History Unplugged Podcast

Piracy didn’t spring into existence in the 18th century Caribbean. It has existed as long as there has been commercial shipping and people to steal the goods. There were medieval pirates. Vikings loved robbing ships in the Baltic and North Seas. The Romans dealt with pirates in the Mediterranean, and the Greeks and Carthaginians before them. Pirates are as much part of history as armies, taxes, and temples. Why do we associate pirates with one specific time and place in the 18th century Caribbean with eye patches and peg legs?Today’s guest is Katherine Howe, author of “The Penguin Book of Pirates.” We go behind the eye patches, the peg legs, and the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger and into the no-man’s-land of piracy that is rife with paradoxes and plot twists We look at real maritime marauders like the infamous Blackbeard; the pirates who inspired Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean,Stede Bonnet in Max’s Our Flag Means Death, and the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride; the egalitarian multi-ethnic and multilingual crews that became enmeshed in historical horrors like the slave trade; and lesser-known but no less formidable women pirates, many of whom disguised themselves as men.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Between 1940 and 1943, Polish diplomats based in Bern, Switzerland, engaged in a remarkable – and until now, almost completely untold – humanitarian operation. This operation was one of the largest actions to aid Jews of the entire war and far eclipsed the better-known efforts of Oskar Schindler. In concert with two Jewish activists, these diplomats masterminded a systematic program of forging documents for Latin American countries that were smuggled into occupied Europe, in an attempt to save the lives of thousands of Jews facing extermination in the Holocaust.Today’s guest is Roger Moorhouse, author of “The Forgers: The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation.” We look at the heroism of a group of ordinary men whose actions were part of a wider story of the Polish Underground resistance.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Clotilda was the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century after the passage of a federal law banning the importation of slaves, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. Five of its passengers, ranging in age from two to nineteen when kidnapped, died between 1922 and 1940.Today’s guest is Hannah Durkin, author of “Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade.” We follow their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Benin through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship’s 110 African men, women, and children in slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile—an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston—to the foundation of Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective—a black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As the popular narrative goes, the Civil War was won when courageous Yankees triumphed over the South. But an aspect of the war that has remained little-known for 160 years is the Alabamian Union soldiers who played a decisive role in the Civil War, only to be scrubbed from the history books. One such group was the First Alabama Calvary, formed in 1862. It went on raids that destroyed Confederate communications and also marched with Sherman’s forces across the South. They aided the fall of Vicksburg and the burning of Atlanta.Today’s guest is Howell Raines, author of “Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta—and Then Got Written Out of History.” As Raines has pieced together, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s decisive effort to burn Atlanta was facilitated by an unsung regiment of 2,066 yeoman farmers and former slaves from Alabama—including at least one member of Raines’s own family.So why have the best-known Civil War historians, including Ken Burns and Shelby Foote, given only passing – or no – attention to this regiment of southerners who chose to fight for the North – a regiment that General Sherman hailed as one of the finest in the Union? We explore this question through an account of Alabama’s Mountain Unionists and their exploits, along with investigating why they and others like them were excised from the historical record.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Veterans of World War 2 are called the Greatest Generation for their uncommon courage and self-determination. Whether this descriptor is true or part of America’s self-mythologizing during the 20th century is a challenging question, one that Andrew Biggio, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, worked to answer.Biggio found that many were brave, but they were all ordinary men who also shared in humanity’s weaknesses and flaws while responding to the call of duty. Biggio is today’s guest and author of “The Rifle 2: Back to the Battlefield.” He shares first-person accounts from the last of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who fought the most dreadful war in history.The idea for his first book “The Rifle” was simple: travel across the country with a 1945 M1 Garand, the basic U.S. fighting rifle of World War II, ask combat veterans of that war to sign it, and listen carefully as the sight, touch, and feel of that rifle evoke a flood of memories and emotions. In this follow-up book, Andrew Biggio once again reveals the astonishing effect his M1 Garand had on the old warriors who held it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the midst of the Great Depression, punished by crippling drought and deepening poverty, hundreds of thousands of families left the Great Plains and the Southwest to look for work in California’s rich agricultural valleys. In response to the scene of destitute white families living in filthy shelters built of cardboard, twigs, and refuse, reform-minded New Deal officials built a series of camps to provide them with shelter and community.Today’s guest is Jonathan Ebel, author of “From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California.” We look at the religious dynamics in and around migratory farm labor camps in agricultural California established and operated by the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration. Ebel makes the case that the camps served as mission sites for the conversion of migrants to more modern ways of living and believing. Though the ideas of virtuous citizenship put forward by the camp administrators were framed as secular, they rested on a foundation of Protestantism. At the same time, many of the migrants were themselves conservative or charismatic Protestants who had other ideas for how their religion intended them to be.By looking at the camps as missionary spaces, Ebel shows that this New Deal program was animated both by humanitarian concern and by the belief that these poor, white migrants and their religious practices were unfit for life in a modernized, secular world.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For nearly two centuries, the beating heart of electoral politics was on the back of a train. William Jennings Bryan spoke to an estimated 5 million people from a train car in his 1896 presidential campaign. Yet memories of the pivotal role campaign trains played in American elections fade with the passing of each generation. Also forgotten are the stories documented by the reporters who traveled with hundreds of whistle-stopping politicians including Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan.Today’s guest is Edward Segal, author of “Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them.” Campaign trains were an American invention that enabled politicians to connect with as many voters as possible in the country’s largest cities and smallest towns.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind were Solomon Loeb and Marcus Goldman, among the “Forty-Eighters” fleeing a Germany that had relegated Jews to an underclass.These industrious immigrants would soon go from peddling trinkets and buying up shopkeepers’ IOUs to forming what would become some of the largest investment banks in the world—Goldman Sachs, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers, J. & W. Seligman & Co. They would clash and collaborate with J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, and other famed tycoons of the era. And their firms would help to transform the United States from a debtor nation into a financial superpower, capitalizing American industry and underwriting some of the twentieth century’s quintessential companies, like General Motors, Macy’s, and Sears. Along the way, they would shape the destiny not just of American finance but of the millions of Eastern European Jews who spilled off steamships in New York Harbor in the early 1900s, including Daniel Schulman’s paternal grandparents.Today’s guest is Dan Schulman, author of “The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America.” We trace the interconnected origin stories of these financial dynasties from the Gilded Age to the Civil War, World War I, and the Zionist movement that tested both their burgeoning empires and their identities as Americans, Germans, and Jews.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the summer of 1944, a handpicked group of young GIs—including such future luminaries such as Bill Blass, Ellsworth Kelly, Arthur Singer, Victor Dowd, Art Kane, and Jack Masey—landed in France to conduct a secret mission. From Normandy to the Rhine, the 1,100 men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known as the Ghost Army, conjured up phony convoys, phantom divisions, and make-believe headquarters to fool the enemy about the strength and location of American units. Every move they made was top secret and their story was hushed up for decades after the war's end.The unit’s official US Army history noted that “its complement was more theatri¬cal than military,” and “It was like a traveling road show that went up and down the front lines impersonating the real fighting outfits.” They pulled off twenty-one differ¬ent deceptions and are credited with saving thousands of lives through stagecraft and sleight of hand. They threw themselves into their impersonations, sometimes setting up phony command posts and masquerading as generals. They frequently put themselves in danger, suffering casualties as a consequence. After holding Patton’s line along the Moselle, they barely escaped capture by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, and in March 1945 they performed their most dazzling deception, misleading the Germans about where two American divi¬sions would cross the Rhine River.To explore the story of this forgotten subterfuge is today’s guest, Rick Beyer, author of “The Ghost Army of World War II: How One Top-Secret Unit Deceived the Enemy with Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, and Other Audacious Fakery.” We look at how a traveling road show of artists wielding imagination, paint, and bravado saved thousands of American lives.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Free time, one of life’s most important commodities, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty minutes?Despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it. Here to explain why this is today’s guest Gary Cross, author of “Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal.” We discuss a broad historical explanation of why our affluent society does not afford more time away from work and why that time is often unsatisfying.We begin with a survey of the past 250 years to understand the roots of our conception of free time and its use. By the end of the nineteenth century, a common expectation was that industrial innovations would lead to a progressive reduction of work time and a subsequent rise in free time devoted to self-development and social engagement. However, despite significant changes in the early twentieth century, both goals were frustrated, thus leading to the contemporary dilemma.Cross touches on leisure of all kinds, from peasant festivals and aristocratic pleasure gardens to amusement parks, movie theaters and organized sports to internet surfing, and even the use of alcohol and drugs. This wide-ranging cultural and social history explores the industrial-era origins of our modern obsession with work and productivity, but also the historical efforts to liberate time from work and cultivate free time for culture.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.