Amazon Won’t Destroy Bookshops Because 600 Years of Disruptions Haven’t Either
In 1784, a young German immigrant named Bernard Quaritch walked into the London office of Henry George Bohn, one of the largest booksellers...
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History Unplugged Podcast
For history lovers who listen to podcasts, History Unplugged is the most comprehensive show of its kind. It's the only show that dedicates episodes to both interviewing experts and answering...
Episodes
20 of 1,132 episodes
The Ancient World's Best Military Technology Was Constantinople's City Walls
On May 29, 1453, Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II captured Constantinople, bringing an end to over a thousand years of Byzantine rule. The city's fo...
Edgar Allen Poe’s Self-Sabotage, Early Death, and Path to Becoming America’s Greatest Poet
In the summer of 1849, Edgar Allan Poe knocked on the door of his friend John Sartain's Philadelphia workshop, wild-eyed and without luggage...
England's Last Knights Fought in Armor Until the 1640s
The 17th-century battlefield ushered in a new era, with formed musketeers and pistol-wielding cavalry gradually taking over from the knights...
Vikings Went from Christendom’s Terror to Its Best Crusaders
In 1861, an archaeologist named James Farrer broke into a grass-covered Neolithic tomb on the Orkney Islands expecting to find ancient bones...
Why the Most Powerful Muslim Rulers in the Middle East Considered the Crusaders a Minor Annoyance
When the First Crusade arrived at the walls of Antioch in 1097, the two most powerful Muslim rulers in Syria were not preparing a joint defe...
The Gold Rush Created Get Rich Quick Schemes and ‘Move Fast and Break Things’
On the morning of January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall climbed into a ditch beside a half-finished sawmill in the Sierra Nevad...
Every Fight in American History Was Also a Fight Over Who Gets to Eat Good Bread
Early America's most important invention wasn't Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod, or the cotton gin. It was the world's first fully automat...
Romans Quarried Marble, Cathars Hid in Caves, and Nazis Built Tank Turrets in These Same Mountains
The Pyrenees stretch 270 miles from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, separating France from Spain, and most people think of them as a natu...
The Roman Emperor Who Spread Christianity Most Was Arguably Augustus (Even Though He Died in 14 AD)
Rome seemed fundamentally opposed to Christianity in the first century. After all, the empire fed Christians to lions, taxed their communiti...
5,000 Years of Punctuation: Why It Terrified Roman Scholars and Started a Russian Revolution
The first punctuation mark was a triangular symbol pressed into clay somewhere in Mesopotamia. Spaces between words were unknown for millenn...
Charlemagne Dreamed of a Sword With Four Words on It and They Predicted Exactly How His Dynasty Would Fall
Late at night in his palace at Aachen, Charlemagne had a dream. A mysterious figure approached him carrying a sword engraved with four Germa...
Cicero—Rome’s Greatest Orator—Saved the Capital From Insurrection, But Couldn’t Save the Republic From Collapse
On December 7, 43 BCE, a sixty-three-year-old man was carried in a litter down a woodland path near the Italian coast, fleeing soldiers who...
Do Napoleons or Hitlers Really Matter? Whether Leaders Make History or Their Societies Make Them
On March 13, 1930, Adolf Hitler was sitting in the passenger seat of his chauffeur-driven car when a trailer truck sped through an intersect...
Washington’s Most Revolutionary Moment Was Surrendering Absolute Power
Washington's most extraordinary achievement was not winning the Revolutionary War or helping found a new nation. It was something far rarer:...
Japan's Military Refused to Surrender Even After Two Atomic Bombs and a Coup Nearly Succeeded
At 1:15 p.m. on April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, when his face suddenl...
Is Patton America’s Most Overrated General?
George S. Patton is considered one of America's greatest generals for his blitzes across Europe in World War 2. He is celebrated for breakin...
Stalin’s Ordered Killing of Trotsky Created the Playbook for Modern Political Assassination
Ramón Mercader expected to easily kill Leon Trotsky, silently and instantly. He had rehearsed the blow for months, practiced the angl...
Belisarius Reconquered Africa and Italy for Rome. Why Did Rome Destroy Him for It?
In 533, a twenty-eight-year-old general named Belisarius sailed from Constantinople with 15,000 men to reconquer North Africa from the Vanda...
Summer of Death: America’s Heat Wave of 1936 That Killed 12,000
A coast guardsman named Earl Cunningham froze to death on Lake Michigan trying to rescue five fishermen trapped on a drifting ice sheet. His...