In 1864, Nine Union Officers Escaped from a POW Camp and Trekked 300 Miles to the North
At the height of the Civil War in November 1864, nine Union prisoners-of-war escaped from a Confederate Prison known as Camp Sorghum in Columbia, South Carolina. They scrambled north on foot in rags t...
21 Sep 202353min
Teddy Roosevelt Nearly Died in a Cavalry Charge Against German Machine Guns in WW1
Teddy Roosevelt faced many challenges at the end of his life. Racked by rheumatism, a ticking embolism, pathogens in his blood, a bad leg from an accident, and a bullet in his chest from an assassinat...
19 Sep 202339min
Beyond the Wall: What Life Was Really Like in East Germany
When the Iron Curtain fell in 1990, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a r...
14 Sep 202343min
How An Unlikely Cohort of Black Nurses at a New York Sanatorium Helped Cure Tuberculosis
Nearly a century before the COVID-19 pandemic upended life as we know it, a devastating tuberculosis epidemic was ravaging hospitals across the country. In those dark, pre-antibiotic days, the disease...
12 Sep 202354min
The Mississippi Was First Mapped by a Polyglot Priest and a College Dropout-Turned-Fur Trapper
Perhaps the most consequential expedition in North American history wasn’t the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It was one that happened 130 years earlier and undertaken by a Catholic priest fluent in mult...
7 Sep 202356min
The Eurasian Steppes Gave Us Atilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, Global Trade and Hybrid Camels
The barbarian nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their impact has gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest ...
5 Sep 20231h 6min
Decades of Turbulent Decolonization After WW2 Launched With The Dutch-Indonesian Wars of 1945-49
The Dutch–Indonesian War was one of the first postwar struggles that followed the Japanese surrender in September 1945, which left a power vacuum in the colonial Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The inf...
31 Aug 202344min
Could the Pacific War of WW2 Have Been Entirely Avoided if Not For U.S. Diplomats in Over Their Heads?
It’s November 1941. Japan and the US are teetering on a knife-edge as leaders on both sides of the Pacific strive to prevent war between them. But failed diplomacy, foiled negotiations, and possible d...
29 Aug 202345min
