History Unplugged Podcast  By  cover art

History Unplugged Podcast

By: Scott Rank PhD
  • Summary

  • For history lovers who listen to podcasts, History Unplugged is the most comprehensive show of its kind. It's the only show that dedicates episodes to both interviewing experts and answering questions from its audience. First, it features a call-in show where you can ask our resident historian (Scott Rank, PhD) absolutely anything (What was it like to be a Turkish sultan with four wives and twelve concubines? If you were sent back in time, how would you kill Hitler?). Second, it features long-form interviews with best-selling authors who have written about everything. Topics include gruff World War II generals who flew with airmen on bombing raids, a war horse who gained the rank of sergeant, and presidents who gave their best speeches while drunk.
    Scott Rank, PhD
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Episodes
  • Kings Were Inevitable and Untouchable Until They Suddenly Weren’t After a Few 1700s Revolutions
    Mar 28 2024
    At the turn of the nineteenth century, two waves of revolutions swept the Atlantic world, disrupting the social order and ushering in a new democratic-republican experiment whose effects rippled across continents and centuries. The first wave of revolutions in the late 1700s (which included the much-celebrated American and French Revolutions and the revolt against slavery in Saint Domingue/Haiti) succeeded in disrupting existing political structures. But it wasn’t until the second wave of revolutionaries came to maturity in the early 1800s—imbued with a passion for social mobility and a knack for political organizing—that these new forms of political life took durable shape, from the states of independent Haiti and Spanish America to the post-revolutionary governments that arose during and after Napoleon’s long reign over early nineteenth-century Europe.

    Today’s guest is Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, author of “The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It.” We look at familiar figures like John Adams and little-known yet pivotal actors such as Marie Bunel, a confidant of Toussaint Louverture in the Haitian Revolution. Monarchies topple and are resurrected, republics emerge and find their footings, and a new social order of mobility upends the previous hierarchical system of rigid social classes. We see that one generation’s fledgling successes allowed their successors to fulfill the promise of a new world order.
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    43 mins
  • The Fall Of Japanese-held Hong Kong in January 1945
    Mar 26 2024
    Commander John Lamade started the war in 1941 a nervous pilot of an antiquated biplane. Just over three years later he was in the cockpit of a cutting-edge Hellcat about to lead a strike force of 80 aircraft through the turbulent skies above the South China Sea. His target: Hong Kong. As a storm of antiaircraft fire darkened the sky, watching from below was POW Ray Jones. For three long years he and his fellow prisoners had endured near starvation conditions in a Japanese internment camp. Did these American aircraft, he wondered, herald freedom?

    Today’s guest is Steven Bailey, and he discovered that much of the story of the U.S. Navy airstrikes on Japanese-held Hong Kong during the final year of World War II had never been told despite being an important step on the march toward Japan. Operation Gratitude involved nearly 100 U.S. Navy warships and close to a thousand planes. Bailey is the author of “Target Hong Kong,” and we look at the air raids through the experiences of seven men whose lives intersected at Hong Kong in January 1945: Commander John D. Lamade, five of his fellow U.S. Navy pilots and the POW Ray Jones.
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    39 mins
  • WW1 German Spies Infiltrated America and Attempted to Start a Race War
    Mar 21 2024
    On January 30, 1918, a young man “with the appearance of a well-educated, debonair foreigner” arrived at the U.S. customs station in Nogales, Arizona, located on the border with Mexico. After politely informing the customs inspector that he had come to complete his draft registration questionnaire and meet a friend in San Francisco, he was approved to cross the border into the United States. Lothar Witzke, the most dangerous German agent in the western hemisphere had reached his destination. His assignment: launch a campaign of sabotage, insurrection, and murder to destabilize the American home front.

    The terror campaign would be devastating - unless it could be stopped by U.S. counterintelligence.

    The Witzke mission was the intelligence game played at its highest level - a plan for destruction on a massive scale, violent insurrection, and assassination, complete with master spies and double agents, diabolical sabotage devices, secret codes, and invisible ink.

    To look at these forgotten elements of German sabotage and assassination plots in the United States during World War One is today’s guest, Bill Mills, author of “ Agents of the Iron Cross.”
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    35 mins

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political bias

In general I enjoy the show, but I listen for historical facts, not politically based bias.! alot of the shows lately have been mixed with political trash. How can i trust your facts if you mix in political opinion.

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informative always

always outstanding narrative and brilliant story lines
LOVE YOU GUYS
keep up the good work

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