History Unplugged Podcast

An inquisitor thirsty for a confession had plenty of medieval tools of torture at his disposal: the iron maiden, the judas cradle, the rack, or the brazen bull. Turns out many of these devices are fabrications from hundreds of years later made for museums that wanted to display the barbarism of the "Dark Ages."   TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes or StitcherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Learn about one of the most important events in modern Irish history. On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of the Irish Republic. They, along with some 1,600 followers, staged a rebellion against the British government in Ireland. It all started at a modest post office in Dublin and led to a direct clash with British troops.   TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes or StitcherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thomas Jefferson once said you can't believe everything you read on the Internet. With those extremely true words in mind, let's look at other quotes that are widely believed to be authentic but totally false.   TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes or StitcherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a remote forest clearing in Burgundy, France, a 13th-century castle is slowly being constructed using only the tools, techniques, and materials that would have been available to the builders of the day. It’s archaeology in reverse. What started out as an eccentric pipe dream is now an established enterprise, drawing in tens of thousands of visitors from around Europe every year. Learn what it took to build a castle in 13th-century France in this podcast episode. If you want to learn first-hand, go to Burgundy and check it out!   TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes or StitcherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Japanese military of World War Two has a nasty reputation—kamikaze pilots, baby killers, and brain-washed, honor-obsessed soldiers who threw away their lives for a lost cause. Parts of this reputation is earned but much of the stereotype has come out of World War Two films. Depicting WWII Japan fairly in film and television while humanizing its people isn't easy, but Dan King is up to the job. King is a WWII Pacific war historian who reads, writes and speaks Japanese. After returning to the US he worked on several dozen movies and historical documentaries as a technical advisor, historical & language consultant and re-enactment coordinator. He was the assistant military advisor for Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai (he had a cameo as a German officer), a researcher for Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima/Flags Of Our Fathers, and technical consultant for Nicolas Cage's Windtalkers. His passion for the subject of the war in the Pacific has also led him to seek out over 250 Japanese WWII veterans and personally interview 97 of them, in their own language. He has also been interviewed on several radio programs and has spoken to hundreds of people about Japanese aviation. Dan King was also employed by EA GAMES as the WWII Japanese technical consultant for the worldwide best selling "Medal of Honor" video game series. His basic task was to provide information to the game creators in order to make the game as accurate as possible. This included providing examples of Japanese WWII uniforms and gear; infantry weapons; tanks, large guns, ships and aircraft; Japanese language supervision during VO recording; and battle tactics and hand signals.   RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Dan's Site Historical Consulting A Tomb Called Iwo Jima The Last Zero Fighter: Firsthand Accounts from WWII Japanese Naval Pilots TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes or StitcherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Teddy Roosevelt was not afraid to tempt death. He hiked the Matterhorn during his honeymoon. He arrested outlaws on the Dakota Frontier. He hunted rhinos in Africa. But his most dangerous journey came after his failure in 1912 to retake the presidency as a third-party candidate on the Bull Moose ticket. He choose to shake off the blues in an extremely dangerous journey to South America. Roosevelt did not merely want a repeat of his African safari: a well-provisioned hunt to a foreign land that was little more than an exotic form of sight seeing. Roosevelt wanted to join the ranks of explorers who were pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge: the arctic explorers discovering the Northwest passage or the African trekkers locating the source of the Nile River. His guide, the Brazilian explorer Col. Candido Rondon, suggested they survey the River of Doubt, an uncharted capillary of the Amazon that ran through treacherous terrain of the rainforest. Many told him the journey would end in his death. Ignoring the warnings of field naturalists with experience in the Amazon, Roosevelt said, “If it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so.” Learn in this episode how he almost did. TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes or StitcherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Theodore Roosevelt was hell bent on becoming president in 1912. He ran as a third-party candidate for the Progressive Party, a splinter group of Republicans dissatisfied with William Howard Taft. He was so committed to winning that he gave a 90-minute speech…immediately after being shot in the chest by a would-be assassin. How did he do it without passing out? What did his audience think as he bled out before their eyes?   TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes or StitcherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Perhaps no president has as many unbelievable stories about his life than Teddy Roosevelt. He was an amateur boxer. He was the first American politician to learn judo. He summited the Matterhorn during his honeymoon. He joined an expedition to log data about an unchartered river in the Amazon. But perhaps no story matches his pursuit of three boat thieves in the Dakotas in the 1880s. Learn how Roosevelt travelled 300 miles in the bitter cold to arrest three thieves… all to prove to other ranches that he wasn’t a week Easterner who came out to to the frontier to play cowboy.     TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes or StitcherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nothing supports the Prohibition movement like a hatchet-wielding radical ready to smash in a Midwestern saloon. Carrie Amelia Nation would know. She made a career out of physical assaulting the alcohol industry in the years before Prohibition (1920).   TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes or StitcherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shake a family tree long enough and something embarrassing secret is sure to drop out: a felon uncle here, an illegitimate nephew there, a grandfather arrested for indecent exposure there. Genealogy can reveal all sorts of unexpected surprises. But it can also help you find second and third cousins that you didn't know were famous. To talk about the wonders of genealogy and how to do it right is Crista Cowan. Crista is the corporate genealogist for Ancestry.com. She was the indexing manager for the company and helped them archive more than 17 billion records. She has found records in libraries, archives, and courthouses. Recently she has used DNA as a powerful tool to locate and connect biological family members. Crista has been involved in family history research for more than 25 years and has been a professional genealogist since 2002. She specializes in descendancy research, Jewish Immigration, and sharing family history with the genealogically challenged. Crista regularly teaches Family History classes at her local LDS Family History Center and at conferences and genealogy societies around the country. She has been employed at Ancestry.com since 2004 and is known as The Barefoot Genealogist. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Crista's Youtube Series: The Barefoot Genealogist TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes or StitcherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.