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...
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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 1,126 episodes
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...
New Archeological Tech Is Rewriting Everything We Know About the Ancient Past
Humanity's story from 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC (from the end of the ice age to the beginning of civilizations) follows this pattern: primitive...
The AI Jobs Panic of the 1890s: The Linotype Triggered Fears of Mass Layoffs but Created an Explosion in Newspaper Work
One of the most feared inventions ever was the Linotype machine. Debuting in 1886, it was designed to eliminate tens of thousands of newspap...
April 1945 in Berlin: The Final Month of the Third Reich
When Heinrich Himmler was appointed to command the army group defending Berlin in January 1945, his operations officer described briefing hi...
Writing Was Invented for Accounting and Scrawled on Baboon Bones
A three-inch baboon bone bearing twenty-nine deliberate incisions was pulled from a South African mountain range in 1970. It is approximatel...
It Took Russia 300 Years To Destroy the Final Pieces of Genghis Khan’s Empire
Before Ivan was the Terrible, he was a young tsar who had tried and failed to destroy the last fragments of Genghis Khan's Empire in the Vol...
The Wunderkind George Forster: Voyaging with Captain Cook at 10 and Dining with Benjamin Franklin in Paris in his 20s
A ten-year-old boy gallops across the Russian steppe on a Kalmyk horse, collecting plants for his father while German settlers starve in ear...