How Hollywood First Depicted the Atomic Bomb and the Manhattan Project
Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dramati...
21 Jul 202049min
A Time of Perfect American National Unity is a Myth, But Some US Origin Stories Are Better Than Others
The cherished idea of United States as a unified country has been long believed. But today’s guest Colin Woodard argues that this is an invented tradition. He has argued for the existence of 11 separa...
16 Jul 202047min
40 Thieves on Saipan: The Elite Marine Scout-Snipers in One of WWII’s Bloodiest Battles
Before there were Navy SEALs, before there were Green Berets, there were the 40 Thieves: the elite Scout Sniper Platoon of the Sixth Marine Regiment during World War II. Behind enemy lines on the isla...
14 Jul 202038min
George Washington’s Team of Rivals: How His Cabinet Forefathered One of America’s Most Powerful Institutions
The U.S. Constitution never established a presidential cabinet—the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected the idea. So how did George Washington create one of the most powerful...
9 Jul 202042min
Lessons From James Monroe, Who Defeated a Pandemic and Overcame Partisanship
James Monroe, America’s fifth president and the last chief executive of the Founding Father generation, lived a life defined by revolutions. From the battlefields of the War for Independence, to his a...
7 Jul 202031min
Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World
At the dawn of the twentieth century, when human flight was still considered an impossibility, Germany's Count von Zeppelin vied with the Wright Brothers to build the world's first successful flying m...
2 Jul 20201h 11min
Nazis Nearly Assassinated Stalin, Churchill, and FDR in 1943. What If They Had Succeeded?
In the middle of World War II, Nazi military intelligence discovered a seemingly easy way to win the war for Adolf Hitler. The three heads of the Allied forces—Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, a...
30 Jun 202038min
In the 1850s, A Mormon Renegade Started a Massive Pirate Colony in Michigan
In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a bur...
25 Jun 202051min
