History on Fire

“It was a period of stupendous change and immense challenge; the entire social, political, and economic landscape of Japan would be transformed within a few decades. Just as this new era was dawning in Japan, Jigoro Kano was born, on October 28, 1860.” John Stevens“In my childhood, I had heard that there was a thing called jujutsu thanks to which even a weak person could defeat a strong person. I definitely thought about learning it.” Jigoro Kano “Some people believe that Judo means simply practicing at the dojo. This is applying the principle of judo at the dojo when practicing defense against attack, and through it is certainly one aspect of judo, it is only a small part of it.” Jigoro KanoIn the second half of the 1800s, after the United States made Japan an offer it couldn’t refuse, Japan experienced a period of crisis and extremely fast modernization. Swept by efforts to copy everything that made the West powerful, Japan turned its back on much of its traditional culture. Martial arts were considered anachronistic and irrelevant, and looked well on their way to disappear into the dustbin of history much in the same way as they had done in other parts of the world. In 1882, a small, nerdy man named Jigoro Kano made his stand to reverse this process. Kano was only 22 years old, and had only little over 5 years of martial arts practice. But what 22-year old Kano started in some spare rooms in a Buddhist temple was going to affect the lives of millions of people.This story is about martial arts, but is also about much more. This story is about the dramatic transformations in Japanese history in the 1800s (and without understanding them, it’s pretty much impossible to understand the role played by Japan in WWII.) It is a story about how one individual can radically impact millions. It’s about how cultural traditions that are seemingly anachronistic can be reinvented to provide value in a modern context. It’s a story about Taoist philosophy, Olympic Games and U.S. presidents, pro-wrestling and helping society, the tension between globalization and nationalism, the role that physical education can play in shaping a person’s character, and a bunch of other things that have only marginally to do with martial arts per se. So, with this in mind, let’s get rolling.If you feel generous and enjoy History on Fire, please consider joining my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/historyonfire to access plenty of bonus content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The adopted father gave away many presents to the people, and these in turn gave presents to me. Thus I became a Crow Indian, a brother of Three Irons and a son of Yellow Leggings, who was a leading counselor of Blackbird, chief of the Mountain Crow tribe.” Tom Le Forge“Cherry was utterly cool… under fire. She was as brave as the bravest. She liked to sing and pray, she was jolly and amiable, but on proper occasion she would stand her ground and fight bravely if that were necessary.” Tom Le Forge about his wife Cherry“The white-man system of continual struggle for money began to pall upon me. My thoughts dwelt more and more upon the simplicity of Crow Indian life, where I had acquired moderate wealth without special effort, or by efforts entirely to my liking. In fact, among them, great accumulation of material wealth was not of importance. Nobody having an amiable disposition ever came to dire want among them.” Tom Le Forge“I worship the Sun and the Bighorn Mountains. The towering range just south of my present home is to me both father and mother. My stomach craves meat cooked in the Indian way… I was born an Ohio American. I shall die a Crow Indian American. My last white wife, in Seattle, got a divorce from me, because of my desertion of her. She was a good woman, but I could not live any longer the life of a white man. When comes the time for me to leave this earth I want to dwell wherever are the spirits of my wives—my Indian wives—both of them.” Tom Le Forge I am fascinated by tales of people who lived across cultures—particularly back in the day when knowledge of different ways of living was severely limited. The tale of Tom Le Forge reads like a real-life Dances with Wolves story. Born as an Anglo-American in 1850, when he was still a teenager he was adopted by a family from the Crow nation, and for all intents and purposes became a Crow, marrying into the tribe, living as one of them, and going to war with them against their traditional enemies. Le Forge also joined the ranks of Crow scouts that helped the U.S. army during the last phase of the Plains Indian wars. His story is a love letter to a way of life that disappeared once the buffalo were gone and the frontier was no more.If you feel generous and enjoy History on Fire, please consider joining my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/historyonfire to access plenty of bonus content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“In order to depict a battle, there is required one of those powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes” Victor Hugo“Inconceivable!” From The Princess BrideA little over 2,000 years ago, Rome was a well-oiled war machine crushing everything in its path. At that time, the Roman legions were the most deadly military force in the Western world, and possibly in the whole world. Every year, they conquered new peoples and pushed the boundaries of their empire. Rape and pillage was the name of the game, and they were masters at it. But in the year 9 CE, something happened in the forests of Germany that was going to have a profound impact on the destiny of the world. Some historians go so far as to suggest that both the German and English languages may not exist as we know them, had things gone differently. News arriving from Germany, along with a severed head delivered by courier, threw Emperor Augustus in a deep depression.In this second and final part of the series about the clash between Rome’s power with Germanic tribesmen, we’ll consider topics such as how suicide post-defeat in battle was a family tradition for one of the key characters in our story, when Varus ordered 2,000 people crucified, the training of the Roman army, Arminius’ skill at playing the long con, the battle that changed history, having to cut your friends’ throat out of kindness, the German passion for human sacrifice, Roman vengeance, how these events may be tied to the creation of the English language, and much more.If you feel generous and enjoy History on Fire, please consider joining my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/historyonfire to access plenty of bonus content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Reflecting upon the chiefs I had known, I realized that here had never been one who was very well off. Poverty was part of a chief’s obligations…” Frank Bird Linderman  Plenty Coups “While we painted ourselves the drums kept beating, and our women sang war-songs. No man can feel himself a coward at such a time. Every man that lives will welcome battle while brave men and women sing war-songs. I would have willingly gone alone against our enemies that day.” Plenty Coups “To be alone with our war-horses at such a time teaches them to understand us, and us to understand them. My horse fights with me and fasts with me, because if he is to carry me in battle he must know my heart and I must know his or we shall never become brothers. I have been told that the white man, who is almost a god, and yet a great fool, does not believe that the horse has a spirit. This cannot be true. I have many times seen my horse’s soul in his eyes.” Plenty Coups "The story of Joseph Medicine Crow is something I've wanted to tell for 20 years." Ken Burns “I felt good. I was a Crow warrior. My grandfathers would have been proud of me.” Joe Medicine Crow  Lakota history has been the subject of many episodes of History on Fire. Today, however, we’ll see history through the eye of their traditional enemies, the Crow. Part of the episode will cover the history and culture of the Crow nation up to the late 1800s. The other part will move into the 1900s and follow the tale of Joe Medicine Crow, the last man to achieve the status of war chief of the Crow Nation thanks to the coups he counted during WWII against the Nazi. The fact that Joe Medicine Crow’s story has not been made into a movie is a crime. I can’t fix that, but at least I can dedicate a podcast to him.If you feel generous and enjoy History on Fire, please consider joining my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/historyonfire to access plenty of bonus content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“This animal is a monster whose father is a lion; it remains open what the mother is.” Jean-Baptiste Boulanger Duhamel “I would be tempted to imagine that we are dealing with a witch, or the devil in person, if only I could believe it.” Jean-Baptiste Boulanger Duhamel  It’s the 1760s, in the Gevaudan area of South Central France. Imagine being a kid. Maybe 12 years old. Maybe as young as 8. You have heard the rumors. Maybe, you saw the mangled bodies. There’s a monster out there. A monster that hunts people and eats them. It has killed people in the woods, on the pastures, and even just a few feet out of their homes. Time and time again, the men have gone out to try to put an end to the monster’s reign of terror, but time and time again the monster has outsmarted them. Some say it’s an animal that escaped a private zoo—a lion or a hyena, or something else you have never seen. Some people say it’s a giant wolf. Some say a demon that can’t be killed by bullets. Maybe, it’s a werewolf.Just knowing that this monster wanders the countryside, right around your village… that would be terrifying. With this bloodthirsty beast roaming around, the door to your house doesn’t seem that solid anymore, and any suspicious noise outside can make you jump. So, it’s more than legitimate for you to think this is scary. But the reality is that this is nothing. Things don’t get truly scary until you take into account the fact that someone has to go outside and take care of the animals. And I don’t mean simply walking to the barn a few yards away from your house. I mean having to leave the relative safety of your home, go out there in the forest, and take them to the pastures, possibly for days at a time. Authorities have been warning people to stay home. Yeah… right… that’s a sweet concept but is practically impossible. If you stay home, your whole family starves. Your father and mother have other jobs that require their presence on the land. Taking animals to pasture… that’s your job. If you are lucky, you get to band with few other friends your age, and tend to the animals together, while you pray that the monster doesn’t choose to come for you. Think about being a 10-year old kid, and that’s your lot in life. This is the story of a monster that killed in the neighborhood of 100 people during the 1760s in France as well as the story of the men sent to hunt it. In the course of this episode, we’ll tackle the entire saga of the monster’s reign of terror, the mystery of the monster’s identity, and the role that the press played in shaping the events. Honorable mentions to the film Brotherhood of the Wolf, Georges St. Pierre, Alan Watts & The Wisdom of Insecurity.  If you feel generous and enjoy History on Fire, please consider joining my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/historyonfire to access plenty of bonus content. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“…a mad, wicked folly…” Queen Victoria about the notion of women having the right to vote “When I watched a policeman fell a girl to the ground and kick her across the platform, my only regret was that I had no weapon with which to strike him an effective blow.” Eunice G. Murray “£100 to any man who can defeat him. Notwithstanding the physical disadvantages against heavier men (for Tani weighs 9 stone only), Apollo will pay any living man twenty guineas who Tani fails to defeat in fifteen minutes: Professional champion wrestlers specially invited.” Music Hall advertisement “Physical force seems to be the only thing in which women have not demonstrated their equality to men, and whilst we are waiting for the evolution which is slowly taking place and bringing about that equality, we might just as well take time by the forelock and use ju-jitsu." Edith Garrud  These days, pretty much any time I run into a movie or a book or a tv series with a strong woman among the lead characters, almost inevitably I run into comments by people whining about it, basically implying that strong women are a Hollywood invention created purely to satisfy some PC, affirmative action requirement. What we play with today is not that kind of a story. There’s nothing fictional about the rather intense ladies starring in this episode. One of them, in particular, Edith Garrud is Exhibit A when it comes to real life tough women from humanity’s past.Our story takes place at the very beginning of the 1900s in England, and it weaves together some rather unlikely elements: how the upper classes’ fear of crime associated with urbanization led to the popularization of Asian martial arts, how the very legitimate request for women to have the right to vote unleashed some rather extreme violence… We’ll talk about suffragettes and terrorism, the early days of pro wrestling, Sherlock Holmes, and some Japanese expats (including that Mitsuyo Maeda destined to set in motion a sequence of events leading to the creation of modern MMA and the UFC.) And most of all, we’ll talk about Edith Garrud, one of the very first women to become a martial arts teacher and to star in the granddaddy of martial arts movies.Please support History on Fire at www.patreon.com/historyonfire  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“I cut off their heads. I burned them with fire. With their blood I dyed the mountain red like red wool. Men I impaled on stakes. The city I destroyed, devastated… the young men and maidens I burned in the fire.” Ashurnairpal II “I filled the wide plain with the corpses of his warriors…. These [rebels] I impaled on stakes. …A pyramid of heads I erected in front of the city.” Salmaneser III“Don’t let Hezekiah mislead you by saying, ‘The Lord will rescue us!’ Have the gods of any other nations ever saved their people from the king of Assyria? 19 What happened to the gods of Hamath and Arpad? And what about the gods of Sepharvaim? Did any god rescue Samaria from my power? 20 What god of any nation has ever been able to save its people from my power? So what makes you think that the Lord can rescue Jerusalem from me?” Isaiah 36:18-20History is a fickle beast. Some events may not seem like much at the time when they happen, but they end up radically shaping all events afterwards. For example, had just one event turned out different—an event largely forgotten today, such as the siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE—and all of history would have changed. If the siege had ended in the way everyone expected it to end, Judaism would have disappeared from the pages of history, and Christianity and Islam would have never been born. Can you imagine how different the world would be if you were to remove the entire history of the three main monotheistic religions? In this episode we’ll tackle this greatest of ‘what ifs.’ In the process of doing so, we’ll discuss the origins of Western monotheism, Assyrian culture, Hebrew legends, the Assyrian protection racket, the clash between monotheistic Hebrews and polytheistic Hebrews, how the Assyrians turned 10 of the tribes of Israel into the “lost tribes”, committing ‘suicide by Assyrian’, the destruction of Lachish, what may have happened in Jerusalem in 701 BCE, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques or means which serve its ends.” Bruce Lee“1. Research your own experience.2. Absorb what is useful.3. Reject what is useless.4. Add what is specifically your own.” Bruce Lee’s methodology“I maintain that truth is a pathless land and you cannot approach it by any religion. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.” Jiddhu Krishnamurti “This doesn’t look like success to me.” Sovannahry Em“A martial artist is a human being first. Just as nationalities have nothing to do with one’s humanity, so they have nothing to do with the martial arts.” Bruce LeeAsk anyone for one name they associate with martial arts, and odds are they will mention Bruce Lee. Because of his career, millions of people were introduced to martial arts. Thanks to his movies, Lee achieved enduring, worldwide fame, broke plenty of box office records, and forever changed the aesthetics of action films. Not bad for a skinny kid from Hong Kong who arrived in United States with the proverbial shirt on his back. The image of his hyper-muscular body in combat pose has become iconic. But there was a lot more to Bruce Lee than meets the eye. He could have been a rock star or a spiritual leader or anything else he had wished… Martial arts was just a channel for his energy. Had he put that same energy anywhere else, he’d have probably had similar success. Despite Hollywood turning him down time and time again due to racial prejudices, Lee refused to take no for an answer and more or less single-handedly changed the way in which Asian people were perceived in the West. His philosophical insights also changed the face of martial arts training, and introduced masses of people to Taoism and Zen Buddhism. His creative & anti-authoritarian approach to life captured the best of the essence of the 1960s. Get ready for a ride because this is an incredible story I have wanted to tell since I first started podcasting. This episode covers Bruce Lee’s philosophy and life from 1965 through his death in 1973. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Energy is eternal delight.” William Blake  “Hong Kong in the 1950s was a depressed place. Post–World War II Hong Kong had suffered from unemployment, a poor economy, over-crowding, homelessness, and people taking advantage of each other. Gangs roamed the street, and juvenile delinquents ran rampant.” Hawkins Cheung “Teachers should never impose their favorite patterns on their students—he said—They should be finding out what works for them, and what does not work for them. The individual is more important than the style.” Bruce Lee “I feel I have this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence, greater than determination, greater than vision. It is all of these combined…” Bruce Lee  Ask anyone for one name they associate with martial arts, and odds are they will mention Bruce Lee. Because of his career, millions of people were introduced to martial arts. Thanks to his movies, Lee achieved enduring, worldwide fame, broke plenty of box office records, and forever changed the aesthetics of action films. Not bad for a skinny kid from Hong Kong who arrived in United States with the proverbial shirt on his back. The image of his hyper-muscular body in combat pose has become iconic. But there was a lot more to Bruce Lee than meets the eye. He could have been a rock star or a spiritual leader or anything else he had wished… Martial arts was just a channel for his energy. Had he put that same energy anywhere else, he’d have probably had similar success. Despite Hollywood turning him down time and time again due to racial prejudices, Lee refused to take no for an answer and more or less single-handedly changed the way in which Asian people were perceived in the West. His philosophical insights also changed the face of martial arts training, and introduced masses of people to Taoism and Zen Buddhism. His creative & anti-authoritarian approach to life captured the best of the essence of the 1960s. Get ready for a ride because this is an incredible story I have wanted to tell since I first started podcasting. This episode covers Bruce Lee’s life from birth to his famous fight with Wong Jack Man in 1964. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dive into the life of John Brown, a polarizing figure whose anti-slavery fervor sparked debates about morality and violence. Explore his audacious raids, including the tumultuous mission to rescue a family from slavery and the infamous Harper's Ferry attack. Uncover the tragic aftermath that led to Brown's martyrdom and the chaos that ensued. His unwavering beliefs about liberty and equality challenge the status quo, igniting conversations about race and rebellion that resonate even today.