Beste History Unplugged podcaster (2025)

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Hooves of History: How Horses Created Ancient Warfare, Built the Silk Road, and Became the Dividing Line Between Nobleman and Peasant 44:28

10h ago44:28

44:28

In order to become rich, powerful, and prestigious in the pre-modern world, nothing mattered more than horses. They were the fundamental unit of warfare, enabling cavalry charges, and logistical support. They facilitated the creation of the Silk Road (which could arguably be called the “Horse Road”) since China largely built it to enable the purcha…

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Moonshining Survived (and Thrived) At Least Two Decades After Prohibition Ended 45:47

5d ago45:47

45:47

The Prohibition era (1920–1933), enacted by the 18th Amendment, birthed an overnight economy of moonshiners who distilled and distributed homemade liquor to meet America’s insatiable demand for alcohol, transforming rural farmers and opportunists into underground entrepreneurs who supplied speakeasies. But this new economy didn’t disappear after Pr…

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How to Cross the Sahara as a Tenth-Century Cameleer 53:08

7d ago53:08

53:08

What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of lang…

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How American Slaves Fled By Sea, Whether as Stowaways or Commandeering a Confederate Ship 46:06

12d ago46:06

46:06

As many as 100,000 enslaved people fled successfully from the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South, finding safe harbor along a network of passageways across North America via the Underground Railroad. Yet many escapes took place not by land but by sea. William Grimes escaped slavery in 1815 by stowing away in a cotton bale on a ship from Sav…

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Did WW2 Heads of State Want to Preserve Their Empires As Much as Defend Their Homelands? 47:51

14d ago47:51

47:51

2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of Germany’s surrender and the fall of the Third Reich. Likewise, World War II is the single most studied conflict in human history. But most Western accounts offer a one-dimensional interpretation: the war was a noble crusade against fascism, creating a convenient parable about good and evil. But this depiction…

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How a British Governor of Virginia Raised an Ex-Slave Regiment in 1776 to Fight Patriots and Triggered the Revolutionary War 55:09

19d ago55:09

55:09

As the American Revolution broke out in New England in the spring of 1775, dramatic events unfolded in Virginia that proved every bit as decisive as the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill in uniting the colonies against Britain. Virginia, the largest, wealthiest, and most populous province in British North America, was led by Lord Dun…

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How a Marine Embedded with Mao Zedong’s Guerrillas in the 30s Became WW2’s Most Celebrated Special Forces Leader 55:46

21d ago55:46

55:46

He was a gutsy old man.” “A corker,” said another. “You couldn’t find anyone better.” They talked about him in hushed tones. “This Major Carlson,” wrote one of the officers in a letter home, “is one of the finest men I have ever known.” These were the words of the young Marines training to be among the first U.S. troops to enter the Second World Wa…

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Microbes Were Discovered in the 1600s. Why It Take 200 Years For Doctors To Start Washing Their Hands? 54:16

26d ago54:16

54:16

Scientists and enthusiastic amateurs first confirmed the existence of living things invisible to the human eye in the late sixteenth century. So why did it take two centuries to connect microbes to disease? As late as the Civil War in the 1860s, most soldiers who perished died not on the battlefield but of infected wounds, typhoid, and other diseas…

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From Einstein’s Chalkboard to Oppenheimer’s Nuclear Test: The 50-Year Path to the Atomic Bomb 48:14

28d ago48:14

48:14

The story of the atomic age began decades before Robert Oppenheimer watched a mushroom cloud form over the New Mexico desert at the Trinity nuclear test in mid 1945. It begins in 1895, with Henri Becquerel’s accidental discovery of radioactivity, setting in motion a series of remarkable and horrifying events. By the early 20th century, a brilliant …

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Japan’s Desperate Air Battles Against the US in the Final Months of WW2 37:15

1M ago37:15

37:15

The B-29 Bomber led the Allied strategic bombing offensive against Japan, succeeding when US Bomber Command switched from high-level daytime precision bombing to low-level nighttime area bombing. The latter tactic required Superfortresses to attack their targets individually, without a formation or escorting fighters for protection. Despite this, J…

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D-Day From the East: The Soviet Operation Bagration Crippled the Wehrmacht in Late 1944 42:08

1M ago42:08

42:08

Throughout the war on the Eastern Front, there were two consistent trends. The Red Army battled to learn how to fight and win, while involved in a struggle for its very survival. But by 1944 it had a leadership that was able to wield it with lethal effect and with far more effective equipment than before. By contrast, the Wehrmacht had commenced a …

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Pilgrimages Involved Penitent Marches, Visiting Holy Places, and Watching Drunken Emperors Go on Chariot Rides 44:53

1M ago44:53

44:53

Pilgrimages are a universal phenomenon, from China’s bustling Tai Shan to the ancient Jewish treks to Jerusalem. But why? What is it about a grueling penitent march to an isolated temple that has become a prerequisite for a civilization of any size, whether Chicen Itza in the Mayan Empire or the holy sites of Mecca? To explore this is today’s guest…

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Britain Learned How to Set Up Its Global Empire on a Tiny Bermudan Island 44:02

1M ago44:02

44:02

Years before Jamestown planters made New World farming profitable by growing tobacco, and years before their countrymen up north in Plymouth Colony managed to overcome their starvation conditions and acclimate to New England’s growing conditions, there was an English settlement in Bermuda that was wealthier, larger, and more prosperous. It was esta…

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The Hatfield-McCoy Feud Started Over a Pig and Nearly Escalated Into a Regional War 45:20

2M ago45:20

45:20

The origins of the Hatfield-McCoy conflict (between the Hatfield family of West Virginia, led by William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield, and the McCoy family of Kentucky, led by Randolph "Old Randall" McCoy) begins with a dispute over a pig. From here, it escalated from minor disagreements to violent encounters that spanned decades, nearly sparking…

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The 1845 Potato Blight Struck Across Northern Europe. Why Did Only Ireland Starve? 48:41

2M ago48:41

48:41

In 1845, a novel pathogen attacked potato fields across Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia—but only in Ireland were the effects apocalyptic. At least one million Irish people died, and millions more scattered across the globe, emigrating to new countries and continents. Less than fifty years after the union of Ireland with the rest of Great Britain,…

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A Simple Tennessee Preacher Transformed Abolitionism from a Deeply Unpopular Radical Movement to a Centrist Cause 51:18

2M ago51:18

51:18

Sitting high above the small community of Ripley, Ohio, a lantern shone in the front window of a small, red brick home at night. It was a signal to slaves just across the Ohio River. Anyone fleeing bondage could look to Reverend John Rankin’s home for hope. To the slaveholders they fled from, Rankin’s activities as a “conductor” on the Underground …

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How Benjamin Franklin’s Stove Invention Kept Early America From Freezing 41:53

2M ago41:53

41:53

The biggest revolution in Benjamin Franklin’s lifetime was made to fit in a fireplace. Assembled from iron plates like a piece of flatpack furniture, the Franklin stove became one of the era's most iconic consumer products, spreading from Pennsylvania to England, Italy, and beyond. It was more than just a material object, however—it was also a hypo…

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Roman Churches Had No Involvement in Marriage. How Did It Become a Holy Sacrament by the Middle Ages? 38:25

2M ago38:25

38:25

For much of Christian history, the Church had little involvement in marriage, which was primarily a contract between families. It wasn’t until the fourth century that church weddings emerged, and even then, they were mostly reserved for the elite. Fast forward to the High Middle Ages, and marriage became a sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church. Si…

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How a Mess Cook Saved Dozens of Sailors from Shark Infested Waters Off the Coast of Guadalcanal 28:21

2M ago28:21

28:21

On the night of September 5, 1942, the USS Gregory (APD-3), a converted destroyer turned high-speed transport, was caught in a deadly ambush near Guadalcanal. The ship had been supporting U.S. Marine forces, ferrying troops and supplies, when it was mistaken for a larger threat by a group of Japanese destroyers. Outgunned and unable to escape, Greg…

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Humanity’s Past Suggests We Only Have 10,000 Years to Change or Go Extinct 53:19

2M ago53:19

53:19

We are living through a period that is unique in human history. For the first time in more than ten thousand years, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. In the middle of this century population growth will stop, and the number of people on Earth will start to decline - fast. As Gee demonstrates, our population has peaked, and is dec…

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The 16th Century Ottomans Nearly Conquered Europe. Why Did European Kingdoms Make So Many Alliances With Them? 51:05

2M ago51:05

51:05

The determined attempt to thwart Ottoman dominance was fought by Muslims and Christians across five theaters from the Balkans to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, from Persia to Russia. But this is not merely the story of a clash of civilizations between East and West. Europe was not united against the Turks; the scandal of the age was the al…

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Fort Stanwix and the Forgotten Revolutionary War Siege That Convinced France to Help the US 42:07

3M ago42:07

42:07

After a series of military defeats over the winter of 1776–1777, British military leaders developed a bold plan to gain control of the Hudson River and divide New England from the rest of the colonies. Three armies would converge on Albany: one under Lieutenant General John Burgoyne moving south from Quebec, one under General William Howe moving no…

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Enough is Enuf, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell 39:21

3M ago39:21

39:21

No language is as inconsistent in spelling and pronunciation as English. Kernel and colonel rhyme, but read changes based on past or present tense. Ough has many pronunciations: ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (drought), ‘uff’ (tough), ‘off’ (cough), ‘oo’ (through). In response to this orthographic minefield, legions of rebel wordsmiths have died on the hill …

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Did Haiti’s First and Last King Squander the Revolution or Succeed in Underappreciated Ways? 51:04

3M ago51:04

51:04

Slave, revolutionary, king, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, to end slavery. Yet in an incredi…

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What Ancient Greeks and Victorian Explorers Thought Was at the North Pole 41:34

3M ago41:34

41:34

The North Pole looms large in our collective psyche—the ultimate Otherland in a world mapped and traversed. It is the center of our planet’s rotation, and its sub-zero temperatures and strange year of one sunset and one sunrise make it an eerie, utterly disorienting place that challenges human endurance and understanding. Erling Kagge and his frien…

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Nothing Healed America’s Wounds After the Civil War Like Baseball 50:35

3M ago50:35

50:35

The nineteenth century was a time of rapid growth and development for the game of “base ball,” and players George Wright and Albert Spalding were right in the thick of it. These two young men, the first superstars of the professional game, won the hearts of a country in search of a unifying spirit after a devastating civil war. Today’s guest is Jef…

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How an 1870 Murder Created San Francisco 37:52

3M ago37:52

37:52

Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. T…

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Failed Futures: If Alexander The Great Hadn’t Died, He Might Have Conquered Europe, Circumnavigated Africa, and Built His Own Silk Road 34:20

3M ago34:20

34:20

And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer. That’s a quote from Hans Gruber in Die Hard, which is a very convoluted paraphrase from Plutarch’s essay collection Moralia. There’s plenty of truth in that unattributed quote from Mr. Gruber. Alexander the Great’s death at 323 BC in Babylon marked the end of the most consequential mil…

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Why the Anabasis is the Second-Most Influential Greek Epic (After Homer’s Works) 48:43

3M ago48:43

48:43

Imagine being stranded thousands of miles deep in enemy territory with 10,000 soldiers, no allies, no clear way home, and the only means of escape was by foot. This was the predicament faced by Xenophon and the Greek mercenaries in Anabasis, one of the most gripping survival stories of the ancient world. In this episode, we delve into the incredibl…

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The American Revolution Would Have Been Lost Without a Ragtag Fleet of Thousands of Privateers 59:36

3M ago59:36

59:36

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 Reagan, observed, “From the beginning of the American Revolution until the end of the War of 1812, America’s real naval advantage lay in its privateers…

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Did Lincoln Save Global Democracy or Undermine It Using Wartime Powers? 57:26

4M ago57:26

57:26

Did Abraham Lincoln preserve democracy during the Civil War, or did he endanger it in the process? To explore this paradox, we’re joined by renowned historian and Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo, author of Our Ancient Faith. Guelzo takes us deep into the high-stakes decisions of Lincoln’s presidency, from the suspension of habeas corpus to the Emancip…

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The 1541 Spanish Expedition Down the Amazon to Find the Imaginary “El Dorado” and Valley of Cinnamon 40:32

4M ago40:32

40:32

As Spanish conquistators slowly moved through Latin America, they encountered levels of wealth that were unimaginable. Most famously, Incan Emperor Atahualpa was captured by Francisco Pizarro and paid a ransom of a room filled with gold and then twice over with silver. The room was 22 feet long by 17 feet wide, filled to a height of about 8 feet. S…

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Everyday Life for the 500K German POWs House in America During World War Two 1:02:31

4M ago1:02:31

1:02:31

During World War II, approximately half a million German prisoners of war were held in the United States, housed in 700 camps spread across the country, from Florida to Maine. These POWs were treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, often working in agriculture and other industries to alleviate domestic labor shortages. Today, evidence of…

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The Arsenal of Democracy: How the Revolver and Repeating Rifle Democratized Gun Ownership and Armed the United States 56:07

4M ago56:07

56:07

The United States is the most heavily armed nation in the world, with an estimated 400 million guns in private hands. But few know that this legacy can be directly traced back to a handful of gunmakers who worked in the Springfield Armory of Massachusetts in the early 1800s. Their names became synonymous with American guns—Colt, Smith, Wesson, Winc…

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Owning Land Was The Best – and Usually Only – Way to Be Rich in the Ancient World 44:24

4M ago44:24

44:24

For millennia, humans eked out survival atop the surface of the Earth and land had no unique value. Eventually, however, humans turned land into an advantage. For several thousand years, control of land meant control of natural resources, like water and wild animals. For several thousand more years it meant agricultural production, raising domestic…

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Benjamin Franklin – In the 200 Years After His Death – Funded New Businesses, Supported Boston and Philadelphia, and Play Pranks 37:53

4M ago37:53

37:53

When Benjamin Franklin died on April 12, 1790, he made a final bet on the future of the United States -- a gift of 2,000 pounds to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to jump start their careers. Each loan would be repaid with interest over ten years. If all went according to Franklin’s inventive scheme,…

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When American Gilded Elite Bought Up English Country Houses, It Create an Epic Transatlantic Clash of Cultures 44:09

4M ago44:09

44:09

For generations, the great palaces of Britain were home to living histories, noble families that had reigned for centuries. But by the end of the nineteenth century, members of elite society found themselves, for the first time, in the company of arrivistes. Their new neighbors—from chorus girls to millionaire greengrocers to guano impresarios—lack…

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The Untold History of Earth: Hobbits Really Existed, Dinosaurs Had Feathers, and Yetis Roamed Our Planet 1:08:48

4M ago1:08:48

1:08:48

The Old English poem Beowulf is a vital source of information on history, language, story and belief from the darkest of the Dark Ages. Only one copy is known to exist (it’s in the British Library), and that was rescued from a fire that is known to have destroyed many other manuscripts. If Beowulf didn’t exist, how much would we know about that per…

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How Did Gold Beat Out Every Other Precious Metal To Become Humanity’s Dominant Currency For the Last 2,600 Years? 36:05

4M ago36:05

36:05

Why has gold reigned as the world’s go-to precious metal for over 2,600 years? It’s not as rare as platinum, durable as diamonds, or malleable as copper. What is it about this metal that made it the standard unit of coinage, from China to Mesoamerica? It’s a very long story, but gold’s scarcity, durability, malleability, and universal appeal made i…

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The 160-Minute Race to Save the Titanic 47:13

5M ago47:13

47:13

One hundred and sixty minutes. That is all the time rescuers would have before the largest ship in the world slipped beneath the icy Atlantic. There was amazing heroism and astounding incompetence against the backdrop of the most advanced ship in history sinking by inches with luminaries from all over the world. It is a story of a network of wirele…

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200 Years Before the French Revolution, German Peasants Tried to Overthrow The Holy Roman Empire 54:27

5M ago54:27

54:27

The German Peasants’ War of 1524-1525 was the largest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. Somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants—roughly 2% of the male population—were slain in a mere two months. While the peasant forces would ultimately prove no match for the lords, for a period of several months the…

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What the Middle Ages Can Teach Us About Pandemics, Mass Migration, and Tech Disruption 53:15

5M ago53:15

53:15

The medieval world – for all its plagues, papal indulgences, castles, and inquisition trials – has much in common with ours. People living the Middle Ages dealt with deadly pandemicsmass migration, and controversial technological changes, just as we do now. Today’s guest, Dan Jones, author of POWERS AND THRONES: A New History of the Middle Ages loo…

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Did Orson Welles’s 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast Really Cause a Mass Panic? 48:26

5M ago48:26

48:26

On a warm Halloween Eve, October 30, 1938, during a broadcast of H G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Orson Welles held his hands up for radio silence in the CBS studio in New York City while millions of people ran out into the night screaming, grabbed shotguns, drove off in cars, and hid in basements, attics, or anywhere they could find to get away from…

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A Talk With The Polar Geographer Who Discovered Shackleton’s Endurance Under 10,000 ft of Frozen Water 43:26

5M ago43:26

43:26

On August 1, 1914, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton and his crew sailed from England, set on making history as the first to cross Antarctica. Their ship never returned from her maiden voyage. On November 22, 1915, the aptly named Endurance disappeared, crushed by ice and swallowed by the Weddell Sea. Today, nearly everyone is familiar with Sh…

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The Founding Fathers Were 20 and 30-Somethings. Why Is America Now a Gerontocracy? 42:13

5M ago42:13

42:13

A house on the Florida coast. An assisted living program. A lively retirement community. Medicare. Our modern concept of old age—and even the idea of old age as a distinct stage of life—are products of our recent past. Where once Americans had little choice but to work until death, in the years after World War II government subsidies and employer p…

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A Pre-WWI French Philosopher Was More Popular Than Elvis and Possibly Entered the US Into the Great War 43:13

5M ago43:13

43:13

In New York City, 1913, French philosopher Henri Bergson gave a lecture at Columbia University, resulting in fanfare, traffic jams, and even fainting spells among the thousands of people clamoring for a seat. But this was not Bergson’s only taste of celebrity. When he got married in 1891, Marcel Proust served as his best man. In 1917, the French go…

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While Starving at Besieged Leningrad, Scientists Hid Drought-Resistant Crop Seeds That Could Prevent Future Famines 40:30

5M ago40:30

40:30

In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—and began the longest blockade in recorded history, one that would ultimately claim the lives of nearly three-quarters of a million people. At the center of the besieged city stood a converted palace that housed the world’s largest collection of seeds —…

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Surviving Nearly 2 Years of Shipwreck on a South Pacific Island in the 1880s 43:13

6M ago43:13

43:13

Today, half of the world’s population lives around the Pacific Rim. This ocean has been the crossroads of international travel, trade, and commerce for at least 500 years. The economy was driven by workers in rickety sailing boats like in Moby Dick. The risk of starvation, dehydration, shipwreck, sinking, and death began as soon as you stepped out …

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How Did 450 Boers Defeat 15,000 Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838? 48:45

6M ago48:45

48:45

By the 1830s, the Zulu kingdom was consolidating its power as the strongest African polity in the south-east, but was under growing pressure from British traders and hunters on the coast, and descendants of the early Dutch settlers at the Cape – the Boers. In 1837, the vanguard of the Boers' Great Trek migration reached the borders of Zulu territor…

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Key Battles of the Barbary Wars, Episode 9: The End of North African Piracy and the Beginning of American Global Naval Hegemony 58:31

6M ago58:31

58:31

In this final episode of our series on the Barbary Wars, we look at the fates of the Barbary States. After 1815, the Barbary States lost their independence, with Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco succumbing to European powers through military defeats and colonization, culminating in French and Spanish protectorates by the 19th century. We also l…

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