History Unplugged Podcast

In October of 1871, Chicagoans knew they were due for the “big one”—a massive, uncontrollable fire that would decimate the city. There hadn’t been a meaningful rain since July, and several big blazes had nearly outstripped the fire department’s scant resources. On October 8, when Kate Leary’s barn caught fire, so began a catastrophe that would forever change the soul of the city.Leary was a diligent, hardworking Irish woman, no more responsible for the fire than anyone else in the city at that time. But the conflagration that spread from her property quickly overtook the neighborhood, and before too long the floating embers had spread to the far reaches of the city. Families took to the streets with everything they could carry. Grain towers threatened to blow. The Chicago River boiled. Over the course of the next forty-eight hours, Chicago saw the biggest and most destructive disaster the United States had ever endured, and Leary would be its scapegoat.Out of the ashes rose not just new skyscrapers, tenements, and homes, but also a new political order. The city’s elite saw an opportunity to rebuild on their terms, cracking down on crime and licentiousness and fortifying a business-friendly environment. But the city’s working class recognized a naked power grab that would challenge their traditions, hurt their chances of rebuilding, and move power out of elected officials’ hands and into private interests. As quickly as the firefight ended, another battle for the future of the city began between the town’s business elites and the poor and immigrant working class.Today’s guest is Scott Berg, author of “The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul.” Beginning with the fire’s origin on the property of Irish immigrant Kate Leary, we explore how a simple barn fire brought Chicago to its knees and ushered in a new political order in which immigrants wrested control of the city from the business class and birthed the machine politics for which the city is known today.

November 22nd marked the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. To commemorate this pivotal event in American history, learn more about Kennedy's 1963 Texas visit, reelection campaign, assassination, and legacy, with this excerpt from This American President.

About four years ago Times of London journalist Daniel Finkelstein undertook an effort to tell his parents’ stories of survival in WW2 Europe. They met at a Jewish youth club in London in the Spring of 1956. He was twenty-six years old and she was twenty-two. Between them, they had lived in ten countries and survived years of hunger, disease, and the barest of survivals. Daniel’s mother Mirjam Wiener was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarete Wiener. Alfred, a decorated hero from the Great War, is now widely acknowledged to have been the first person to recognize the existential danger Hitler posed to the Jews and began, in 1933, to catalogue in detail Nazi crimes. After moving his family to Amsterdam, he relocated his library to London and was preparing to bring over his wife and children when Germany invaded Holland. Before long, the family was rounded up, robbed, humiliated, and sent to Bergen-Belsen. Daniel’s father Ludwik was born in Lwow, (now Lviv) the only child of a prosperous Jewish family. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, the family was rounded up by the communists and sent to do hard labor in a Siberian gulag. Working as slave laborers on a collective farm, his father survived the freezing winters in a tiny house they built from cow dung. Finkelstein is today’s guest and he’s here to discuss his new book “Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family.” It is both a family story and a larger exploration of how an entire continent came apart.

The British Royal Family and the intelligence community are two of the most mysterious and mythologized actors of the British State. From the reign of Queen Victoria to the present, they shared a complicated relationship, with some monarchs working hand-in-glove with their spies, while others detesting them. Nevertheless, successive queens and kings have all played an active role in steering British intelligence, sometimes against the wishes of prime ministers. Even today, the monarch receives “copy No. 1” of every intelligence report.Today’s guests are Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac, authors of “Crown, Cloak, and Dagger: The British Monarchy and Secret Intelligence from Victoria to Elizabeth II.” We explore attempted assassinations and kidnappings, the abdication crisis, world wars and the Cold War, and the death of Princess Diana, all within the complex interconnection of the British Monarchy and its spy corps.

Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers. Despite being wounded at Petersburg—and told by two surgeons he would die—Chamberlain survived the war, going on to be elected governor of Maine four times and serve as president of Bowdoin College. How did a stuttering young boy come to be fluent in nine languages and even teach speech and rhetoric? How did a trained minister find his way to the battlefield? To explore Chamberlain’s fascinating story is today’s guest, Ronald White, author of “On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.” He is presented from cradle-to-grave in all his ideals, tenacity, and contradictions.

During Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency—from 1901 to 1909, when Mark Twain called him the most popular man in America—his daughter Alice Roosevelt mesmerized the world with her antics and beauty. Alice was known for carrying a gun, a copy of the Constitution, and a green snake in her purse. When her father told her she couldn’t smoke under his roof, she climbed to the top of the White House and smoked on the roof. She became the most famous woman in America—and even the world—predating Princess Diana and Jackie Kennedy as an object of public obsession. As her celebrity grew, she continued to buck tradition, push against social norms, and pull political sway behind the curtain of privilege and access. She was known for her acerbic wit and outspoken tendencies which hypnotized both the social and political world. Today’s guest is Shelley Fraser Mickle, author of “White House Wild Child: How Alice Roosevelt Broke All the Rules and Won the Heart of America.” We explore what it would have been like to be a strong-willed, powerful woman of the 20th century aughts.

In 1923, the Weimar Republic faced a series of crises, including foreign occupation of its industrial heartland, rampant inflation, radical violence, and finally Hitler’s infamous “beer hall putsch.” Fanning the flames of anti-government and anti-Semitic sentiment, the Nazis tried to violently seize power in Munich, only failing after they were abandoned by like-minded conservatives. Today’s guest is Mark Jones, author of “1923: The Crisis of German Democracy in the Year of Putsch.” We discuss how the Nazis’ plan was initially to seize power in Munich, control Bavaria, then march on Berlin. Hitler needed the support of the military and the police, which he did not get in 1923 but did get in 1933. Tracing Hitler’s early rise, Jones reveals how political pragmatism and unprecedented international cooperation with the West brought Germany out of its crisis year. Although Germany would succumb to tyranny a decade later, the story of the republic’s survival in 1923 offers essential lessons about the future of democracy today.

Among the conflicts that convulsed Europe during the nineteenth century, none was more startling and consequential than the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Deliberately engineered by Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the war succeeded in shattering French supremacy, deposing Napoleon III, and uniting a new German Empire. But it also produced brutal military innovations and a precarious new imbalance of power that together set the stage for the devastating world wars of the next century.Today’s guest is Rachel Chrastil, author of “Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe.” We see how the war reshaped and blurred the boundaries between civilian and soldier as the fighting swept across France by bolstering a unified Germany to contributing to the development of modern warfare.

Religious beliefs have been the source of food "rules" since Pythagoras told his followers not to eat beans (they contain souls), Kosher and Halal rules forbade the shrimp cocktail (shellfish are scavengers_, and the Catholic church forbade its peoples from eating meat on Fridays (fasting to atone for committed sins). Rules about eating are present in nearly every American belief, from high-control groups that ban everything except air to the infamous strawberry shortcake that sated visitors to the Oneida Community in the late 1800s.To explore the intersection of religion and modern diet is Christina Ward, author of “Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat.” The explosion of religious movements since the Great Awakenings that birthed a cottage industry of food fads and cookbooks. Ward uncovers the interconnectivity between obscure sects and communities of the 20th Century who dabbled in vague spirituality and used food to both entice and control followers.

The Pax Romana has long been shorthand for the empire’s golden age. Stretching from Caledonia to Arabia, Rome ruled over a quarter of the world’s population. It was the wealthiest and most formidable state in the history of humankind.Today we are speaking with Tom Holland, author of “Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age” to explore Rome at the height of its power. From the gilded capital to realms beyond the frontier, we see ancient Rome in all its glory and cruelty: Nero’s downfall, the destruction of Jerusalem and Pompeii, the building of the Colosseum and Hadrian’s Wall, and the conquests of Trajan. Looking at the lives of Romans both ordinary and spectacular, from slaves to emperors, we see that Roman peace was the fruit of unprecedented military violence.