History Unplugged Podcast

On July 9, 1776, a group of American soldiers listened to the Declaration of Independence read aloud in New York City, then rushed down Broadway and spent several minutes prying a two-ton golden equestrian statue of King George III off its pedestal on Bowling Green. They hacked off the head, sent the body to a Connecticut foundry, and melted it into exactly 42,088 bullets, a number chosen deliberately to evoke the British revolutions of 1642 and 1688. On the road to the foundry, loyalist neighbors in Wilton crept out at night and stole pieces of the statue, burying them in their yards as a quiet counter-protest. Those fragments stayed hidden for centuries until treasure hunters with metal detectors dug them up.
Today's guest is Robert G. Parkinson, author of Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence. We look at the 27 grievances that make up the body of the Declaration, the section that Jefferson, Congress, and the British government all considered the essential part of the document but that modern Americans almost never read. We discuss how the very first grievance is secretly about the king vetoing Virginia's attempt to curtail the slave trade, and that the patriots saw themselves not as radical innovators but as the heirs of 1688, conducting the third British revolution in 135 years, and that the Declaration was written not in a moment of triumph but during nine weeks of almost unbelievable catastrophe.
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For more than 1400 years, the history of Jewish and Muslim engagement has been a complex story of cooperation and conflict. The best known events are hostile encounters (like the 1066 Granada massacre or modern Arab-Israeli wars), they’ve had a multifaceted relationship, from Muhammad’s dealings with Jewish tribes in Arabia in the 600s, Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II sending his navy to rescue Jews from the 1492 expulsion from Spain, to the contemporary tensions currently unfolding in the Middle East.
Today’s guest is Marc David Baer: Author of “Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish–Muslim Relations.” We discuss how Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East and Europe, more often in cooperation than in conflict, for more than a millennium. When Islam emerged in the seventh century, Muslims and Jews were bound by shared religious tenets and common cultural practices, and for centuries afterward, they were often allies.

We also discuss Muslim warriors fighting for a medieval Turkish Jewish kingdom on the Caspian Sea, Jewish viziers leading the Muslim sultan’s troops in Spain, and Jewish literary lights and political party leaders in modern Egypt and Iraq. At the same time, religious tolerance did not mean a lack of hierarchy and discrimination. For most of history, Muslims held power over Jews and Islam was promoted as the superior religion.
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In 1832, a New Bedford whaleship called the Mentor struck a reef in the remote Pacific archipelago of Palau. The tiny, 100-foot-long ship began sinking immediately, and the 22 men who made up its crew were thrown into one of the most extraordinary survival ordeals in American maritime history. Ten men vanished the night of the wreck and were never seen again. The survivors found themselves stranded among island peoples with their own complex politics, rival confederations, and fifty years of complicated history with Western ships that the castaways knew nothing about. What followed was a story of captivity, starvation, forced tattooing, a rescue that made everything worse, and a years-long scramble across islands and ocean before the last survivors finally made it home.
Today's guest is Eric Jay Dolin, author of "The Wreck of the Mentor." We untangle one of the great forgotten stories of the Age of Sail, and explore how fifty years of British guns and gunboat diplomacy warped Palauan politics long before the Mentor arrived, why the men who attacked the castaways with war clubs also cooked them lavish feasts and wept for their dead, and how crewman Horace Holden kept himself alive on a famine-stricken island when almost everything pointed toward death.
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The Nobel family (which are the namesake of the Nobel prize), had a rags-to-riches story bigger than the Rockefellers or Morgans. The Nobel patriarch Emanuel fled debtor’s prison in 1837. He then travelled east and built a foundation for the largest oil empire in Russian history. Three generations of Nobels invented the world's first oil tanker, stopped the Royal Navy cold with undersea mines during the Crimean War, and outmaneuvered both Rockefeller and the Rothschilds in the world's first great corporate oil war. Then the Bolsheviks arrived. Lenin nationalized everything overnight, Stalin personally targeted the family patriarch for arrest, and the man who quietly made the Nobel Prize a reality had to escape revolutionary Russia in a horse-drawn cart wearing a disguise, with forged papers and three borrowed children to complete the ruse. It is one of the great lost stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, overshadowing the very prizes that bear the family name.
Today's guest is Douglas Brunt, author of The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel. We discuss how capitalism and Marxism grew up in the same Russian cities before their catastrophic collision, why Emanuel Nobel defied the King of Sweden to ensure his uncle Alfred's will was honored, and what it actually looked like when Lenin's pen stroke erased three generations of Nobel engineering genius in a single day. We explore this story of oil, revolution, and a dynasty that fueled the world and then vanished.
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The thirteen colonies that became the United States were just half of the British colonies that existed in the 18th century. The empire stretched from New England, south to Georgia and Florida and the islands of the West Indies, east to India, Scotland, and Ireland, and south again to British forts on the West coast of Africa. Because of this, the revolution of 1776 wasn’t isolated to the North American eastern seaboard. It was a world-historical crisis that swept up American Indian nations, Caribbean islands, West African forts, Indian cities, Scottish drawing rooms, German principalities, Cuban harbors, Chinese trading houses, and a fledgling colony in Sierra Leone. The result is a Revolution that was on the one hand a political struggle for the 13 colonies, but it was also a genuinely global catastrophe in which Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans, German soldiers, French philosophes, Caribbean planters, Indian merchants, and Spanish generals all fought for their own competing visions of what "freedom" actually meant.
Today’s guest is Sarah Pearsall, author of Freedom Round the Globe. We see how the fight for liberty went far outside the borders of the American colonies. When the British Parliament imposed the Stamp Act in 1765, the protests and violent crowd actions that erupted were not confined to Boston or Virginia, they broke out with equal fury in St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and other Caribbean colonies. But they chose to stay loyal because they feared slave uprisings more than they resented Parliament. The French alliance that saved American independence at Yorktown drove France itself toward bankruptcy and revolution. And there were at least two would-be fourteenth colonies (British Florida and Quebec) courted by Americans but believed their fortunes were better served in other places than the Revolution. The Revolution was not a contained colonial rebellion. It was a world war, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783 settled the claims of dozens of nations, most of whom had nothing to do with the thirteen colonies.
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