History Unplugged Podcast

John Wayne’s 1956 film The Conqueror was a historical biopic about Genghis Khan far worse than you can imagine. The All-American legend was in full Fu Manchu make-up and depicted the Great Khan as a Mongol madman. He was given Shakespear-esque dialogue that was as grandiose as it was misapplied to the Duke loose way of speaking (one example: “I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says, take her.”) It was a film so embarrassing that it disappeared from print for over a quarter century. Worse yet, half its cast and crew met their demise bringing the film to life by being exposed to nuclear radiation while on set. To get into this story is today’s guest Ryan Uytdewilligen, author of “Killing John Wayne, the Making of the Conqueror. Filmed during the dark underbelly of the 1950s—the Cold War—when nuclear testing in desolate southwestern landscapes was a must for survival, the very same landscapes were where exotic stories set in faraway lands could be made. Just 153 miles from the St. George, Utah, set, nuclear bombs were detonated regularly at Yucca Flat and Frenchman Flat in Nevada, providing a bizarre and possibly deadly background to an already surreal moment in cinema history. We discuss the story of the making of The Conqueror, its ignominious aftermath, and the radiation induced cancer that may have killed John Wayne and many others.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The United States is the most heavily armed nation in the world, with an estimated 400 million guns in private hands. But few know that this legacy can be directly traced back to a handful of gunmakers who worked in the Springfield Armory of Massachusetts in the early 1800s. Their names became synonymous with American guns—Colt, Smith, Wesson, Winchester, and Remington among them – and they made firearms portable, powerful, rapid firing, and distinctly American. They also created the nation’s industrial base by making guns out of interchangeable parts, becoming early adopters of the assembly line process. Today’s guest is John Bainbridge, Jr., author of Gun Barons: The Weapons That Transformed America and the Men Who Invented Them. More than just keen inventors and wily businessmen, these iconic gun barons were among the founding fathers of American industry. Their visionary work in the development of rapid-fire weaponry helped propel the U.S. into the forefront of the world’s industrial powers in the mid-nineteenth century.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Growing up in the 1930s in Memphis, Tennessee, Phil Larimore is the ultimate Boy Scout—able to read maps, put a compass to good use, and traverse wild swamps and desolate canyons. His other great skill is riding horses.Phil does poorly in school, however, leading his parents to send him to a military academy. After Pearl Harbor, Phil realizes he is destined for war. Three weeks before his eighteenth birthday, he became the youngest candidate to ever graduate from Officer Candidate School (OCS) at Fort Benning, Georgia.Landing on the Anzio Beachhead in February 1944, Phil is put in charge of an Ammunition Pioneer Platoon in the 3rd Infantry Division. Their job: deliver ammunition to the frontline foxholes—a dangerous assignment involving regular forays into No Man’s Land.As Phil fights his way up the Italian boot, into southern France, and across the Rhine River into Germany, he is caught up in some of the most intense combat ever as one of the youngest officers in the U.S. Army. Toward the end of the war, after fifteen months of front-line fighting, he’s sent on a top-secret mission to find the world-famous Lipizzaner horses that Hitler has hidden away. But it’s what happens in the final stages of the war and his homecoming – particularly the advocacy for amputees and the role that those permanently disabled from war can play in society -- that makes Phil’s story so remarkable. Today’s guest is Walt Larimore, the son of Phil and author of the new book At First Light: A True World War II Story of a Hero, His Bravery, and an Amazing Horse. He tells a WW2 story about courage, combat, and resourcefulness that continues to resonate today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dozens of American leaders captured their party’s nomination for the presidency but never reached the Oval Office. How would history have changed if they had won? If Abraham Lincoln had lost to Stephen Douglas, a pro-slavery Democrat, in 1860, then Emancipation would be the last thing on his mind during the Civil War. If Richard Nixon had defeated JFK in 1960, then the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs Invasion, and Space Race could have also turned out very differently. To explore these counterfactuals is today’s guest Peter Shea, author of the book In the Arena: A History of American Presidential Hopefuls. We discuss the rise, early career, campaign, and later achievements of historical giants like Aaron Burr and Henry Clay, up through modern candidates to get insight into what it’s like to run for one of the most powerful positions in the world – and come up short.In a speech Theodore Roosevelt gave after losing the 1912 presidential election, he assigned ultimate credit “to the man who is actually in the arena…who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the 1930s, the biggest American media celebrities were four foreign correspondents: Dorothy Thompson, John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker, and Vincent Sheehan. They were household names in their heyday, as famous as their novel-writing Lost Generation counterparts, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. They helped shape what Americans knew about the world between the two World Wars by landing exclusive interviews with the epic political figures of their day, including Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, as well as Trotsky, Gandhi, Nehru, Churchill, and FDR. But they also went beyond state press releases and listened closely to dissidents in European nations and heard alarming reports of violence against these authoritarian regimes. And they made waves at home and abroad. H.R. Knickerbocker was the only foreign reporter whose dispatches Mussolini bothered to read. Goebbels called Knickerbocker an “international liar and counterfeiter.” John Gunther shot to fame with the book Inside Europe (1936), arguing that “unresolved personal conflicts in the lives of various European politicians may contribute to the collapse of our civilization.”These reporters warned their readers that the dictators wouldn’t be satisfied with the territories they conquered. They vehemently objected to policies of appeasement, and they predicted the coming of the Second World War, putting together the stories they covered—the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the Spanish Civil War that broke out the next year, the 1938 German annexation of Austria, and the carve-up of Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement—to make startlingly accurate judgments about what would come next. The story of these four journalists – and how they changed the news media irrevocably – is told by today’s guest Deborah Cohen, author of Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War. We see how these figures told the major stories of the day as reporters but also shaped them as opinion columnists and book authors. Contests over objectivity in the media aren’t new to the 21st century but age-old. These conflicts about taking sides heated up to a boiling point in the 1930s. Were reporters eyewitnesses or advocates? How far should they go in trying to shape public opinion? We’ll get into all that and more in this episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the worst natural disasters of the 20th century happened in 1990, when cyclone struck the most densely populated coastline on Earth in today’s Bangladesh. Over the course of just a few hours, the Great Bhola Cyclone would kill 500,000 people and begin a chain reaction of turmoil, genocide, war, and a U.S-Soviet standoff. The storm formed on warm ocean currents of the Indian Ocean. By the time it made landfall, it was about the size of Texas, creating a 20-foot storm surge. Survivors had to climb to the tops of balm trees, as the deluge filled apartments to the second story. But the worst was yet to come. The cyclone caused a domino effect of cascading catastrophes: flipping a democratic election in the country of Pakistan, which led to a genocide of 3 million Bengalis, a civil war, and all the way up to a nuclear brinksmanship between the American and Soviet navies in which the two nuclear superpowers were an hour away from mutually-assured destruction. In this episode we are going to explore how revolutions are not always man-made affairs, but often in response to natural disasters. We are joined by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, authors of The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation. We observe that seemingly unrelated small events can snowball not just into national revolutions but international ones or even global war (not least with the parallels to Ukraine today).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After the Allies defeated Germany in WW2, high-ranking Nazis and collaborators lived in a long, strange twilight. The lucky ones were recruited by the Allies (such as Wernher von Braun and his rocket science team who built America’s space program) but others either fled or tried to disappear back into German society.But many of the closest Nazi collaborators became scions of German industry. Today’s guest is David De Jong, author of the book Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties. He investigated the secret alliances between Germany’s richest modern business dynasties—many of which also have a large U.S. presence—and the Nazi Party during World War II. The tycoons, lauded by society today, seized Jewish businesses, procured slave laborers, and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler’s army as Europe burned around them. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz, and still control Porsche, Volkswagen, and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

War is assumed to be one of the chief features of human history. Plenty of ancient and modern writers back up this perspective (Plato said that only the dead have seen the end of war; John Steinbeck said all war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal, suggesting it was hard-wired into our brutish nature). But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if war isn’t the status quo? This is the argument made by today’s guest, who says prolonged violence between groups isn’t normal. Wars shouldn’t happen, and most of the time they don’t. We are joined with Prof. Christopher Blattman, a professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago and author of Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. He synthesizes decades of social science from politics, economics, and psychology to help people understand the reasons for war and why they are the exception to the normal state of human affairs, not the rule. On top of that, he uses game theory to explain the five reasons why wars happen. Using this schema, we discuss why Russia invaded Ukraine; why it took so long for the US to leave Afghanistan; why he thinks it’s unlikely the US will have a civil war; and what to do about the spiking gang violence in big American cities. But what he really focuses on is peace -- what of remedies that shift incentives away from violence and get parties back to dealmaking? He walks us through the places where compromises and tradeoffs have worked, highlighting successful negotiation techniques or exploring often the much-maligned peacekeeping armies actually succeed, even using cognitive behavior therapy on drug lords, with surprising results.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We often think of the late nineteenth century in Western societies as an era of immense technological and scientific change, moving from religion to secularism, from faith to logic. But today’s guest, Dominic Green, author of The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; April 19, 2022) religion in the past was much stronger, and much weirder, than we give it credit. Tsame period that introduced Darwin’s theory of evolution, democratic revolutions, mass urbanization, and the Industrial Revolutions, also brought with it new kinds of religiosity. It wasn’t an absence of religion, but instead new forms of spirituality that filled the vacuum left behind by the diminished prominence of the Church in European and American politics and life.While fueled by rapid scientific and technological innovation, these formative decades were also a time of great social strife. The same period that welcomed the invention of the telephone and the motor vehicle, the de jure abolishment of slavery and serfdom, the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, and countless seminal artistic and literary movements, was also plagued by the aggressive rise of capitalism and colonialism, subjecting entire populations to the West’s bottomless appetite for money and power. In effect, another transformation was underway: the religious revolution.Green chronicles this spiritual upheaval, taking us on a journey through the lives and ideas of a colorful cast of thinkers. He traces the influence of new Sanskrit translations of Hindu and Buddhist texts on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He follows the rise of occultism from upstate New York to Bombay to Italy. He examines the ways in which religion and nationalism entwined for Wagner and Nietzsche. We get warts-and-all portraits of the many figures who profoundly influenced the religious shifts of this era, including big names like Marx, Darwin, Baudelaire, and Thoreau, as well as some lesser-known figures such as Éliphas Levi and--my personal favorite of the bunch--Helena Blavatsky. In response to the challenges brought on by industrialization, globalization, and political unrest, these figures found themselves connecting with their religious impulses in groundbreaking ways, inspiring others to move away from the oppressive weight of organized faith and toward the intimacies and opportunities that spirituality offered.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As Spanish conquistators slowly moved through Latin America, they encountered levels of wealth that were unimaginable. Most famously, Incan Emperor Atahualpa was captured by Francisco Pizarro and paid a ransom of a room filled with gold and then twice over with silver. The room was 22 feet long by 17 feet wide, filled to a height of about 8 feet. Such events fired the imaginations of the Spanish, who created myths such as of El Dorado, the “gilded man” who, legend held, was daily powdered from head to toe with gold dust, which he would then wash from himself in a lake whose silty bottom was now covered with gold dust and the golden trinkets tossed in as sacrificial offerings.The story was fake but it lead to real expeditions, some of which were so dangerous that they nearly killed party members. Such is the 1541 expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro, Francisco’s brother, to find El Dorado, and his well-born lieutenant Francisco Orellana down the Amazon to find these riches.Today’s guest is Buddy Levy, author of River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana and the Deadly First Voyage through the Amazon. He reconstructs the first complete European exploration of the world’s largest river and the relentless dangers around every bend. Quickly, the enormous retinue of mercenaries, enslaved natives, horses, and hunting dogs are decimated by disease, starvation, and attacks in the jungle. Hopelessly lost in the swampy labyrinth, Pizarro and Orellana make a fateful decision to separate. While Pizarro eventually returns home barefoot and in rags, Orellana and fifty-seven men continue downriver into the unknown reaches of the mighty Amazon jungle and river. Theirs would be the greater glory.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.