Vikings Definitely Came to the New World Before Columbus. Did Celtic Monks, the Chinese, and Phoenicians Do So Also?
Many brave sailors arrived in North and South America long before Columbus, suggesting that trans-oceanic voyages could be accomplished centuries before his voyage. Some think that the Atlantic was cr...
6 Sep 20221h 5min
How America Chooses to Remember Itself: 200 Years of U.S. Museums, and Presenting the Civil War, Spanish Flu, and the Culture Wars
On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. The New York Times wrote that “the destruction of so many of its fine collections will be viewed as a nationa...
1 Sep 202242min
The Many Ways To Die While Building an Aircraft Carrier
Tip the Empire State Building onto its side and you’ll have a sense of the length of the United States Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the most powerful in the world: the USS John F. Kennedy. Weighing...
30 Aug 202246min
The Divorce Colony: Why Women Fled to South Dakota in the 1880s to End Their Troubled Marriages
No-fault divorce laws began spreading across the globe in the 1970s, in which neither party had to prove wrong-doing. Before this time, somebody had to prove that the other party breached the marital ...
25 Aug 202247min
America's Universal Education System Exists From a Coalition of Progressives, the Know-Nothing Party, and the Ku Klux Klan
In a remarkably short span of time, American children went from laboring on family farms to spending their days in classrooms. The change came from optimistic reformers like Horace Mann, who in the ea...
23 Aug 20221h 12min
How 2 Men Escaped Auschwitz, Exposed the Holocaust to the World, and Saved Hundreds of Thousands of Hungarian Jews
Europe’s Jewish population suffered during every stage of the Holocaust, but by the time the Third Reich occupied Hungary and targeted its Jews for deportation and extermination, the concentration cam...
18 Aug 202238min
Josie Underwood: The Civil War-Era Socialite Who Owned Slaves, Hated Lincoln, and Loved the Union
A well-educated, outspoken member of a politically prominent family in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Josie Underwood (1840–1923) left behind one of the few intimate accounts of the Civil War written by a s...
16 Aug 202224min
The American Revolution Would Have Been Lost Without a Ragtag Fleet of Thousands of Privateers
Privateers were a cross between an enlisted sailor and an outright pirate. But they were crucial in winning the Revolutionary War. As John Lehman, former secretary of the navy under President Ronald R...
11 Aug 20221h 1min
