt said that it wasn’t these weapons that were the real arsenal of democracy, but the American people themselves.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a preview of Mark Vinet's "History of North America." Explore one of the most glorious Mesoamerican societies and encounter the Pre-Hispanic Mexico ancient culture & civilization that was the Aztec Empire with this special episode from the History of North America podcast, hosted by Mark Vinet. Subscribe to History of North America: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3NMEUTz Spotify: https://sptfy.com/Ojwu Discover more episodes of History of North America: Deep Timeline of USA, Canada and Mexico: https://apple.co/44jjZP5 / https://sptfy.com/OjwC Dinosaur Extinction to the Arrival of Humans: https://apple.co/3pFt062 / https://sptfy.com/OjwG Did China Discover America in 1421?: https://apple.co/3D5G7jZ / https://sptfy.com/OjwI Sir Ferdinando Gorges: https://apple.co/3pM3VGv / https://sptfy.com/OjwNSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.