History Unplugged Podcast

Claims of India's fantastic wealth lead Europeans through the centuries to seek to trade with this fabled land, which existed on the far eastern reaches of known civilization.As far back as the 500s BC, Scylax of Caryanda, a Greek explorer sailed down the length of the Indus in the service of Darius. Later Alexander's troops passed through India, and many troops stayed behind, creating an incredible East-West synthesis. Buddhism came out of this mix, as well as the early Christian heresy Manicheism. Exotic trade. For hundreds of years, Greek speakers could be found in Indian port towns.Such legends inspired Cristopher Columbus to sail west across the Atlantic and reach a direct route, even though other navigators insisted his calculations were terrible and he and his crew would starve at sea. Yet he did reach land and traded with settlers whom he believed the rest of his life to be of India, and the name stuck, as Indians.Today’s episode is about the impact that India had on Western Civilization and how the quest for India led to incredible long-distance travel for traders for over two millennia.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The American Revolution has received a burst of attention in the last two decades, with Pulitzer Prize-winning monographs from David McCullough and Ron Chernow (and the biggest Broadway musical in recent history, with Hamilton). But it’s come under attack as well, with historical revisionist projects like the New York Times 1619 Project, which says 1776 was a colossal mistake steeped in racism.Today’s guest is Edward Lengel, editor of the new book “The 10 Key Campaigns of the American Revolution.” He argues that the American Revolution encompasses a human drama of epic proportions. At different points in time, at locations separated by hundreds and often thousands of miles, individuals—often the unlikeliest imaginable—took destiny in their hands and accomplished astonishing things that profoundly changed the course of human history. Their deeds should be unforgettable.We discuss all sorts of things – like unsung heroes of the Revolution (Henry Knox is a favored choice), whether or not Benedict Arnold was a traitor or just misunderstood, and what the Revolution means for Americans in 2020.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1939, as the Nazis closed in, Alfred Berger mailed a desperate letter to an American stranger who happened to share his last name. He and his wife, Viennese Jews, had found escape routes for their daughters. But now their money, connections, and emotional energy were nearly exhausted. Alfred begged the American recipient of the letter, “You are surely informed about the situation of all Jews in Central Europe….By pure chance I got your address….My daughter and her husband will go…to America….help us to follow our children….It is our last and only hope….”After languishing in a California attic for over sixty years, Alfred’s letter came by chance into Faris Cassell’s possession. Questions flew off the page at her. Did the Bergers’ desperate letter get a response? Did they escape the Nazis? Were there any living descendants? Today’s guest, Faris Cassell, author of the book The Unanswered Letter, discusses many things, including a previously unknown opportunity to assassinate Hitler—to which the Bergers were connected.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a preview of a members-only series on Teddy Roosevelt's years in the Dakota Badlands called Forging a President. Subscribe today for access to all premium episodes! https://patreon.com/unpluggedSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

1453 was the most shocking year in Europe since the starting of the Bubonic Plague (1347), the beginning of the First Crusade (1095), or the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in 800. Many called it the Year the Middle Ages ended. That’s because the Ottomans, an upstart empire less than two centuries removed from being a semi-nomadic chieftainship and vassal state of the Mongols, conquered Constantinople, the crown jewel of eastern Christendom and the “still-beating heart of antiquity”Learn how Mehmet, the 21-year-old Sultan, conquered the city by assembling an army of 100,000, commissioned a cannon that could fire a 1,200-pound ball, and had warships hauled out of water and over hills in order to enter the enemy’s harbor.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For George Washington, the “foreign” nation that posed the biggest threat to the survival of the infant United States wasn’t Britain, France, or Spain; it was the numerous Indian nations that still dominated large areas of the North American continent and threatened to destroy the fragile nation. Washington’s major goal as president was to secure the future of America and build the republic on Indian land. That’s not to say that Washington wanted to trample on Indian rights. His secondary goal was to establish fair policies for dealings with Indian peoples. Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox believed that the most honorable and cheapest way to acquire Indian land was to purchase it in a fair treatyThis episode looks at George Washington’s dealings with American Indians, and his hope that he could grow his nation while treating the current inhabitants with justice and respect. He did not have the policies of Andrew Jackson of the 1820s or 30s, who tore up treaties and forcibly relocated Indian peoples west of the Mississippi (in fact, the Cherokee leader John Ross at this time remembered Washington so fondly that he named his son after the first president). Washington sought a national Indian policy that might somehow reconcile taking Native resources with respecting their rights even as the nation expanded across their homelands and ignored earlier Indian treaty rights. He failed in these goals, and his failure eventually became America’s failure.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Did Hitler die in his bunker…or not? I’m talking with Robert J. Hutchinson today to explore what really happened to Hitler. He’s the author of the book What Really Happened: The Death of Hitler. According to official accounts and numerous eyewitnesses, the dictator of the Third Reich shot himself, loyal Nazis burned his body, and the bones were removed by the Russians. Yet, after WWII, 50 percent of Americans polled did not believe the captured Nazis who said Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide in their Berlin bunker. They thought the Führer had faked his death and escaped justice. Joseph Stalin himself told Allied leaders that Soviet forces never discovered Hitler’s body and that he believed the Nazi leader had gotten away. There were numerous reports of top Nazi officials successfully fleeing to South America.Incredible as it sounds, the mystery surrounding Hitler's final days only deepened in 2009 when a U.S. forensic team announced that a piece of the skull held in Soviet archives was not actually Hitler’s. So, what really happened? Hutchinson sifts through the mountains of primary resources and debunks urban legends to uncover the truth about Hitler’s last week in Berlin.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Long neglected in world history, the Ottoman Empire was a hub of intellectual fervor and geopolitical power. At the height of their authority in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans, with extraordinary military dominance and unparalleled monopolies over trade routes, controlled more territory and ruled over more people than any world power, forcing Europeans out of the Mediterranean and to the New World.Yet, despite its towering influence and centrality to the rise of our modern world, the Ottoman Empire’s history has for centuries been downplayed. But today’s guest Alan Mikhail presents a recasting of Ottoman history, retelling the story of the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520) in his book “God’s Shadow.”Born to a concubine, and the fourth of his sultan father’s ten sons, Selim claimed power over the empire in 1512 and, through ruthless ambition, nearly tripled the territory under Ottoman control, building a governing structure that lasted into the twentieth century.It was the Ottoman monopoly on trade routes, combined with military advances, that thrust Spain and Portugal out of the Mediterranean, forcing the merchants and sailors to become global explorers. This included Christopher Columbus, who cut his military teeth as a “Moor-slayer.” Also, Selim’s conquest of Yemen allowed his army to control the “first truly global commodity”—coffee—and subsequently made it the phenomenon it is today, a product that “energizes nearly every kind of social interaction across the world.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a preview of a members-only series on Teddy Roosevelt's years in the Dakota Badlands called Forging a President. Subscribe today for access to all premium episodes! https://patreon.com/unpluggedSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Making a book in the Middle Ages was extremely hard work. It took the skin of several calves to make the vellum (a writing material), an army of monks in a scriptorium, rare ink for the illustrations, and six months’ time. Writing for hours on end was torture (monks called it just that when they wrote in book margins, which read like ransom notes). Yet if not for the work of these monks, every single work from antiquity would have been lost. Almost no writing from ancient Greece or Rome survives in its original form; all of it was copied and preserved in medieval monasteries.In this episode, we explore the arduous process of making a book. We will specifically look at the Codex Gigas, the largest medieval book in the world (it’s a yard tall, 19 inches across, 9 inches thick, and weighs 165 pounds). It is also known as The Devil’s Bible because according to legend, the author sold his soul to the devil to complete it.Overall, we have these monks to thank for keeping ancient science and philosophy alive. If not for their punishing efforts to record these ancient documents, they would have been lost forever.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.