Afleveringen
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Was Harry Truman really our poorest president or simply a man up at 2 a.m. struggling with financial anxiety? Did Calvin Coolidge get bad advice from his stockbroker to buy stocks in 1930 as the market continued to crash? Is it true George Washington enhanced his net worth by marrying up?
We often think of the US presidents as being above the fray. But the truth is, the presidents are just like usâworried about money, trying to keep a budget, and chasing the American financial dream. While some presidents like Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford became wildly successful with money, others like Thomas Jefferson and Joe Biden struggled to sustain their lifestyle. The ability to win the presidency is no guarantee of financial security, although today itâs a much easier path to monetize.
Todayâs guest is Megan Gorman, author of âAll the Presidentsâ Money.â We look at the different personal money stories of the presidents. Grit, education, and risk are just some of the different ways that the presidents over the last 250 years have made (or lost) money. -
From the taking of the holy city of Jerusalem in the 7th century AD by Caliph Umar, to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I, Christian popes, emperors and kings, and Muslim caliphs and sultans were locked in a 1300-year battle for political, military, ideological, economic and religious supremacy.
Some of the most significant clashes of arms in human history include the taking and retaking of Jerusalem and the collapse of the Crusader states; the fall of Constantinople; the sieges of Rhodes and Malta; the assault on Vienna and the 'high-water mark' of Ottoman advance into Europe; culminating in the Allied capture of Jerusalem in World War I, the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the dissolution of the sultanate and the caliphate, and the formation of modern Europe and the modern Middle East.
To explore this history is todayâs guest, Simon Mayall, author of âThe House of War: The Struggle between Christendom and the Caliphate.â -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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More Americans have peanut allergies today than at any point in history. Why? In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a strict recommendation that parents avoid giving their children peanut products until they're three years old. Getting the science perfectly backward, triggering intolerance with lack of early exposure, the US now leads the world in peanut allergies-and this misinformation is still rearing its head today.
How could the experts have gotten it so wrong? Could it be that many modern-day health crises have been caused by the hubris of the medical establishment? Experts said for decades that opioids were not addictive, igniting the opioid crisis. They demonized natural fat in foods, driving Americans to processed carbohydrates as obesity rates soared.
These failures of medical groupthink have been seen throughout history. Philosophers of the 16th century who claimed that blood circulated throughout the body (instead of resting in a layer below the epidermis) faced capital punishment. James Lind, who discovered that Vitamin C prevented scurvy, was ignored for 40 years. Ignaz Semmelweis was rejected by the medical community for suggesting that doctors should perhaps wash their hands before operating on patients.
Todayâs guest is Marty Makary, author of âBlind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What it Means for Our Health.â We see how when modern medicine issues recommendations based on good scientific studies, it shines. Conversely, when medicine is interpreted through the harsh lens of opinion and edict, it can mold beliefs that harm patients and stunt research for decades. -
Appleton Oaksmith was a swashbuckling Civil War-era sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-19th century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering schemes in Nicaragua, Cuban liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. But in his life we also see the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln Administration went to destroy the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade. Thatâs because he spent years working as an outlaw mariner for the Confederacy and later against the Klan.
Oaksmith lived in the murky underworld of New York City, where federal marshals plied the docks in lower Manhattan in search of evidence of slave trading. Once they suspected Oaksmith, federal authorities had him arrested and convicted, but in 1862 he escaped from jail and became a Confederate blockade-runner in Havana. The Lincoln Administration tried to have him kidnapped in violation of international law, but the attempt was foiled. Always claiming innocence, Oaksmith spent the next decade in exile until he received a presidential pardon from U.S. Grant, at which point he moved to North Carolina and became an anti-Klan politician.
To look at this story is todayâs guest, Jonathan White, author of âShipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade.â -
For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. But it has been received by different cultures and language groups in (sometimes) radically different ways. Following Jesusâs departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, and every community it has encountered has read, heard, and seen the Bible through its own language and culture. It was spread by merchants, missionaries, and colonizers Asia, Africa, and to the Americas. Local communities adapted the "alien" book through a blend of cultural integration and reinterpretation. For instance, 20th-century Chinese theologians described similarities between Confucianism and biblical texts, while Native Americans placed themselves directly into biblical narrativesâa group of 18th-century Mohican converts renamed themselves Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, proclaiming themselves "patriarchs of a new nation of believers."
Todayâs guest is Bruce Gordon, author of âThe Bible: A Global History.â We discuss the story of the Bibleâs journey around the globe and across more than two thousand years, showing how it has shaped and been shaped by changing beliefs and believersâ different needs. The people who received it interpreted it in radically different ways, from desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages. -
In World War II, there were no C-130s or large cargo aircraft that could deliver heavy equipment
â such as a truck or artillery piece â in advance of an airborne invasion. For that, you needed to put that equipment, along with its crew, in a glider. These were unpowered boxes of plywood, pulled by a towing plane into enemy territory by a single cable wrapped with telephone wire.
The men who flew on gliders were all volunteers, for a specialized duty that their own government projected would have a 50 percent casualty rate. In every major European invasion of the war they led the way. They landed their gliders ahead of the troops who stormed Omaha Beach, and sometimes miles ahead of the paratroopers bound for the far side of the Rhine River in Germany itself. From there, they had to hold their positions. They delivered medical teams, supplies and gasoline to troops surrounded in the Battle of the Bulge, ahead even of Patton's famous supply truck convoy.
These all-volunteer glider pilots played a pivotal role from the day the Allies invaded Occupied Europe to the day Germany finally surrendered. Yet the story of these anonymous heroes is virtually unknown.
To explore these stories with us is todayâs guest, Scott McGaugh, author of âBrotherhood of the Flying Coffin: The Glider Pilots of World War II.â -
From George Washingtonâs powdered pigtail to John Quincy Adamsâ bushy side-whiskers and from James Polkâs masterful mullet to John F. Kennedyâs refined Ivy League coif, the tresses of American leaders have long conveyed important political and symbolic messages.
There are surprising, and multi-dimensional ways that hair has influenced the personalities, public and private lives, personal scandals, and tragedies of the men and women who have occupied the White House and influenced the nation at large.
To explore this unconventional aspect of American history is todayâs guest, Ted Pappas, author of âCombing Through the White House: Hair and Its Shocking Impact on the Politics, Private Lives, and Legacies of the Presidents.â -
This is the question that historians have argued since the end of World War Two. How much did an average person know, and, more importantly, how responsible were they? What made people âperpetrators,â âbystanders,â and âvictimsâ within a wider context of coercion and consent?
To explore this question is todayâs guest, Richard Evans, author of âHitlerâs People: The Faces of the Third Reich.â We look at a connected series of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regimeâs leadership. This includes personal lives of figures whose names appear in nearly all Nazi biographies, like Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels (âThe Policemanâ and âThe Propagandistâ), as well as professionals with skills deemed advantageous to the Nazi agenda, including Julius Streicher (âThe Schoolmasterâ) and the eugenicist Karl Brandt (âThe Professionalâ), and some of the women in Hitlerâs orbit such as Ilse Koch (âThe Witchâ) and Leni Riefenstahl (âThe Starâ).
Through these biographies, one of our greatest historians explores the enduring and unnerving questions: How could human beings carry out such terrible and murderous atrocities? Were they degenerate, deranged psychopaths, or were they ordinary men doing their jobs? How can examining individual personalities help us reach an understanding of the evil and immorality that sustained the Nazi regime? -
Iberia was one of three crucial theatres of the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome. Hannibal of Carthageâs siege of Saguntum in 219 BC triggered a conflict that led to immense human and material losses on both sides, pitting his brother Hasdrubal against the Republican Roman armies seeking to gain control of the peninsula. Then, in 208 BC, the famous Roman general Scipio Africanus defeated Hasdrubal at Baecula, forcing Hasdrubalâs army out of Iberia and on to its eventual annihilation at the Metaurus.
Todayâs guest, Mir Bahmanyar, author of âSecond Punic War in Iberia: 220-206 BCâ brings to life the key personalities and events of this important theatre of the war, and explains why the Roman victory at Baecula led to a strategic shift and Carthageâs eventual defeat. It covers Scipio Africanusâ brilliant victory at Ilipa in 206 BC, where he crushed the army of Mago Barca and Hasdrubal Gisco. -
Contrary to popular belief, Robin Hood may not have been the merry medieval outlaw of Sherwood Forest. Rather, a look at real historical figures who inspired the legend are narrowed down to the most unlikely suspect: an Anglo-Saxon hitman who may have assassinated the King of England.
Todayâs guest, Peter Staveley, proposes that Robin Hood lived during the time of William II (near the time of the Norman conquest of England in 1066), rather than Richard I and Prince John of the late 1100s. He argues that Robin was responsible for the death of William II, also known as Rufus, in what was long considered a hunting accident in the New Forest in 1100. This act conveniently paved the way for Williamâs brother to ascend the throne as Henry I. Staveley places Robin deep within the geography of South Yorkshire, with strong ties to historic Hallamshire, Loxley, Bradfield, and Ecclesfield, challenging the traditional narrative and the long-held association with Nottingham.
We explore how Yorkshire, particularly Sheffield, might reclaim the legacy of Robin Hood from Nottingham and reveal the true, rougher man behind the legend.
Staveley is author of âRobin Unhooded, And the Death of a King.â -
The use of horses by humans began roughly 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Pontic- Caspian Steppe when a daring man (or a woman â we have no way of knowing) jumped on the back of a docile mare. Thus began the horseâs unrivalled historical influence across millennia to the present day.
The horse dominated every facet of humanityâas a mode of transportation, a vehicle of trade, an essential farming tool, a status symbol, a formidable weapon of war, a source of energy, an agent of both lethal disease and lifesaving medicine, a participant in sport, and, of course, a steadfast and loyal companion.
For most of us, horses are not part of our everyday, practical lives, and are instead relegated to entertainment and recreation through racing, rodeos, and equestrian or television shows and movies depicting bygone eras. But this is a relatively recent development as cars âunseatedâ the horse as the primary method of transportation a mere one hundred years ago. To demonstrate the profound historical impact of the horse on our global civilization, we are joined by Timothy Winegard, author of âThe Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity.â -
Charles Cowlamâs career as a convict, spy, detective, congressional candidate, adventurer, and con artist spanned the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age. His life touched many of the most prominent figures of the era, including Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant. One contemporary newspaper reported that Cowlam âhas as many aliases as there are letters in the alphabet.â He was a chameleon in a world of strangers, and scholars have overlooked him due to his elusive nature.
Reconstruction offered additional opportunities for Cowlam to repackage his identity. He convinced Ulysses S. Grant to appoint him U.S. marshal and persuaded Republicans in Florida to allow him to run for Congress. After losing the election, Cowlam moved to New York, where he became a serial bigamist and started a fake secret society inspired by the burgeoning Granger movement. When the newspapers exposed his lies, he disappeared and spent the next decade living under an assumed name. He resurfaced in Dayton, Ohio, claiming to be a Union colonel suffering from dementia to gain admittance into the National Soldiersâ Home.
Todayâs guest, Frank Garmom, author of A Wonderful Career in Crime, Cowlamâs stunning machinations -
Soviet espionage existed in the United States since the U.S.S.R.âs founding and continued until its dissolution in the 1990s. It reached its height in World War 2 and the early Cold War, especially to steam atomic weaponâs technology (revealed to the public with the trials and executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two Americans who fed intelligence back to the Soviets).
The funnel for Americans into Soviet espionage was the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), a movement that attracted egalitarian idealists and bred authoritarian zealots. Throughout its history, the American Communist Party attracted a variety of seemingly contradictory people. Democratic, reform-minded individuals who wanted to end inequality worked alongside authoritarians and ideologues who espoused Soviet propaganda. These factions reached loggerheads following Nikita Khrushchevâs revelation of Joseph Stalinâs crimes, leading to the organizationâs decline into political irrelevance.
To look at this history is todayâs guest, Maurice Isserman, author of âReds: The Tragedy of American Communism.â -
In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth?
In the intervening years, âMarmâ Mandelbaum had become the countryâs most notorious âfenceââa receiver of stolen goodsâand a criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called âthe nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime,â she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country.
But Mandelbaum wasnât just a successful crook: She was a business visionaryâone of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters, she handled logistics and organized supply chainsâturning theft into a viable, scalable business.
To discuss this story is todayâs guest, Margalit Fox, author of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. We look at a colorful fixture of Gilded Age New Yorkâa city teeming with nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and âlegitimateâ commerce. -
Beneath the trench warfare of World War One existed an entirely separate war underground: battles in the mines and dugouts between the Great Powers. In 1914â17, the underground war was a product of static trench warfare, essential to survive it and part of both sides' attempts to overcome it.
In the stagnant, troglodyte existence of trench warfare, military mining was a hidden world of heroism and terror in which hours of suspenseful listening were spent monitoring the steady picking of unseen opponents, edging quietly towards the enemy, and judging when to fire a charge. Break-ins to enemy mine galleries resulted in hand-to-hand fighting in the darkness.
We are joined by Simon Jones to discuss the ingenuity, claustrophobia and tactical importance of the underground war. He is the author of âThe War Underground, 1914-1918: Tactics and Equipment.â -
In the months leading up to D-Day, Eisenhowerâs attention was in relentless demand, whether he was negotiating, rallying troops, or solving crises from his headquarters in Bushy Park, London. He projected optimism outwardly but resisted it inwardly. The day of the invasion, he gave the most rousing speech of his life, exhorting the tens of thousands of young men of the âGreat Crusadeâ ahead of them. Then in a fleeting moment of quiet, he wrote out a draft of a resignation letter in case the invasion failed.
Outwardly, Eisenhower was a genial cypher. He was liked by all and seemed to make success inevitable. Inwardly, he was near constantly abuzz with brilliance, exhaustion, will, frustration, and the acute awareness that failure was always a possibility. The D-Day landing sees him at this unique, extraordinarily consequential moment, for D-Day would not only go down as one of the most important military successes in history but would also forge a modern George Washington.
To explore this story, we are joined with todayâs guest, Michel Paradis, author of âThe Light of Battle.â We see how Ike masterminded D-Day, wielding his unique leadership skills to save Europe and shape the course of history. -
On August 20, 1942, twelve Marine dive-bombers and nineteen Marine fighters landed at Guadalcanal. Their mission: defeat the Japanese navy and prevent it from sending more men and supplies to "Starvation Island," as Guadalcanal was nicknamed. The Japanese were turning the remote, jungle-covered mountain in the south Solomon Islands into an air base from which they could attack the supply lines between the U.S. and Australia. The night after the Marines landed and captured the partially completed airfield, the Imperial Navy launched a surprise night attack on the Allied fleet offshore, resulting in the worst defeat the U.S. Navy suffered in the 20th century, which prompted the abandonment of the Marines on Guadalcanal.
The Marines dug in, and waited for help, as those thirty-one pilots and twelve gunners flew against the Japanese, shooting down eighty-three planes in less than two months, while the dive bombers, carried out over thirty attacks on the Japanese fleet. The attacks were led by such figures as Major John L. Smith, a magnetic leader who became Americaâs top fighter ace for the time; Captain Marion Carl, the Marine Corpsâ first ace, and one of the few survivors of his squadron at the Battle of Midway (he would be shot down and forced to make his way back to base through twenty-five miles of Japanese-held jungle; and Major Richard Mangrum, the lawyer-turned-dive-bomber commander whose inexperienced men wrought havoc on the Japanese Navy.
To discuss these stories is todayâs guest, John Bruning, author of Fifty-Three Days on Starvation Island. -
When global supply chains were shut down in 2020 and messily rebooted after COVID lockdowns ceased, one island nation emerged as the most important player in getting critical components to factories around the world. That was Taiwan, which produces 90 percent of the worldâs advanced semiconductors. Without this island nation of 23 million, there are no smart phones, new cars, or any advanced consumer electronics.
Things were no less dull on the foreign policy side, as US-Chinese relations deteriorated. When Nancy Pelosi declared her intent to visit Taiwan in 2022, it sparked frenzied discussions across the United States, China, and Taiwanâa discourse that was characterized by amnesia and half-truths about the history of this pivotal island nation. Today, as relations between Washington and Beijing deteriorate and as tensions over Taiwan reach a boiling point, its survival as an independent democracy is precarious indeed. Any attempt to resolve the impasse and avert a devastating war demands that we understand how it all began.
To explore Taiwanâs modern history is todaâs guest Sulmaan Wasif Khan, author of âThe Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between.â The story begins in 1943, when the Allies declared that Japanese-held Taiwan would return to China at the conclusion of World War II. When the Communist Party came to power in China, the defeated Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan, where he was afforded US protection despite establishing a brutal police state. From the White Terror to the Taiwan Straits Crises, from the normalization of Sino-American relations to the tensions of the Trump-era, we look at the tortuous paths that led to our present predicament. War is not inevitable, Khan shows, but to avoid it, decision-makers must heed the lessons of the past. -
Today, the words âfederalismâ and âoriginalismâ are bandied about in the news almost daily, but to get at the underpinnings of these modern interpretations of constitutional law, it is essential to look at how the Constitution was being interpreted and applied during the crucial period of 1815-1861, between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the Civil War.
Early nineteenth-century Americans found themselves consumed by arguments about concurrent powerâthe areas in which the Constitution had left the line between federal and state authority unclear. The scope of specific concurrent powers became increasingly important, and controversial, in the early nineteenth century. In 1815, the most pressing political and legal issues increasingly concerned situations in which multiple layers of governmental power overlappedâand the Constitution provided no clear delineation. Moreover, the choice of which level of government regulated each subject had dramatic consequences for the policy that resulted.
To explore this topic is todayâs guest, Alison LaCroix, author of âThe Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms.â We see just how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time. -
Every citizen of every state for the last two thousand years has compared his nation to Rome at some point. Americans considered Geroge Washington their Cincinnatus for taking on supreme power and giving it up once his work was done. Inflation hawks call for a Diocletian to end the debasing of national currency. Upset citizens call their leader a Nero for ignoring a conflagration in favor of musical composition. Americans canât help but do the same now, especially when 2024 gives so much reason for pessimism and feelings that we are experiencing a late Roman moment of our own.
To discuss this, we are joined by Jeremy Slate, a historian of the Roman Empire (and host of Create Your Life podcast). We delve into the parallels between ancient propaganda (think Virgil's book, The Aeneid, paid for by a Roman Emperor) and the modern echo chamber of 2024's media frenzy.
Drawing inspiration from Diocletian's reforms in Rome's third century, after which Rome lasted nearly 200 years, we discuss whether a contemporary reformer could reshape our tumultuous 2024 landscape and restore stability. In an era of rampant inflation, immigration, and crumbling power structures, the parallels are uncanny. - Laat meer zien