History Unplugged Podcast

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 “perpetrators,...

Iberia was one of three crucial theatres of the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome. Hannibal of Carthage’s siege of Saguntum in 219 BC triggered a conflict that led to immense human and materi...

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 u...

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 – we have no way of knowing) jumped on the back of a d...

Charles Cowlam’s 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 promi...

Soviet espionage existed in the United States since the U.S.S.R.’s founding and continued until its dissolution in the 1990s. It reached its height in World War 2 and the early Cold War, especially to...

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...

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 1914–17, the underground war was a product of st...

In the months leading up to D-Day, Eisenhower’s attention was in relentless demand, whether he was negotiating, rallying troops, or solving crises from his headquarters in Bushy Park, London. He proje...

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 "Starvat...