History Unplugged Podcast

Much of what we know about the college admissions process in the United States -- eg. requiring interviews to gauge "character"; seeking diversity of interest; looking for "geographic diversity" – are not timeless features of American higher education. They were actually implemented in the early 20th century to keep their Jewish populations down. This was one of many ways these schools tried to maintain their WASP character. Columbia University created separate campus in Brooklyn from 1928 to 1938 where they tried to send Jews and other undesirable minorities, to keep the main, uptown campus a space for its wealthy, Protestant students. At Dartmouth, a professor told a Jewish students in the 1950s that anti-Jewish quotas were necessary, or else the campus would be "swimming in Jews."Today’s guest is Mark Oppenheimer. He is a former New York Times religion columnist, author, and host of a new podcast series called Gatecrashers: The Hidden History of Jews and the Ivy League, in which he explores why we apply to college the way we do and how the Jewish experience in the Ivy League shaped American higher education and America at large. He shares how much has changed at the elite colleges since the 1920s, the strides that have been made, and the parallels between the college experience then and how “diversity” is achieved now.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Why was Uber able to destroy the taxi cab industry in the United States, but it failed to get any sort of market share in the United Kingdom and China? The reasons are many, but essentially, the UK had strict licensing codes that made Uber’s operations impossible, while China openly supported a local rival to prevent the foreign company from taking over its market. However, the story of Uber is larger than a 21st century tale of government red tape. It goes back centuries to the origins of entrepreneurship and property rights in the Western legal traditionEntrepreneurship is more than taking risks to start a business, challenging legacy industries and innovating into success. It’s actually – as today’s guest argues – an act of rebellion that challenges the status quo and has a lot in common with fighting a revolution. We’re joined by John Landry, author of Launchpad Republic: America’s Entrepreneurial Edge and Why It Matters. We discuss how this rebellious spirit has influenced the institutional, political, and legal factors that have shaped our economy—with an in-depth look at how these have operated throughout history and can be improved going forward. Taking us from the economic foundation of the Constitution right to the present day, we explore current concerns about the ever-increasing inequality of wealth, offering strategies to improve the system without abandoning the balancing act between rewarding builders and enabling challengers that has proved remarkably resilient.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We are joined by James Early, the co-host of some of the best series on this show, including our Key Battles Series (World War One, the Civl War, the Revolutionary War) and Presidential Fight Club. James is here to discuss the War of 1812, a little war with a big impact. Although it was a sideshow for the British (that cared more about the Napoleonic Wars, which threatened its existence) and to the lesser extent the Americans (that couldn’t bother to field a standing army up to the war), the War of 1812 forged post-Revolutionary American identity. It gave the United States a new boost of confidence, shored up its military power, and kick off the age of expansion that continued for the next century.Check out more of James’s content on his Key Battles of American History Podcast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Looking at Colditz Castle, it was no surprise why the Nazi’s chose the towering fortress as their prison-of-war camp for the most defiant Allied prisoners. Perched high above a rocky outcrop with thick medieval walls of stone, the men who had escaped other camps would surely have no such luck here, living out the war under the watchful eye of their German captors. But men do not resign themselves so lightly, and with nothing but time on their hands, the POWs of Colditz would engineer some of the most ingenious—and utterly reckless—methods of escape that could be imagined.Today’s guest is Ben Macintyre, author of “Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape From Colditz.” We metaphorically go inside the prison to live among side these men as they grapple with class conflict, bullying, boredom, insanity and farce. There are heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. We get into character portraits of the inmates, along with their stories of bravery and sacrifice.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson was a broken man. Reeling from the loss of his wife and humiliated from a political scandal during the Revolutionary war, he needed to remake himself. And to do that, he traveled. Traipsing through Europe, Jefferson saw and learned as much as he could, ultimately bringing his knowledge home to a young America. He wrote a travelogue called “Hints to Americans Traveling in Europe.”Jefferson documented his trip in order to educate the infant nation on cutting-edge techniques in agriculture and architecture. He included sketches of buildings with Roman domes and columns, which he thought should be incorporated into America’s buildings to celebrate one of the ancient world’s greatest democracies. But he also indulged in European luxury and spent a gilded carriage’s worth on wine, ivory-handled knives, and porcelain statuettes, and (most odd) an organ for teaching songs to birds. More than two hundred years later, Derek Baxter, a devotee of American history, decided to follow in his footsteps and see what he could learn from the Founding Father. Baxter is today’s guest and author of “In Pursuit of Jefferson: Traveling Through Europe With the Most Perplexing Founding Father.” He stumbled on Jefferson’s travelogue and used it as a roadmap, embarking on a new journey, following Jefferson to the same French wineries and rivers, even eating period-accurate food at Monticello. The goal was to figure out how to make sense of Jefferson and the multitude of contradictions in his life, the most debated being that he was a slaveholder who also wrote a world-historical testament to freedom. This is an unflinching look at a founding father, and a moving personal journey. We explore how we can be better moving forward only by first looking back.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Frank Murphy was a public servant that achieved the highest levels of civilian success in the early 20th century. After serving in World War I, he served as mayor of Detroit, then as the top appointed U.S. official to the Philippines, then as Governor of Michigan, U.S. Attorney General, and ultimately as a Justice on the Supreme Court, appointed by FDR. But it was his securing justice for a black doctor against a KKK mob that made him an icon. In 1925, Ossian Sweet, a black doctor, moved with his family into a traditionally white neighborhood in Detroit. The city did not have Jim Crow but it had the KKK and segregation, particularly in housing. On a daily basis, the Sweet family faced taunts and threats of violence from white mobs that gathered outside. One day in September, the mobs grew violent and threw rocks at the Sweet house, shattering glass windows as the police stood by. Sweet (or one of his companions) shot out from the house and killed a white bystander. He was arrested and tried for murder before an all-white jury. Judge Frank Murphy insisted on a fair trial for the Black defendants. As the trial judge, Murphy told the jury that Sweet had no duty to retreat if his home was threatened, as Americans had a right to live where they wanted. He evoked the house as a castle metaphor. Twice, the jury refused to convict and the charges were eventually dropped. The result was hailed by the NAACP and others as a rare triumph of the legal process for black defendants. When Murphy later ran for mayor of Detroit, he won in black precincts by margins of 30-1. Today’s guest, Greg Zipes, is here to share the story of Murphy. He’s the author of Justice and Faith: The Frank Murphy Story. Throughout his career, Murphy influenced the country’s values in tangible ways, cementing its focus on individual dignity and liberties at times in America’s history when it had moved in more authoritarian directions, whether through war-time suspension of rights or Jim Crow-era legislation or the internment of Japanese Americans.Other fascinating parts of his life include his Organization of Mayors, which helped pressure the federal government to provide aid directly to cities and individuals, bypassing the states; how the US did not learn lessons about colonial decoupling from Murphy's role in the Philippines prior to World War II; and Murphy’s dissent in the 1944 Supreme Court decision Korematsu vs. US, a decision that debated the legality of Japanese internment camps.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today we think of New York as the center of the twentieth century art world, but it took three determined men, two world wars, and one singular artist to secure the city’s cultural prominence. Pablo Picasso was the most influential and perplexing artist of his age, and the turning points of his career and salient facets of his private life have intrigued the world for decades. However, the tremendous feat of winning support for his art in the U.S. has long been overlooked. To discuss this largely forgotten story is Hugh Eakin, author of Picasso’s War How Modern Art Came to America. He details the story of how a single exhibition, years in the making, finally brought the 20th century’s most notorious artist U.S. acclaim, irrevocably changed American culture, and in doing so saved dozens of the twentieth century’s most enduring artworks from the Nazis. A small group of eclectic figures made this happen: the renegade Irish-American lawyer John Quinn and the mountain-girl-turned-foreign correspondent, Jeanne Foster; the art dealer and Paris kingmaker, Paul Rosenberg; the wunderkind museum founder Alfred Barr and his sharp-witted, Irish-Italian wife, Margaret Scolari. Working sometimes together and often at odds, they were determined to bring the radical art revolutions of Europe to the States, no matter what stood in their way. In the end, they would have to overcome political revolutions, bankruptcies, divorces, art seizures—and years of American cultural hostility before they could achieve their goal. Collectively, it would take the destruction of New York’s first great modern art collection and finally, the Nazis’ war on modernism to bring this twenty-year quest to its surprising conclusion.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The stories of King Arthur and Merlin, Lancelot and Guinevere, Galahad, Gawain, Tristan and the rest of the Knights of the Roundtable, and the search for the Holy Grail have been beloved for centuries and are the inspiration of many modern fantasy novels, films, and shows. These legends began when an obscure Celtic hero named Arthur stepped on to the stage of history sometime in the sixth century, generating a host of oral tales that would be inscribed some 900 years later by Thomas Malory in his classic Morte D’Arthur (The Death of Arthur).But Malory had many more sources than he could ever use in his book. As such, historians of Arthur have thougth for decades than an update was necessary. Today’s guest, John Matthews, took up the challenge. He’s the author of “The Great Book of King Arthur & His Knights of the Round Table.” He brings these legends into the modern age, using accessible prose for contemporary readers for the first time. He includes many tales of Arthur and his knights either unknown to Malory or written in other languages, such as the story of Avenable, the girl brought up as a boy who becomes a famous knight; Morien, whose adventures are as fantastic and exciting as any found in Malory’s work; and a retelling of the life of Round Table favorite Gawain, from his strange birth to his upbringing among the poor to his ascension to the highest position—Emperor of Rome.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a sample of a recent episode of Steve Guerra's History of the Papacy Podcast (https://www.parthenonpodcast.com/history-of-the-papacy-podcast/) about Freemasonry, the Catholic Church, and the modern world.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Even before Mata Hari (née Margaretha Zelle) was executed by a French firing squad in 1917 for spying on behalf of the Germans, her life had already become legend. At her trial, prosecutors claimed that the world-famous exotic dancer had seduced countless men from both sides of the war (definitely true) and leaked intelligence that caused the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers (almost certainly false). Immediately after her death, biographies ran with the juicier narrative and turned her into the femme fatale archetype, who lured high-ranking officers into her boudoir and steal their documents while they were asleep. She inspired books, musicals, and films. But more recently, historians argued that she was merely a gossip who tried to steal state secrets but never discovered anything that couldn’t be found in the newspapers. The only recent the French military charged her with espionage was to distract the nation from France’s poor showing in the war.In today’s episode, we explore the life and death of Mata Hari, a woman who was an excellent performer, perhaps a poor spy, but above all else, never, ever uninteresting.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.