History Unplugged Podcast

When people think of Irish emigration, they often think of the Great Famine of the 1840s, which caused many to flee Ireland for the United States. But the real history of the Irish diaspora is much longer, more complicated, and more global. Today’s guest, Sean Connolly, author of “On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World,” argues that the Irish exodus helped make the modern world. Starting in the eighteenth century, the Irish fled limited opportunity at home and fanned out across America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These emigrants helped settle new frontiers, industrialize the West, and spread Catholicism globally. This led to the commodification of Irish culture, best exemplified by the ubiquity of the Irish Pub and Guinness, the popularity of River Dance, and annual Saint Patrick’s Day parades. As the Irish built vibrant communities abroad, they leveraged their newfound power—sometimes becoming oppressors themselves.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1937, two British sisters, Louise and Ida Cook, seemed headed for spinsterhood due to so many men of their generation dying in World War One. Louise was a typist, and Ida was becoming a famous romance novelist, who would go on to write over 100 books. They found refuge in their love of music, with frequent visits to Germany and Austria to see their favorite opera stars perform. But with the clouds of WW2 gathering, Europe’s opera stars, many of whom were Jewish, face dark futures under the boot heel of the Nazis.Louise and Ida formed a secret cabal along with Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss (a favorite of Hitler, but quietly working with the Cook sisters) to bring together worldwide opera aficionados and insiders in an international operation to rescue Jews in the opera. They smuggled Jewish people's jewelry and other valuables into England, thereby enabling them to satisfy British financial security requirements for immigration. By the time war arrived, they had saved over two dozen Jewish men and women from the Holocaust and spirited them to safety in England.Today’s guest is Isabel Vincent, Overture of Hope: Two Sisters’ Daring Plan That Saved Opera’s Jewish Stars from the Third Reich. We look at the Cook Sister’s daring rescue mission and what happened to those they saved in their post-war lives. It’s a story of common people who rise to the challenges of uncommon circumstances.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the wake of Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, American men famously flooded recruiting offices across the nation to join the war effort. These stories are well documented and attested by eye witnesses, but a part of this story left out or overlooked is that black Americans joined with an equal level of fervor. Over one million black men and women served in the war, playing crucial roles in every theatre of World War 2. They worked in segregated units and performed vital support jobs.This mobilization did take time. This was during the Jim Crow era, and some black Americans asked if they should risk their lives to live as what one called “Half-American.” But as the war effort grew, black Americans increasingly enlisted as part of what newspapers called the Double V Campaign, a slogan to promote the fight for democracy abroad but also in the home front in the United States and the idea that black Americans wholeheartedly contributing to the war effort would lead to legal and social equality.Today’s guest is Matthew Delmont, author of “Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad – the first-ever comprehensive history of World War II to focus on black Americans.We look at stories figures such as Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer for the NAACP, who investigated violence against black troops and veterans; Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., leader of the Tuskegee Airmen, who was at the forefront of the years-long fight to open the Air Force to black pilots; Ella Baker, the civil rights leader who advocated on the home front for black soldiers, veterans, and their families; James Thompson, the 26-year-old whose letter to a newspaper set in motion the Double Victory campaign; and poet Langston Hughes, who worked as a war correspondent for the black press. Their bravery and patriotism in the face of unfathomable racism is both inspiring and galvanizing.Some of their greatest struggles came when they returned home. They were denied housing and education. On the streets of Southern cities, black soldiers were attacked just for wearing their uniforms in public, beaten for drinking from “Whites Only” water fountains, or chased away from the voting booth by mobs. Yet without black Americans’ crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have been victorious.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Free market” is a concept beloved by many but understood in incredibly different ways. Most use Milton Friedman’s definition: the absence of any and all government activity in economic affairs. In the Cold War, free markets were understood to be a feature of liberty that set the free world apart from the planned economies of communist nations. Politicians use “free markets” as a stand-in for less government regulation or red tape or taxation. To interrogate this idea is Jacob Soll, author of “Free Market: The history of an idea.” He wonders why, in the United States, where the concept of free markets are universally loved, we’ve had two government bailouts in less than twenty years and whether our understanding of the term needs reappraisal. We discuss how we got to this current crisis, and how we can find our way out by looking to earlier iterations of free market thought. Contrary to popular narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. Roman thinkers such as Cicero believed the Roman Empire built and sustained trade. Throughout the Middle Ages, kingdoms were highly protectionist. But in the eighteenth century, thinkers insisted on free markets without state intervention, leading to a tradition of ideological brittleness.Tracing the intellectual evolution of the free market, Soll argues that we need to go back to the origins of free market ideology to truly understand it—and to develop new economic concepts to face today’s challenges.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Was it ever possible for the Soviets to win the Cold War? Looking back, its defeat seemed inevitable. The USSR had a political system hated by much of its population, a backwards economy, and harsh geographic conditions that made development challenging. But as late as the 1980s, few thought it would fall apart as catastrophically as it did.How close was the USSR to victory? Was it structurally doomed to fail, or could better internal management and more strategic blunders from the United States brought it victory? If so, how? To explore this alternate reality and its level of plausibility is Dr. Robert Farley, a professor of security and diplomacy at the University of Kentucky and author of “Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology.” Few who fought in the Cold War thought American victory was inevitable. Rather, they thought that U.S dominance – or even survival – depended on investments in cutting edge military technologies and extensive interventions across the globe, with Korea and Vietnam being only a couple of examples. We will explore the arguments on each side, and what the Soviet Union would have done if it had in fact won the Cold War.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Confederate leaders were nothing if not dreamers. They did not merely want to maintain slavery in a quiet corner of the world and hold onto antiquated traditions. They saw themselves as true progressives that would lead a neo-feudal order, becoming massively wealthy with trade, and dominate the Western Hemisphere.In the antebellum era, leading Southern politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic.Today’s guest is Adrian Brettle, author of Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World. We explore how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. While some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing toward a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war’s wake.We can’t know what would have happened if the Confederacy had a chance to implement their plans. But when we put ourselves in their shoes, seeing how they drew up plans for a future that was extremely plausible, we understand better the mindset of the leaders of the Confederacy at one of the most important moments in American history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer. That’s a quote from Hans Gruber in Die Hard, which is a very convoluted paraphrase from Plutarch’s essay collection Moralia. There’s plenty of truth in that unattributed quote from Mr. Gruber. Alexander the Great’s death at 323 BC in Babylon marked the end of the most consequential military campaign in antiquity. He left behind an empire that stretched from Greece to India, planted the seeds of the Silk Road, and made Greek an international language across Eurasia, all in 13 short years. He became and remained the biggest celebrity in the ancient world, probably only replaced by Jesus a few centuries into the Christian era. But what if he had not died as a young man? What if he had lived years or decades more? How much more influence could he have had? We have clues about Alexander’s plans for the future – and they come from Greek chroniclers Diodorus and Arrian, writing centuries after his death. They include conquering the Mediterranean coast all the way to the Pillars of Hercules (Rock of Gibraltar), building a tomb for his father Philp that would be as large as the Great Pyramid of Giza, and transplanting populations from Greece to Persia and vice versa to unite his domains through intermarriage.To explore this hypothetical scenario is Anthony Everitt, author of “Alexander the Great: His Life and Mysterious Death.” We look at the life of the most influential person in the ancient world, and explore the ramifications of his life having even more influence.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a preview of an upcoming series on this podcast that looks at the detailed post-war plans from generals and heads of state that never came about because said leaders either died or lost their war. Alexander the Great was said to have plans to launch conquest along the Mediterranean all the way to Spain and send naval expeditions around Arabia and Africa. The Confederacy wanted to dominate global trade and fortify slavery in the Western Hemisphere. The Soviet Union always had plans to spread communism around the globe. We will look at each of these plans in detail, not so much to speculate "what if" but to understand the mindsets of these people in question.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You flick on a light without thinking about it. But what about the fascinating and bizarre stories hidden behind that simple action? Fortunes were made and lost, ideas stolen, rivalries pursued, dogs electrocuted, beards set on fire, arms amputated, and decapitated human heads reanimated all with the invention and evolution of electricity.To discuss this history that we take for granted is Kathy Joseph, author of The Lightning Tamers: True Stories of the Dreamers and Schemers Who Harnessed Electricity and Transformed Our World.We look at the stories of those who made it possible, from the assistant who invented the electric light 140 years before Edison to the severed ear that led to the telephone, follow the chain of experiments, inventions, and discoveries through time. We also look at the business wars between George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla that made Coke vs. Pepsi seem tame by comparison.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The pendulum in American electoral politics never swung harder than the 1920s to 1930s. In the 1924 presidential election, Democrats lost every state outside the Jim Crow south and barely scraped together 25 percent of the popular vote. In less than 10 years, they built the New Deal Coalition, a tremendously powerful political force that included everyone from the KKK on one side to black communists on the other, with Great Plains populists, backcountry Jacksonians and multilingual urbanites in between. How do electoral coalitions that seem timeless breakdown and reform in the blink of an eye, and what can that tell us about our current political coalitions?To discuss how political realignment happens is today’s guest Timothy Shenk, author of the book Realigners. In a history that runs from the drafting of the Constitution to 2022, Shenk discusses characters from James Madison and Charles Sumner to Phyllis Schlafly and Barack Obama. The result is a provocative reassessment of the people who built the electoral coalitions that defined American democracy―and a guide for a time when figures ranging from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to MAGA-minded nationalists seek to turn radical dreams into political realities.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.