History Unplugged Podcast

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Female rulers dominated the Middle Ages. But it wasn't just the queens or empresses who wielded enormous power. This episode is the second of a three-part series at the lives of the most powerful women in the Middle Ages, and we will first look at the life of Catherine of Siena, the Catholic Mystic who almost single-handedly restored the papacy to Rome in the 1300s and navigated the brutal and male-dominated world of Italian politics. Then we will explore the life of Catherine was the 23th child of a poor family and unable to write until three years before her death at 33. She spent years as a low-ranking member of a religious order and primarily spent her days in solitude and prayer. However, by the end of her life Catherine had travelled throughout the Italian peninsula as a diplomat and negotiated peace between princes. She wrote dozens of letters to Pope Gregory and convinced him to restore the papacy in Rome. She authored “The Dialogue,” a treatise on a fictional conversation between a saint and God, which influenced theologians and the lay religious for centuries. She was named a joint Patron Saint of Italy along with Francis of Assisi in 1939 and a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970. In addition to Catherine, we will also explore the life of Queen Isabella I of Castile and Leon (1451-1504), the reformer, Catholic monarch, and inquisitor. Isabella became Queen of Castile as a politically inexperienced 23-year-old caught in a political tug-of-war between her half-brother and the Spanish nobles. Upon her death in 1504, she had successfully united Spain's kingdoms, completed the Reconquista, stabilized the economy, and commissioned an idealistic Genoese sailor to find a shorter sea route to India by crossing the Atlantic in 1492. Funding such trips to the New World was a significant reason that Spain became a global power in the next century. These brighter moments are contrasted by the darker ones in her 28-year reign. She and her husband Ferdinand compelled all Jews and Muslims to convert to Christianity, expelling those who refused. This policy laid the legal infrastructure for the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition in the coming century.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The idea of a powerful woman in the Middle Ages seems like an oxymoron. Females in this time are imagined to be damsels in distress, trapped in a high tower, and waiting for knights to rescue them, all while wearing traffic-cones for a hat. After rescue, their lives improved little. Their career choices were to be either a docile queen, housewife, or be burned at the stake for witchcraft. But what if this image of medieval women is a complete fiction? It turns out that it is. Powerful female rulers fill the Middle Ages. Anglo-Saxon queen Aethelflaed personally led armies into direct combat with Vikings in the 900s and saved England from foreign invasion. Byzantine Empress Theodora kept the empire from falling apart during the Nika Revolts and stopped her husband Justinian from fleeing Constantinople. Catherine of Siena almost single-handedly restored the papacy to Rome in the 1300s and navigated the brutal and male-dominated world of Italian politics.In this episode, part 1 of a 3-part series, I look at the lives of three extraordinarily powerful women in the Middle Ages. In particular I look at the lives of Empress Theodora of Byzantium, Aethelflaed of the Mercians (a proto-English kingdom), and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the most powerful landholder in Europe in the 12th century. We will explore how they managed to ascend the throne, what made their accomplishments so notable, and the impact they had on their respective societies after their deaths.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Traitor!” “Failure!” “Bungling fool!”Southern newspapers hurled these sentiments at Confederate General John C. Pemberton after he surrendered the fortress of Vicksburg—the key to controlling the Mississippi River during the Civil War. But were they justified in their accusations?Today I'm talking with Dr. Samuel Mitcham, author of Vicksburg: The Bloody Siege that Turned the Tide of the Civil War. He argues that these newspapers—and history itself—have wrongly marred Pemberton’s legacy.Some of the myths he argues against are that Pemberton’s indecisiveness delayed the aid Vicksburg needed, when in fact he had been urgently requesting reinforcements, stationed nearby, but his commanding general repeatedly ignored him due to a petty grudge.The Confederate Army fought an exhaustive battle to defend the fortress of Vicksburg from the spring of 1862 until its surrender on July 4, 1863. Trapped for six weeks, the residents of Vicksburg were forced to dig caves and eat rats to survive. But, due to Pemberton’s stalwart character and resourceful mind, they continued to trust his command despite dire circumstances.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Long before Thanos snapped his fingers in Avengers: Infinity War, another villain successfully killed half of humanity.Malaria is a simple parasite, transmitted by a mosquito bite. But this deadly disease, which has been around as long as homo sapiens, has killed more than all wars and natural disasters combined. It has wiped out cities, destroyed empires, ruined colonies, and may be responsible for 50 billion deaths, among them Alexander the Great and Marcus Aurelius (allegedly).Malaria's role in history is perhaps more under-appreciated than anything else. Here's two examples: Many historians believe America won the Revolutionary War due to malaria depleting the ranks of infected soldiers. Some think it caused Rome's downfall. When the malaria parasite was discovered in the 1800s it led to containment efforts. But the real game changer was the deployment of DDT in World War Two. Deadly swamp lands (like much of the United States) were now safe for human habitation. Even South Pacific islands were no longer death traps.However, the fight against malaria took a different turn in the 1960s with the publication of Silent Spring, a book that argued pesticides could permanently damage earth's ecological balance.Malaria is not the killer it once was but it still plays a massive role in public affairs debates today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In August 1862, two Union soldiers were gravely wounded at the Battle of Second Manassas. They were brought to a field hospital, though both died as a result of their injuries. Their bodies were laid to rest in a shallow burial pit, intermixed with amputated limbs from other soldiers wounded in the battle. Then they were lost to history.But in 2014, the National Park Service (NPS) first encountered the remains during a utility project. With help from the Smithsonian Institution, the NPS was able to identify the remains as Union soldiers, and worked with the Army to give these soldiers an honorable final resting place.Beneath the surface, they found two nearly-complete human skeletons, and several artifacts including buttons from a Union sack coat, a .577 Enfield bullet, three pieces of .31 caliber lead buckshot, and an assemblage of eleven arms and legs. The discovery was something incredibly rare: a battlefield surgeon's burial pit. In fact, this was the first time such a burial pit had ever been excavated and studied at a Civil War battlefield.Today I'm talking with archeologist and Manassas National Battlefield Park Superintendent Brandon Bies about the discovery, what it can tell us about Civil War combat medicine (when doctors did their best despite having little else but a saw an chloroform) and the new light this sheds on the horrific nature of warfare in the 19th century.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You've heard it before: American politics have never been nastier or more divisive than they are today. Just witness the recent words of one recent front-runner candidate, who told told the media his opponent was a hermaphrodite, because he was too weak to be a man but too ugly to be a woman. The front-runner's hatchet men counter-attacked. They called his opponent a nasty low-life who was the vile offspring of a mulatto and an Indian. He was a bloodthirsty war-monger who wanted to trigger a war with America's enemies, leading to a national orgy of “rape, incest, and adultery.” The slurs kept piling up. The front-runner was called a criminal and fascist. The opponent was called an atheist cowardly weakling. Does this sound like words passed between the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns in 2016? They weren't— these were insults traded between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 election. Jefferson's camp described Adams as having a “hideous hermaphroditical character.” Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” As you can see, American elections have always been vicious. To dive into this topic, I have on the show David Severa, host of the podcast called Early and Often – the History of Elections in America. We talk about the history of voting in the United States, all the way from the earliest colonial days to the present.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Slavery died a long death in the Western World. Abolitionists began mobilizing in the 1700s (chief among them Quakers and other Protestant sects) but the movement took decades of activism, bookmaking, and even armed resistance to succeed.In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, America dealt with the contradiction of being founded on liberty and justice for all…while treating four million humans as literal property for no other reason than their skin color. Strange situations emerged, such as Thomas Jefferson forcefully arguing for universal, innate rights while most likely fathering six children with his slave Sally Hemings.In this episode we will explore:Whether emancipation was the result of religions movements, the Enlightenment, all of these things, or none of them; why the first thing emancipated slaves did was look for lost family members (They posted descriptions of family members in newspapers. Most looked in vain and continued to post until World War One); how slaves reacted to the very first day of emancipation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Slavery predates European entry into the Atlantic world in the Age of Exploration, but the system that developed during the 16th and 17th centuries was arguably a more inhumane and racially tinged institution than anything that had previously existed. The first English colonists in the Americas believed they could become wealthy through mutual trade with Native Americans. This system failed and was replaced by chattel enslavement of Africans to work on cash-crop plantations. American slavery grew and metastasized until it swallowed up over 10 million lives in the Atlantic Slave Trade.This episode explores the origins of New World slavery (originally based on the Iberian enslavement of Muslims), the miseries that Africans experienced on slave ships, auction blocks, and plantation life, and the establishment of laws in early America that made slavery a cornerstone of the young nation's economy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As the trans-Atlantic slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas began to grow in the 1500s, there was another slave trade that operated on an even larger scale in the same time period. It was the capture of Europeans by north-African Muslims. Barbary Pirates enslaved an estimated 1 million Europeans in the period from 1500 to 1800.Enslavement was a real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland. In 1632, pirates captured the Irish city of Baltimore. They and others were snatched from their homes, taken in chains to the slave markets of Algiers, and sold to the highest bidder. Some spent the rest of their lives rowing galleys. Others toiled in quarries or on farms. Attractive women were sent to harems and became a pasha's concubine. This episode looks at a little-known chapter in the history of slavery. Although few know the stories of these captives, the threat of piracy on the Mediterranean had a huge impact on the Western World. Thomas Jefferson developed the U.S. navy to eliminate the Barbary Threat. Miguel de Cervantes spent years in North Africa. Even John Smith of Pocahontas fame was a slave in Istanbul.Learn about this strange period in history and how it all came to an end in the early 1800s.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.