History Unplugged Podcast

The 1949-50 City College Beavers basketball team were incredible underdogs who experienced an incredible rise and subsequent fall from grace. At a time when the National Basketball Association was still segregated, the Beavers team was composed entirely of minority players – eight Jews and four African Americans. In 1950 the City College Beavers became the only basketball team in history to win both the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same year. But one year later the team’s star players were arrested for conspiring with gamblers to shave points. Overnight the players went from heroes to villains.Today's guest is Matthew Goodman, author of the book “The City Game.” He argues these players were actually caught in a much larger web of corruption that stretched across major social institutions from City Hall to the police department, sports arenas, and even the universities themselves. It’s a historical story of duplicity and cynicism that’s all too relevant to big-money college sports today.But it's also a story of redemption, particularly Floyd Layne, one of the players implicated in the scandal. Floyd Layne was raised by a single mother in the Bronx, an immigrant from Barbados. He was a popular, talented, cheerful kid who loved basketball and jazz. Time and again he resisted the urgings of his teammates to take money from gamblers, but finally he relented because he wanted to buy his mother a $110 washing machine for Christmas. After he was arrested, he and the other players were blacklisted from the NBA – but unlike the other players, Floyd spent years trying unsuccessfully to join the league. Eventually he gave up and began coaching youth basketball in the Bronx, where his mentees included the future Hall of Famer Nate “Tiny” Archibald. In 1975 the job of head basketball coach of City College became available, and Floyd applied and got the job – after a quarter century, he was back at City College.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Civil War historians have asked if the South could have won the Civil War (or at least fought to a stalemate) since 1866. If they would have won, then what then? What would a divided states of America have looked like? Would a USA and a CSA have a happy peace and maintain a cooperative co-existence, like North and South Dakota, or maintain a cold war that threatened to go hot at any moment, like North and South Korea?In this episode, we look at an alternate timeline of the Confederate States of America, whether emancipation would have happened, which foreign alliances would be forged, and how the two Americas would react to World War Two and the rise of Hitler. Suffice it to say, in the infinite timelines that exist, there is a large number that includes the CSA, and nearly all of them are bad.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's episode features a special guest, James Stavridis, a four-star U.S. Navy Admiral and former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. He joins us to discuss the ten greatest admirals in history and looks at their examples of leadership and resourcefulness. Case studies include Themistocles, English Sea Captain Francis Drake, Chinese explorer Zheng He, Horatio Nelson, WW2 Pacific Theatre Commander Chester Nimitz, and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.Most of all, we get at what it's like to look down on a carrier strike group (made up of 7,500 personnel, an aircraft carrier, at least one cruiser, a flotilla of six to 10 destroyers and/or frigates, and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircraft) and know that you have absolute command over the fates of everyone and everything below you and how that feeling would affect the lives of these people.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Could one American diplomat have prevented the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor? The answer might be yes. America’s ambassador to Japan in 1941, Joseph Grew, certainly thought so. He saw the writing on the wall—economic sanctions were crippling Japan, rice was rationed, consumer goods were limited, and oil was scarce as America’s noose tightened around Japan’s neck. Japan and the U.S. were locked in a battle of wills, yet Japan refused to yield to American demands. In this episode, I speak with Lew Paper, author of "In the Cauldron: Terror, Tension, and the American Ambassador’s Struggle to Avoid Pearl Harbor." He describes how the United States and Japan were locked in a cauldron of boiling tensions and of one man’s desperate effort to prevent the Pearl Harbor attacks before they happened.Through "In the Cauldron," Paper reveals new information—mined from Grew’s diaries, letters, official papers, the diplomatic archives, and interviews with Grew’s family and the families of his staff—to present a compelling narrative of how the militaristic policies of Imperial Japan collided with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s determination to punish Japanese aggression in the Far East.We look at Pearl Harbor attack inside the ambassador’s perspective through Paper’s revelation of: • Grew’s personal diaries detailing the events leading up to the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor • Personal interviews with Grew’s family and staff, giving the inside look into Grew’s struggle to prevent the attacks • Detailed accounts of the correspondence between Grew and other State Department officials about the warning signs leading up to the Pearl Harbor attacks • An in-depth look into the fast-depreciating lives of the Japanese people and how their struggles and cultural ideology contributed to the fatal attacksSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On October 15, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of UN troops in Korea, convinced President Harry Truman that the Communist forces of Kim Il-sung would be utterly defeated by Thanksgiving. The Chinese, he said with near certainty, would not intervene in the war.As he was speaking, 300,000 Red Chinese soldiers began secretly crossing the Manchurian border. Led by some 20,000 men of the First Marine Division, the Americans moved deep into the snowy mountains of North Korea, toward the trap Mao had set for the vainglorious MacArthur along the frozen shores of the Chosin Reservoir. What followed was one of the most heroic--and harrowing--operations in American military history, and one of the classic battles of all time. Faced with probable annihilation, and temperatures plunging to 20 degrees below zero, the surrounded, and hugely outnumbered, Marines fought through the enemy forces with ferocity, ingenuity, and nearly unimaginable courage as they marched their way to the sea.Today I'm speaking with Hampton Sides, author of the account  On Desperate Ground a soldier's eye view of this conflict that chronicle of the extraordinary feats of heroism performed by the beleaguered Marines, who were called upon to do the impossible in some of the most unforgiving terrain on earth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You don't have to read the ancient folklore of China, Sumeria, or anywhere else long before you encounter a dragon. Sometimes they guard treasure. Sometimes they kidnap local maidens. Sometimes they are the primary antagonist for a hero to conquer. Mostly they perform all three roles. But the problem is they never existed. Outside of a handful of cryptozoologists, nobody argues that they are real. So why do cultures that had no contact with each other produce remarkably similar myths?This episode looks into the theories of the spread of dragon myths. Perhaps there was an Ur-myth in Egypt or Mesopotamia that slowly spread across the world. Or it's an anthropological reaction to the fear that most humans have of lizards. More exotic theories claim dragons are the genetic memory of dinosaurs. Even more exotic theories claim they are the embodiment of rainbows (we'll explain that last one in more detail).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For more than one thousand years, Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes at peace and sometimes at war. When Christian armies seized Jerusalem in 1099, they began the most notorious period of conflict between the two religions. Depending on who you ask, the fall of the holy city was either an inspiring legend or the greatest of horrors.In this episode I’m speaking with Dan Jones, author of Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands. In Crusaders, Dan Jones interrogates the many sides of the larger story, charting a deeply human and avowedly pluralist path through the crusading era. Expanding the usual timeframe, Jones looks to the roots of Christian-Muslim relations in the eighth century and tracks the influence of crusading to present day. He widens the geographical focus to far-flung regions home to so-called enemies of the Church, including Spain, North Africa, southern France, and the Baltic states. By telling intimate stories of individual journeys, Jones illuminates these centuries of war not only from the perspective of popes and kings, but from Arab-Sicilian poets, Byzantine princesses, Sunni scholars, Shi'ite viziers, Mamluk slave soldiers, Mongol chieftains, and barefoot friarSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Once the Nazi Party took power in Germany, they managed to end democracy and turned the nation into a one-party dictatorship, launching an endless propaganda campaign to mobilize the public for war. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda arranged book burnings, lists of banned literature, and the release of films that exalted Aryan values and demonized Jews.Before the rise of the Nazis, Germany was the most educated society on Earth, producing the finest literature, film, and university programs of any advanced nation. How did it succumb to such a simplistic propaganda program? The answer has to do with the ancient story of propaganda and how the masses swallow almost any message if it's repeated enough and speaks to their deepest fears.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two years before the Civil War, Congressman Daniel Sickles and his lovely wife Teresa were popular fixtures in Washington, D.C. society. Their house sat on Lafayette Square across from White House grounds, and the president himself was godfather to the Sickleses’ six-year-old daughter. Because Congressman Sickles is frequently out of town, he trusted his friend, U.S. Attorney Philip Barton Key—son of Francis Scott Key—to escort the beautiful Mrs. Sickles to parties in his absence. Revelers in D.C. were accustomed to the sight of the congressman’s wife with the tall, Apollo-like Philip Barton Key.Then one day Daniel Sickles received an anonymous note suggesting his wife's infidelity. It sets into motion a tragic course of events that culminated in a shocking murder in broad daylight in Lafayette Square.Today's guest is Chris DeRose, author of the book Star Spangled Scandal, about the biggest media sensation in Civil War America. The press couldn't get enough of the trial, which had a play based on the events hit the stage as the trial was in progress. The trial introduced the concepts of the insanity defense, challenged ideas of chivalry and masculinity, and ensconced ideas of an unwritten law, where “honor crimes” were tolerated by judges for nearly a century after the trial.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are few events that would shake the world order like the success of the American Revolution. Some changes would be felt immediately. English traditions such as land inheritance laws were swept away. Other changes took longer. Slavery would not be abolished for another hundred years. Americans began to feel that their fight for liberty was a global fight. Future democracies would model their governments on the United States'.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.