History Unplugged Podcast

Language not only defines humans as a species, placing us head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators, but it also beguiles us with its endless mysteries. How did different languages come to be? Why isn't there just a single language? How does a language change, and when it does, is that change indicative of decay or growth? How does a language become extinct?   In today's rebroadcast, I speak with John McWhorter, a linguist from Columbia University. He addresses these and other issues, such as how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today, everything from proto-Indo European to Ebonics English in the United States.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

World War 2 was won due to Allied bravery, superior strategy, better technology, and more supplies. But the true unsung hero of the war effort is the Allied logistics network. The U.S. alone fed and supplied soldiers through a planet-spanning supply chain. It waged two wars on different continents at the same time. They kept supplied 98 divisions on a supply line that was well over 10,000 miles long: 7,000 from San Fran to Manila, 4000 from NYC to Normandy. About 1.9 million tons of supplies reached Britain in May 1944 alone.The multi-step process from when supplies were built to when they arrived on the front lines could have failed at multiple points (and they often did). Goods, for example, were made in a U.S. factory then shipped halfway across the world to a remote beach or port. Once at the point of debarkation, an administrative organization had to offload, organize, and transport everything to the front. Support units had to build installations and airfields, establish factories for the assembly of vehicles, and create an administrative bureaucracy to manage the entire administrative effort to support a theater of war. Added to this, the Allied militaries had to provide food and medical care for civil populations, outfit allies that could not support themselves, as well as house and care for tens of thousands of prisoners of war.To discuss the logistical challenge of the century is David Dworak, a retired U.S. Army colonel and academic administrator at the US Army War College. He is the author of the new book War of Supply: World War II Allied Logistics in the Mediterranean. We go behind the scenes with the Allies during the “war of matériel" that gave them a distinct, strategic advantage over the Axis powers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jack the Ripper’s serial killing spree of 1888 shocked the world, triggering panic from Paris to South America that he could strike anywhere, anytime. New Yorkers in particular were on high alert when local prostitute Carrie Brown, a.k.a. “Old Shakespeare,” was found brutally murdered in a seedy Manhattan hotel on the waterfront. NYPD Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes accused an Algerian named Amir Ben Ali of the crime. He was convicted of second degree murder despite the evidence against him being doubtful, but pardoned eleven years later. Who was the real killer?To explore one of the most notorious crimes of the Gilded Age is Luke Jerod Kummer, author of the Audible audiobook Takers Mad. In his research, questions about what really happened in the hotel on that monstrous night began to reveal themselves. Did the police scapegoat the man arrested for the crime? What about the blood that detectives found? Or did authorities actually let Jack the Ripper walk free?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

No paratrooper in the legendary “Band of Brothers” – a WW2 parachute rifle company part of the 101st Airborne Division in the U.S. Army -- was more enigmatic than Ronald Speirs. Rumored to have gunned down enemy prisoners and even one of his own disobedient sergeants, he was one of World War II’s most storied soldiers, a controversial man whose ferocity and courage earned him the nickname “Killer.” But who was the real Ronald Speirs?Most accounts about him end in 1945, but today’s guest Jared Frederick, author of Fierce Valor: The True Story of Ronald Speirs and His Band of Brothers, unveil the full story of Easy Company’s longest-serving commander and, for the first time, tell of his lesser-known exploits in Korea, the Cold War and Laos. We explore how• Speirs was a complex, driven man, and not a dark caricature as some have imagined him• Speirs was deeply shaped by his whirlwind wartime romance with Edwyna. Theirs was a marriage that tragically ended in divorce after she discovered her first love was not dead, but a POW. Decades later, Speirs wrote about her, “I loved her and still do”• Speirs survived gut-wrenching Cold War assignments in Korea and grinding battles with the Chinese. These lesser-known exploits come to light fully for the first time in Fierce Valor As Easy Company’s most colorful and controversial figures, Spiers was a soldier whose ferocious courage in three foreign conflicts was matched by his devotion to duty and the bittersweet passions of wartime romance.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the biggest unresolved World War 2 debates is the Vatican’s complicity in the Holocaust – did Pope Pius XII sit back and do nothing as Nazi Germany exterminate 6 million Jews? Critics accuse him of a weakness for dictatorships and a distaste for Jews, a pushover that Mussolini and Hitler could easily intimidate. Defenders say he was a virtuous man who stood up to Nazis and their Italian fascist allies despite being threatened with kidnapping and assassination. He worked tirelessly and effective to prevent more Jews from being murdered. The question was little more than speculation for decades because the Vatican’s archives that cover World War 2 were closed. However, Pope Francis decided to open them recently, and today’s guest, David Kertzer, took immediate advantage of this opportunity. He’s the author of the new book “The Pope at War” and he shows us what went on behind the scenes at the Vatican during World War II and the Holocaust. We discuss secret negotiations that Pius XII held with Hitler in the late 1930s, how the pope blessed Italy’s war effort until Mussolini’s fall in 1943, and how he held back aid to Jews after the Nazis’ systematic murder was revealed.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You and your ancestor from 1,000 years ago have almost nothing in common. Your clothes are different. Your worship rituals are different. Your thoughts about the opposite sex are definitely different. Almost the only similarity is that both of you are driven to obtain food. In fact, one could say that civilization itself began in the quest for food. In this episode, Professor Ken Albala of the University of the Pacific puts the subject of food and its importance in history on the table. Ken has studied widely on the types of cuisine that would be featured at a Roman feast, a medieval banquet, or a Renaissance Italian civic celebration. He’s ground Italian flour to make the sort of bread one would eat in Pompeii. He’s made stewed rabbit in a homemade clay pot the way an Elizabethean peasant would. He hasn’t tried field-mouse-on-a-stick (a popular Roman delicacy) but probably not for lack of trying. We discuss how Roman food reflected social rank, wealth, and sophistication; why the Middle Ages produced some of history’s most outlandish and theatrical presentations of food, such as gilded boars’ heads, “invented” creatures, mixing parts of different animals; and cooked peacocks spewing flames; modern foody gastronomy; and finally, one of my favorite desserts, Turkish Chicken pudding.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For those that have no living memory of JFK, it’s nearly impossible to think of his presidency as anything but a few preordained moments that move inevitably toward his tragic death: His 1961 inauguration marking a high point of the optimism of the post-war era in which Jackie Kennedy holds their infant son and JFK famously intones: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” This is quickly followed by the botched Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Kennedy’s challenge for the US to land on the moon by the end of the decade. But his assassination tragically cuts his life short, and the legend of JFK becomes frozen in amber. To get a sense of what it was actually like to live during the JFK presidency, we are joined by Mark Updegrove, author of Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency. Looking back on Kennedy’s strength and challenges as a man and leader from the lens of today, we eschew the Camelot myths and look at the textured portrait of a complicated leader, examining the major challenges JFK faced and the influential figures that surrounded him.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were two Lakota chiefs born in the final generation of Plains Indians who grew up in the manner similar to their ancestors: hunting herds of buffalo so large they seemed to cover the earth and moving freely with their nomadic tribes. But they always had contact with white settlers, first a trickle of fur traders and pioneers, then a flood of fortune seekers in 1874 Black Hills Gold Rush. The conflict came to a head in the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn, in which they crushed George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. But what happened to them after this victory?Today’s guest is Mark Lee Gardner, author of The Earth is All That Lasts: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation. We look at the their stories and how their victory over the U.S military also marked and the beginning of the end for their treasured way of life. And in the years to come, both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, defiant to the end, would meet violent—and eerily similar—fates. They were two fascinating leaders struggling to maintain the freedom of their people against impossible odds.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Please enjoy this preview of the Vlogging Through History Podcast, hosted by Chris Mowery. In his show, Chris tells the story of the private soldier as much as it is the story of the great general. It is the story of the farmer in the field as much as it is the story of the man in the Oval office. Go to vloggingthroughhistory.com to enter a giveaway to mark the show's launch.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the most widely read books of the 20th century is Viktor Frank’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” In it, the author, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps during World War II, described his psychotherapeutic method to endure the most hellish experiences imaginable. One must hold onto a purpose in life and immersively imagine that outcome. Many have used Frankl’s method, one of which was Harold Frank, a WW2 rifleman who survived a Nazi POW camp, a multi-day death march, thousands of tons of bombs detonating nearby, and starvation conditions that caused him to lose over 100 pounds.His combat began at D-Day in 1944: twenty-year-old PFC Harold Frank had moved as one with his battalion onto the shores of Utah Beach, pushing into France to cut off and blockade the pivotal Nazi-occupied deep-water port of Cherbourg. As a recognized crack shot with WW II's iconic American automatic rifle, Frank fought bravely across the bloody hedgerows of the Cotentin Peninsula. During the most intense fighting, Frank was ambushed and wounded in a deadly, nine-hour firefight with Germans. Taken prisoner and with a bullet lodged under one arm, Frank found himself dumped first in a brutal Nazi POW concentration camp, then shipped to a grueling work camp on the outskirts of Dresden, Germany, where the young PFC was exposed to the vengeance of a crumbling Nazi regime, the menace of a rapidly advancing Russian military—and the danger of thousands of Allied bombers screaming overhead during the firebombing of Dresden.Today’s guest is historian Mark Hager, author of The Last of the 357th Infantry: Harold Frank’s WWII Story of Faith and Courage. He builds on hundreds of hours of interviews with Frank, sharing the account of his journey as a child of the Great Depression to the bloody shores of the D-Day invasion, into the bowels of Nazi Germany, and back to the U.S. where as a young man Harold would spend years resolutely dealing with the lingering effects of starvation rations while determinedly building a new life—a life always mindful of the legacy of his POW experience and his faithful service in America’s hard-fought war against Nazi aggression.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.