History Unplugged Podcast

It’s November 1941. Japan and the US are teetering on a knife-edge as leaders on both sides of the Pacific strive to prevent war between them. But failed diplomacy, foiled negotiations, and possible duplicity in the Roosevelt administration thwart their attempts.Drawing on now-declassified original documents, today’s guest, Dale Jenkins, author of “Diplomats & Admirals” reveals the inside story of one fateful year, including:How the hidden agendas of powerful civilian and military leaders pushed the two nations toward warThe miscommunications, misjudgments, and blunders that doomed efforts at peaceChina’s role in the US ultimatum that triggered the attack on Pearl HarborWhy the carrier-to-carrier showdown at Coral Sea proved a fatal mistake for JapanHow courageous US navy pilots snatched victory from defeat at the Battle of MidwaySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After the devastating Japanese blows of December 1941, the Allies found themselves reeling with defeat everywhere in the Pacific. Although stripped of his battleships and outnumbered 10:3 in carriers, the US Navy commander-in-chief Admiral Ernest J. King decided to hit back at Japan’s rapidly expanding Pacific empire immediately, in an effort to keep the Japanese off-balance.On February 1, 1942, Vice Admiral Bill Halsey led the US Pacific Fleet carriers on their first raid, using high-speed hit-and-run tactics to strike at the Japanese, at a time when most of the Japanese carrier fleet was in the Indian Ocean. Halsey’s aggressive commitment inspired its American participants to invent the mythical “Haul Ass With Halsey” club. The last of the 1942 US carrier raids in March 1942 would form a defining moment in the Pacific War, prior to a new phase of high-seas battles between the opposing fleets.To discuss this overlooked era is Brian Herder, author of “Early Pacific Raids 1942: The American Carriers Strike Back.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ice is everywhere: in gas stations, in restaurants, in hospitals, in hotels via noisy machines, and in our homes. Americans think nothing of dropping a few ice cubes into tall glasses of tea to ward off the heat of a hot summer day. Most refrigerators owned by Americans feature automatic ice machines. Ice on-demand has so revolutionized modern life that it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way—in fact, the national obsession with ice can be traced back to a Bostonian merchant who, 200 years ago, figured out how to get Caribbean bartenders addicted to serving their drinks cold.Today’s guest is Amy Brady, author of “Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks.” She shares the strange and storied two-hundred-year-old history of ice in America: from the introduction of mixed drinks “on the rocks,” to the nation’s first-ever indoor ice rink, to how delicacies like ice creams and iced tea revolutionized our palates, to the ubiquitous ice machine in every motel across the US. But Ice doesn’t end in the past. Brady also explores the surprising present-day uses of ice in sports, medicine, and sustainable energy—including cutting-edge cryotherapy breast-cancer treatments and new refrigerator technologies that may prove to be more energy efficient—underscoring how precious this commodity is.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a preview of the new Parthenon Podcast Network show "Historical Jesus," hosted by Mark Vinet. This show explores the question of who was Jesus Christ and why did he inspire such admiration, fervor, and devotion? Join Mark as he unravels the truth, myth, legends, and mysteries surrounding this Titan of History.Subscribe to Historical Jesus:Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3rgGPbrSpotify: https://sptfy.com/OjwsDiscover more episodes of Historical Jesus:The Bible: https://apple.co/44ChqHL / https://sptfy.com/OjwTOld Testament: https://apple.co/3pxYqeM / https://sptfy.com/OjwURoots of Christianity: https://apple.co/3rkq8Mz / https://sptfy.com/OjwXWhat is Religion?: https://apple.co/43eaorH / https://sptfy.com/OjwYSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The WW2 battle of Leyte Gulf was the largest naval encounter in history and probably the most decisive naval battle of the entire Pacific War, and one that saw the Imperial Japanese Navy eliminated as an effective fighting force and forced to resort to suicide tactics.Leyte was a huge and complex action, actually consisting of four major battles. And much of the accepted wisdom of the battle has developed from the many myths that surround it, myths that have become more firmly established over time, such as the “lost victory” of the Japanese advance into Leyte Gulf that never happened. To explore this battle is today’s guest, Mark Stille, author of “Leyte Gulf: A New History of the World’s Largest Sea Battle.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How did Britain – an island nation the same size as Oregon – manage to control most of the world through its colonial empires? The answer is that it didn’t, at least not directly. Britain farmed out control to its imperial holdings by granting land rights to joint-stock corporations. And many of them, like the East India Company, were sovereign nations in all but name.Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan—a legal fiction with very real power.Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, today’s guest, Philip Stern (author of Empire, Incorporated) argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Following the Napoleonic Wars, a tidal wave of independence movements hit the Western Hemisphere. The United States was afraid that expansionist powers—namely Britain, France, Germany, and Japan—might extend their empires into these regions, threatening the growth of fledgling republics in the Americas. This kicked off a century of American launching well-intentioned but bloody imperialism in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, with the annexation of Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, and military occupations of Cuba, Haiti, Panama, and other countries as a firewall against European expansion.Only after making these preemptive incursions to restore order and support democracy in its “mortal combat” against imperialism, as Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan put it, did the U.S. get bogged down in interventionist quagmires.Today’s guest is Sean Mirski, author of “We May Dominate the World: Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus.” Mirski examines a lost chapter of American foreign policy, the century following the Civil War in which the United States carved out a sphere of influence and became the only great power in modern history to achieve regional hegemony.By understanding what drove the United States’ behavior, it offers a window into the trajectory that other regional powers—including China, Russia, and Iran—may take in the coming decades.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a recently bombed, spy-infested Casablanca, Morocco, the architects of Allied victory in World War Two meet. It is January 1943, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and more assemble secretly at a resort hotel. Here, they will put together the plan to end the war – if they can make it out of the country alive. One word to the Germans, and it would be a bloodbath. Turns out, one word really was all they needed… to escape assassination. A spy in the Spanish division of German intelligence informs Berlin about the meeting at Casablanca. A wooden German officer, seemingly unfamiliar with Spanish or geography or both, translates “Casablanca” as “White House.” A slip-up that meant Hitler and his goons missed the singular chance to bomb the entire Allied command as they all assembled in one small spot. To talk about this incident and many more at the 1943 conference that determined the Allied course of the war (and the post-war world after that) is today’s guest Jim Conroy, author of “The Devilss Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan that Won the War.” We recount the the Casablanca Conference – a meeting that many historians now view as one of the most crucial conclaves directly associated with the Allied victory of World War II.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

James Garfield was the last president born in a log cabin, and was raised by a poor widow on Ohio’s rugged Western Reserve. By his late twenties, he had become a respected preacher, state senator, and college president, and, after the Civil War broke out, joined the Union Army to help eradicate the “monstrous injustice of human slavery.” Soon Garfield was the youngest general fighting for the Union, and before war’s end was its youngest Congressman—as well as one of its most progressive. He helped establish equal citizenship and voting rights for Black Americans, and became one of the most powerful leaders of the postwar Republican Party. By 1880, Garfield was not only Minority Leader of the House, but also a practicing Supreme Court attorney, the founder of the Department of Education, the creator of a proof of the Pythagorean theorem, a Senator-elect, and (unwillingly) the Republican nominee for President. A more compelling “American Dream” story among Presidents does not exist.Garfield’s personal achievements are even more notable given the turmoil surrounding his ascent to power. He was the only major American politician who held national office for all of Reconstruction and the start of the Gilded Age. A crucial pragmatist of a divided era, he even brokered the peaceful but controversial settlement of the country’s first disputed Presidential election in 1876. “To be an extreme man is doubtless comfortable,” Garfield once remarked before his assassination. “It is painful to see so many sides to a subject.” The parallels between his time and our own are easy to spot. To explore forgotten aspects of Garfield’s life is today’s guest, C.W. Goodyear, author of “President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Some of the most important moments in the lives of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison weren’t their inventions or business successes. It was their road trips through the most remote, rustic parts of America. Between 1916 and 1924, Ford, Edison, Harvey Firestone went on a number of camping trips. Calling themselves the Vagabonds, they set up campsites, took photographs, and fixed cars themselves. They were also joined by famous naturalist John Burroughs, an elderly writer with a large white beard who looked like a gold prospector.The relationship began in 1913 between Burroughs, then 75, and Ford, nearly 50, and enjoying a banner year for the Model T. Both men were influenced by the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but they disagreed about the role of the automobile in American life.To Ford’s chagrin, Burroughs wrote in an article in Atlantic Monthly that the automobile “was going to kill the appreciation of nature”; Ford believed it would open up facets of America that most people could not access. In response, Ford sent Burroughs a new Model T, which indeed changed the old naturalist’s life by prompting him to set out on wide-ranging road trips beyond his Hudson River homestead. Meanwhile, Ford and Edison, who had both “imbibed” the rural values of the Midwest, and Firestone, “the head of the largest tire manufacturing concern in the country,” were long-standing friends, busy plotting numerous new business ventures.Their road trips became increasingly ambitious to San Francisco, the Adirondacks of New York, and the Green Mountains of Vermont. Davis chronicles the memorable road trip of summer 1918, when the fast friends—who held wildly different views about the impending war—drove from the Allegheny range through West Virginia and into the “rustic magic of the Great Smoky Mountains,” all in the spirit of curiosity and exploration.To discuss these journeys, and the long-lasting impact it had on Ford, Edison, and 20th-century America, is today’s guest Wes Davis, author of “American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and John Burroughs.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.