History Unplugged Podcast

Before Amsterdam, there was a dazzling North Sea port at the hub of the known world: the city of Antwerp. For half the sixteenth century, it was the place for breaking rules – religious, sexual, intellectual. Known as Europe’s Babylon, the once-humble Belgian city had an outsized role in making the modern world.In the Age of Exploration, Antwerp was sensational like nineteenth-century Paris or twentieth-century New York. It was somewhere anything could happen or at least be believed: killer bankers, a market in secrets and every kind of heresy.And it was a place of change—a single man cornered all the money in the city and reinvented ideas of what money meant. Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition needed Antwerp for their escape, thanks to the remarkable woman at the head of the grandest banking family in Europe. She set up an underground railroad for Jews so that they could flee persecution and find safe passage to friendlier lands like Poland or the Ottoman Empire.Thomas More opened Utopia there, Erasmus puzzled over money and exchanges, William Tyndale sheltered there and smuggled out his Bible in English until he was killed. Pieter Bruegel painted the town as The Tower of Babel.But when Antwerp rebelled with the Dutch against the Spanish and lost, all that glory was buried. The city that unsettled so many now became conformist. Mutinous troops burned the city records, trying to erase its true history.To discuss the growth and decline of this city is today’s guest is Michael Pye, author of Europe’s Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s Golden Age.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today is a group discussion in which the four guys that make up the Parthenon Podcast Network (Steve Guerra from Beyond the Big Screen, Richard Lim from This American President, James Early from Key Battles of American History, and Scott Rank from History Unplugged) discuss a beloved hypothetical that our listeners have separately asked each of us many times: if you could eliminate one person from our timeline, who would it be?And to force us to think outside of the box, we've eliminated Hitler as a choice. That one is too obvious.Check out all our shows at parthenonpodcast.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From politics to fashion, their style still intrigues us. WASPs produced brilliant reformers—Eleanor, Theodore, and Franklin Roosevelt—and inspired Cold Warriors—Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and Joe Alsop. They embodied a chic and an allure that drove characters like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby mad with desire.They were creatures of glamour, power, and privilege, living amid the splendor of great houses, flashing jewels, and glittering soirées. Envied and lampooned, they had something the rest of America craved.Yet they were unhappy. Descended from families that created the United States, WASPs felt themselves stunted by a civilization that thwarted their higher aspirations at every turn. They were the original lost generation, adrift in the waters of the Gilded Age. Some were sent to lunatic asylums or languished in nervous debility. Others committed suicide.Yet out of the neurotic ruins emerged a group of patriots devoted to public service and the renewal of society. In a new study of the WASP revolution in American life, today’s guest Michael Knox Beran brings the stories of Henry Adams and Henry Stimson, Learned Hand and Vida Scudder, John Jay Chapman and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to life. These characters were driven by a vision of human completeness, one that distinguishes them from the self-complacency of more recent power establishments narrowly founded on money and technical know-how.WASPs shaped the America in which we live: so much so that it is not easy to understand our problems without a knowledge of their mistakes. They came to grief in Vietnam and through their own toxic blood pride, yet before they succumbed to the last temptation of arrogance, they struggled to fill a void in American life, one that many of us still feel.For all their faults, they pointed—in an age of shrunken lives and diminished possibility—to the dream.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place―in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in rocks, where boiling hot jets of mineral-rich water gushed out from cracks in the ocean floor.Although these membranes were leaky, the environment within them became different from the raging maelstrom beyond. These havens of order slowly refined the generation of energy, using it to form membrane-bound bubbles that were mostly-faithful copies of their parents―a foamy lather of soap-bubble cells standing as tiny clenched fists, defiant against the lifeless world. Life on this planet has continued in much the same way for millennia, adapting to literally every conceivable setback that living organisms could encounter and thriving, from these humblest beginnings to the thrilling and unlikely story of ourselves.Today guest, Henry Gee, author of A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, zips through the last 4.6 billion years to tell a tale of survival and persistence that illuminates the delicate balance within which life has always existed. We discuss the following:Dinosaurs In Flight. It’s 25 years since the discovery of the first feathered dinosaurs and Henry was (to quote Hamilton) In The Room Where It Happened, quite literally. Learn about Sinosauropteryx, how they came to be published and how it transformed our ideas of dinosaurs, birds, and flight.Whether We Are We Really Doomed As someone who studies the Earth from its beginning, Henry believes that the current crisis of climate and extinction, although real, has been overplayed and that we can turn the tide. In the context of the Earth’s history, a rise of a degree or two amounts to no more than a hill of beans; and calls to ‘Save the Planet’ look like a case of colossal narcissistic hubris. One might as well say ‘Stop Plate Tectonics’, or even ‘Stop Plate Tectonics – NOW.’ Henry is one of the few scientists who believes there is still hope, and, perhaps, some cause for cautious optimism.The Beowulf Effect. The Old English poem Beowulf is a vital source of information on history, language, story and belief from the darkest of the Dark Ages. Only one copy is known to exist (it’s in the British Library), and that was rescued from a fire that is known to have destroyed many other manuscripts. If Beowulf didn’t exist, how much would we know about that period? It’s a sobering thought that between 410 and 597, no scrap of writing survives from what is now England. This is an interval comparable in length between now… and the Napoleonic Wars. The same is true about fossils — what we know of the fossil record is an infinitesimal dot on an infinitesimal dot on what really happened. Almost everything that once existed on our planet has been lost. This means that anything new we find has the potential to change everything. Henry can talk about the latest discoveries on human evolution showing how the story of human evolution was much stranger than we could have imagined even twenty years ago. There was a time, not so long ago, when hobbits, yetis and giants really did walk the Earth, and some of them have left their genetic heritage in us.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the fall of 1789, George Washington, only six months into his presidency, set out on the first of four road trips as he attempted to unite what were in essence thirteen independent states into a single nation. In the fall of 2018, Nat Philbrick, his wife Melissa, and their dog Dora set out to retrace Washington’s route across the country. By following Washington as he attempted to bring the country together, traveling as far north as Kittery Point, Maine, and as far south as Savannah, Georgia, Philbrick hoped to gain some historical perspective on our own politically divided times.Washington accomplished an extraordinary amount to bring this unruly collection of states together in support of the creation of a federal government, of a tax plan, of a Federal City – what would become Washington, DC. Without this road trip, America may never have made it, and today’s leaders could stand to learn from George’s methods.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a stunning move, the armies of Nazi Germany annihilated the French military and captured Paris, the crown jewel of Europe, in a matter of a few weeks. As Adolf Hitler tightened his grip on the City of Lights, the shocked Allies regrouped and began planning for a daring counterattack into Fortress Europe. The longer the Nazis held the city, the greater danger its citizens faced. By 1944, over 120,000 Parisians died, and countless more tortured in the city's Gestapo prisons and sent to death camps. The exiled general Charles de Gaulle, headquartered in the bar of London's Connaught Hotel, convinced General Dwight Eisenhower to put Paris before Berlin. Unless Paris was taken immediately, he told him, the City of Light would be leveled. The race for Paris begins.Today’s guest is Martin Dugar, author of “Taking Paris: The Epic Battle for the City of Lights.” We discuss the story of the people who set that city free and the account of the battle for the heart and soul of Paris in one of the twentieth century’s darkest moments.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Frederick Bruce Thomas was born in 1872 to former slaves and spent his youth on his family’s prosperous farm in Mississippi. However, a resentful, rich white planter's attempt to steal their land forced them to escape to Memphis. And when Frederick's father was brutally murdered by another black man, the family disintegrated. After leaving the South and working as a waiter and valet in Chicago and Brooklyn, Frederick went to London in 1894, then traveled throughout Europe, and decided to go to Russia in 1899, which was highly unusual for a black American at the time. Frederick found no color line in Russia and made Moscow his home. During the next nineteen years he renamed himself “Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas,” married twice, acquired a mistress, took Russian citizenship, and by dint of his talents, hard work, charm, and guile became one of the city’s richest and most famous owners of variety theaters and restaurants. The Bolshevik Revolution ruined him and he barely escaped with his life and family to Turkey in 1919. Starting with just a handful of dollars out of the millions he had lost, Frederick made a second fortune in Constantinople by opening a series of celebrated nightclubs that introduced jazz to Turkey. However, because of the long arm of American racism, the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic, and his own extravagance, he fell on hard times, was thrown into debtor's prison, and died in Constantinople in 1928.Although widely known during his lifetime, Frederick Thomas is now virtually forgotten. The few references to him that have been published during the past eighty years are all brief and often wrong. Vladimir Alexandrov, today’s guest and author of the book “The Black Russian,” researched Frederick Thomas’s life and times exhaustively in archives and libraries throughout the United States, as well as in Russia, France, England, and Turkey, and found a great deal of information about him. Frederick Thomas is fascinating because of the extraordinary way he escaped the constraints of his humble origins and being black in the United States, because of how his life went from rags to riches to ruin not once but twice as a consequence of revolutionary transformations in two exotic societies, and because of the contrasting roles that race played in his life abroad--from being invisible in Russia, to returning to haunt him in Turkey, when he most needed help and the American government turned him down.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The medieval world – for all its plagues, papal indulgences, castles, and inquisition trials – has much in common with ours. People living the Middle Ages dealt with deadly pandemics, climate change, mass migration, and controversial technological changes, just as we do now in 2021. Today’s guest, Dan Jones, author of POWERS AND THRONES: A New History of the Middle Ages looks at these common features through a cast of characters that includes pious monks and Byzantine emperors, chivalric knights and Renaissance artists. This sweep of the medieval world begins with the fall of the Roman empire and ends with the first contact between the Old World and the New. Along the way, Jones provides a front row seat to the forces that shaped the Western world as we know it. This is the thousand years in which our basic Western systems of law, commerce, and governance were codified; when the Christian Churches matured as both powerful institutions and the regulators of Western public morality; and when art, architecture, philosophical inquiry and scientific invention went through periods of seismic change. We discuss: • The height of the Roman empire and its influential rulers, as well as the various reasons it fell, including climate change pushing the Huns and so-called “barbarian” tribes to the empire’s borders. • The development of Christianity and Islam, as well as the power struggles and conflict ignited in the name of religion, chivalric orders such as the Knights Templar, and the rise of monasteries as major political players in the West. • The intimate stories of many influential characters of the Middle Ages, such as Constantine I, Justinian, the Prophet Muhammad, Attila the Hun, Charlemagne, El Cid, Leonardo Da Vinci, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, Martin Luther, and many more. • The development of global trade routes and commerce across Europe, Asia, and Africa and the expanding map during the Age of Exploration. • The Black Death, which decimated up to sixty percent of the local population in the fourteenth century and led to widespread social unrest and the little Ice Age, the period between 1300-1850 triggered by volcanic activity that created a climate so regularly and bitterly cold that it contributed to the Great Famine of 1315-21.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At the beginning of World War II, military planners set out to form the most ruthless, skilled, and effective force the world had ever seen. The U.S. Marines were already the world’s greatest fighters, but leadership wanted a select group to conduct special operations at the highest level in the Pacific theater. And so the Marine Raiders were born.These young men, the cream of the crop, received matchless training in the arts of war. Marksmen, brawlers, and tacticians, the Marine Raiders could accomplish their objective before the enemy even knew they were there.Yet even though one of their commanders was President Roosevelt’s son, they have largely been forgotten. To explore their legacy, we are joined by Carole Engle Avriett, author of “Marine Raiders: The True Story of the Legendary WWII Battalions.”We discuss:- The personal narratives of four men who served as Marine Raiders- Frontline accounts of the Raiders’ most important engagements- The explanation for their obscurity, despite their earlier fameSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

South Africa, despite abolishing apartheid in the 1990s, still stays very fraught with racial tension, making the United States' experience of 2020 pale in comparison. A series of settlements and wars from over a hundred years ago and over hundreds of years still ripple South Africa today with their effects. But South Africa didn't become what it is today by accident, though Europeans did settle it by accident ... at least at first.Over the 18th & 19th centuries, white settlements expanded quite intentionally across southern Africa... but quite chaotically too. Those European settlers weren't the only ones expanding in southern Africa. The Zulu tribe rapidly expanded and "adopted" other tribal members who they didn't annihilate. These clashes often didn't follow racial lines, and nor were they always over resources. Most of these clashes remain forgotten by most of the world. And even the so-called Boer War remains extremely misunderstood. Today's guest Michael Buster hosts the Forgotten Wars Podcast, a more than 40-chapter podcast with the first season focusing on these clashes over control of southern Africa with the bulk of the season focusing on Anglo-Boer Wars, fought in the 1880s and early 1900s.Some have mischaracterized the Anglo-Boer War as the British Empire's Vietnam War, while others have drawn parallels between it and US invasion of Iraq in 2003, or just another war over natural resources (in this case gold and diamonds). But the ripple effects and implications of this regional war go way beyond the boundaries of South Africa.We discuss:- How the British botched abolition in the Cape Colony and sowed the seeds for many future wars. We contrast this approach with the approach Abraham Lincoln took to abolition in slave state(s) that stayed in the Union.- How did this war helped "make" Winston Churchill? His time as a POW led to to lucrative book sales that helped him fund his first campaign and win a seat in the House of Commons- Whether the British really invented concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War- How to win a war fought thousands of miles from your motherland.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.