pplpod

Benjamin Franklin ran away from his brother's print shop as a teenage fugitive, arrived in Philadelphia with almost nothing, and spent the next six decades becoming the most famous American in the wor...

15 Jun 22min

James Madison stood five foot four, weighed barely a hundred pounds, suffered from nervous exhaustion, and never fought in a single battle. Yet this physically unimposing man designed the Constitution...

15 Jun 22min

Harry Truman was a failed farmer, a bankrupt hat shop owner, and the only modern American president without a college degree. He was chosen as vice president because he was inoffensive, became preside...

15 Jun 23min

Louis XVI preferred making locks and hunting deer to governing France — and his kingdom paid the price. He inherited a bankrupt nation, failed to push through the reforms that might have saved the mon...

15 Jun 20min

Paul Revere is remembered for one night — and that night did not happen the way Longfellow's poem described it. The real Revere was not primarily a horseback messenger but a master silversmith, a pion...

15 Jun 20min

Lyndon Johnson passed more transformative legislation than any president since FDR — the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start — and then destroyed his presidency and...

15 Jun 24min

Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal as a monument to his dead wife Mumtaz — one of the most beautiful buildings in human history, constructed by one of the most ruthless rulers in the Mughal dynasty. The m...

15 Jun 20min

Napoleon Bonaparte rose from minor Corsican nobility to Emperor of France in fifteen years, conquered most of Europe, rewrote its legal systems, and then lost everything twice — first on the frozen ro...

15 Jun 21min