History Unplugged Podcast

In a little-noted eulogy delivered shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Frederick Douglass called the martyred president “emphatically the Black man’s president,” and the “first to show any respect for their rights as men.” To justify his description, Douglass pointed not just to Lincoln’s official acts and utterances, like the Emancipation Proclamation or the Second Inaugural Address, but also to the president’s own personal experiences with Black people. Referring to one of his White House visits, Douglass said: “In daring to invite a Negro to an audience at the White House, Mr. Lincoln was saying to the country: I am President of the Black people as well as the white, and I mean to respect their rights and feelings as men and as citizens.”But Lincoln’s description as “the Black man’s president” rests on more than his relationship with Douglass or on his official words and deeds. Lincoln interacted with many other Black Americans during his presidency. His unfailing cordiality to them, his willingness to meet with them in the White House, to honor their requests, to invite them to consult on public policy, to treat them with respect whether they were kitchen servants or abolitionist leaders, to invite them to attend receptions, to sing and pray with them in their neighborhoods – all were manifestations of an egalitarian spirit noted by Frederick Douglass and other prominent African Americans like Sojourner Truth, who said: “I never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality than were shown to me by that great and good man, Abraham Lincoln.” To discuss this issue is today’s guest Michael Burlingame, author of the book The Black Man’s President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality. We focus on Lincoln’s personal interchange with Black Americans over the course his career, whichreveals a side of the sixteenth president that, until now, has not been fully explored.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

More than twenty years have elapsed since the United States last brokered a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. In that time, three presidents have tried and failed. Today’s guest, Martin Indyk—a former United States ambassador to Israel and special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2013—has experienced these political frustrations and disappointments firsthand. To understand the arc of American diplomatic influence in the Middle East, Indyk returns to the origins of American-led peace efforts and to Henry Kissinger, the man who created the Middle East peace process. He is the author of the new book “Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy.” He discusses the unique challenges and barriers Kissinger and his successors have faced in their attempts to broker peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Based on newly available documents from American and Israeli archives, extensive interviews with Kissinger, and Indyk’s own interactions with some of the main players, the author takes readers inside the pivotal negotiations and reveals how American diplomacy operates behind closed doors. He argues that understanding Kissinger’s design for Middle East peacemaking is key to comprehending how—and how not—to make peace.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

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. 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.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 pandemicsmass migration, and controversial technological changes, just as we do now.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, 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.