7270: Charles I — The King Who Wore Two Shirts to His Own Execution | pplpod
Charles I wore two shirts to his execution on a freezing January morning so that the crowd would not see him shiver and mistake it for fear. It was a final act of royal dignity from a king whose stubb...
17 Kesä 28min
7269: Henry IV of France — The King Who Traded His Faith for a Nation | pplpod
Henry IV of France converted from Protestantism to Catholicism because "Paris is worth a mass." It was the most cynical and most effective political calculation of the sixteenth century. He ended deca...
17 Kesä 22min
7268: Alfred the Great — The King Who Built England from Mud and Marshes | pplpod
Alfred the Great was hiding in a swamp when the Viking invasions nearly erased the last independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom. He rebuilt his army from nothing, defeated the Danes, and then did something no...
17 Kesä 23min
7267: Judy Garland — The Industry That Built and Broke a Legend | pplpod
Judy Garland was put on amphetamines to keep her energy up and barbiturates to bring her down, starting at age thirteen. MGM controlled her diet, her sleep, and her image while she sang her way throug...
17 Kesä 21min
7266: Wayne Gretzky — The Human Behind the 99 and Hockey's Greatest Mind | pplpod
Wayne Gretzky was too small, too slow, and too weak to dominate professional hockey. He dominated it anyway. He holds sixty-one NHL records, and his career point total is so far beyond second place th...
17 Kesä 20min
7265: Baron Haussmann — The Fugitive Who Demolished Old Paris and Built a New One | pplpod
Baron Haussmann tore down medieval Paris and replaced it with the wide boulevards, uniform facades, and grand public spaces that define the city today. He did it under Napoleon III's protection, with ...
17 Kesä 21min
7264: The Failed Pianist Who Abandoned Music and Mapped the American West | pplpod
Before he became one of the great explorers of the American frontier, he was a young musician whose dreams of a concert career fell short. The same discipline and obsessive attention to detail that fa...
17 Kesä 20min
7263: Werner Herzog — The Ecstatic Truth of Cinema's Most Fearless Director | pplpod
Werner Herzog ate his own shoe on camera, dragged a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon, and was shot by a sniper during an interview and kept talking. He has made over seventy films in conditions...
17 Kesä 22min
