PODCAST · history
History Shorts
by History Shorts
Dive into the past with award-winning historian Peter Zablocki in this captivating daily podcast! Uncover hidden stories you never knew existed. And don't miss Friday Conversations where Peter teams up with top experts for riveting, in-depth discussions that bring history to life.
Episodes
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When FDR Wanted Hoover to be President
In January 1920, Franklin Roosevelt wrote that Herbert Hoover was "certainly a wonder" — and that he wished "we could make him President." Before the Depression, Hoover was a global hero: the man who fed occupied Belgium and whose name became a verb. Nobody even knew his party. In this episode…
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How Baghdad Saved Ancient Greek Philosophy
Socrates never wrote a word. Most of Aristotle's polished writing is lost forever. And for six hundred years after Rome fell, Western Europe had barely any Aristotle at all. In this episode, we trace how the Greek philosophers invented the questions that still shape how we think — and the...
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The Third Tier: Theaters & Prostitutes
Look up from the stage of a big-city American theater in the 1830s and you'd see three levels of seats. The pit. The family boxes. And the third tier — with its own staircase, its own street entrance, and its own bar. It was set aside for prostitutes, and many of them got in free. In this…
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The Home Remedies that Killed
For generations, nobody had to tell you what was in your medicine. Not the morphine in the syrup that quieted your teething baby. Not the arsenic in the wafers that promised a perfect complexion. Not the mercury in the nursery powders, or the radium in the tonic a Pittsburgh millionaire swore by....
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The Most Expensive American War is...
Most people say World War II is the most expensive war in American history — $4.5 trillion in today's money. But that's only direct military spending. Add veterans' care, interest on war debt, and long-term obligations, and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have already cost…
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Eight Days that Ended the Gilded Age
On September 6th, 1901, President McKinley was shot twice at a World's Fair in Buffalo. His first instinct was to protect his attacker and spare his wife the news. He appeared to recover. An X-ray machine was on display at the Exposition — a wonder of modern science. Nobody used it. McKinley died...
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Poland: What Does it Take For a Nation to Survive, w/ Norman Davies
What does it take for a nation to survive after the state is gone? For 123 years, from 1795 to 1918, Poland did not exist on the map. It had been partitioned three times, divided among Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and written off as a finished chapter of European history. And yet the nation...
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The Search for the Last Rebel Yell
The rebel yell — the Confederate battle cry that terrified Union soldiers across four years of war — was never recorded during the Civil War. The phonograph wasn't invented until 1877. Twelve years too late. By the 1930s, the men who had made the sound were in their eighties and nineties and…
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From Burnsides to Sideburns
Every time you use the word sideburns, you're accidentally commemorating one of the worst generals of the Civil War. Ambrose Burnside told Lincoln twice he wasn't the right man for the job. He was right both times. The third time he said yes — and sent 12,000 Union men across an open field at...
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Thucydides Invents History
In 424 BCE, an Athenian general arrived too late to save a city from a Spartan attack. Athens exiled him for it. In that exile, he invented something that had never existed before — historical writing as a rigorous discipline, based on evidence, cross-checked accounts, and the honest separation…
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Why did Hitler Declare War on America?
On December 11th, 1941 — just four days after Pearl Harbor — Adolf Hitler stood before the Reichstag and declared war on the United States. He wasn't obligated to. The Tripartite Pact didn't require it. He could have stayed out entirely and let America focus its fury on Japan in the Pacific. He...
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The Dreyfus Affair
In 1894, French Army officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason and sentenced to imprisonment on Devil's Island. Dreyfus was Jewish. The evidence against him was deeply flawed, while secret material was provided to the military judges without the defense being allowed to examine it. Then...
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The Nixon v. Khrushchev Kitchen Debate
In July 1959, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev stood inside a model American kitchen in Moscow and started arguing. The subject? Washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, and the meaning of a good life. Nixon was visiting the American National Exhibition, designed to showcase the consumer...
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The Rise of American Air Power in WWII, w/ A.J. Baime
Bestselling author A.J. Baime joins History Shorts for a full conversation about his upcoming book, Bird Men: The Rise of American Airpower and the Machine That Ended World War II. In the late 1930s, the U.S. Army Air Corps was still a relatively modest force. By 1945, America had built the B-29...
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The Lost Romanov Fortune
When Tsar Nicholas II and his family were killed in 1918, the Romanovs had been associated with staggering wealth accumulated over centuries of imperial rule. The Bolsheviks seized the obvious treasures: palaces, artwork, imperial collections, and crown property. But the Romanovs also possessed...
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Nellie Bly Around the World
In 1889, 25-year-old journalist Nellie Bly boarded a steamship in New York carrying one small bag, one dress, and a remarkable assignment: Travel around the world faster than Phileas Fogg. Inspired by Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, Bly raced across oceans and continents by…
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Debunking the 1637 Tulip Mania
In 1637, some Dutch tulip bulbs really did sell for extraordinary prices. But the famous story of Tulip Mania—families ruined, homes exchanged for flowers, and the Dutch economy devastated by history's first great speculative bubble—is far more complicated. The most prized tulips displayed...
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The Lost Tomb of Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan built an empire that stretched across much of Eurasia. Then, in 1227, he died—and his burial place vanished from history. According to later traditions, extraordinary measures were taken to keep the location secret. Stories tell of witnesses being killed, horses trampling the burial...
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Alexander the Great's Road to Tyre
In 332 BCE, Alexander the Great stood on the Mediterranean coast staring at a seemingly impossible target. Tyre sat on an island roughly half a mile offshore, protected by massive walls rising directly from the sea. Previous conquerors had spent years trying to take the city. Alexander was 23…
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J. Colter - America's First Mountain Man
In 1806, the Lewis and Clark Expedition was finally heading home when one member asked permission to turn around. His name was John Colter. Over the next several years, Colter became one of the earliest legendary mountain men, exploring and trapping across the northern Rockies. He traveled…
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Reassessing the Hindenburg Disaster, w/ Catherine Katz
On May 6, 1937, the German airship Hindenburg came in to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Crowds were waiting. Radio was already rolling. Thirty-four seconds later the greatest aircraft of its age was gone—and a reporter on the field was crying into a microphone words we still know: Oh, the…
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Warsaw 1920 - The Battle that Saved Europe
In August 1920, the Red Army approached Warsaw, and the newly independent Polish state appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The stakes stretched far beyond Poland. Bolshevik leaders hoped victory could help carry revolution westward, particularly toward a politically unstable Germany. Then…
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The Worst Military Decision in Ancient History
In 415 BCE, Athens made an extraordinary decision: invade Sicily. The expedition was enormous. Confidence was high. And one of its chief architects was Alcibiades—a brilliant, charismatic, and notoriously unpredictable Athenian politician and general. Then everything began to unravel. Before the...
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The Rise of Catherine the Great
In 1744, a 14-year-old German princess arrived in Russia to marry the heir to the Russian throne. She spoke little Russian, had few resources of her own, and barely knew the man who would become her husband. But Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst began reinventing herself. She learned Russian, converted to...
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South Sea Company - The Original Economic Bubble
In 1720, London was gripped by an investment frenzy. Companies appeared almost overnight, promising fortunes from everything imaginable—and sometimes from nothing at all. One notorious prospectus supposedly offered shares in "an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."...
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Two Days in Berlin 1961 - Cold War (Almost) Turns Hot
On October 27, 1961, ten American tanks and ten Soviet tanks faced each other across Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin—loaded, ready, and separated by barely 100 meters. For sixteen hours, a single shot could have triggered a confrontation between two nuclear superpowers. But behind the scenes, John…
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Seven Days in Korea - To Fight or Not to Fight?
At 4:00 a.m. on June 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. Within days, President Harry Truman moved from supplying the South Koreans to ordering American air and naval support—and then committing U.S. ground troops. He did so without asking Congress for…
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Morris - The Forsaken Founder w/ Scott Greenberger
Gouverneur Morris wrote "We the People." He fought slavery on the floor of the Constitutional Convention. Washington turned to him when the army was starving. Hamilton's widow asked him to give the eulogy. He stayed in Paris through the Reign of Terror—wooden peg leg and all. Then history forgot...
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Eight Days in Manila - When the U.S. Became an Empire
On May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. Then the cable went silent. For nearly a week, Americans had no reliable news from the Philippines. Newspapers speculated that Dewey had been defeated, captured, or perhaps had never fought at all. Meanwhile, events...
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Four Days in April - The Spark of the Civil War
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. For 34 hours, thousands of shells rained down on the fort. Remarkably, no one was killed during the bombardment. The first fatality came after the surrender. As the Union garrison fired a...
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Six Days in March - The End of the Roman Republic
On March 15, 44 BC, Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by a group of Roman senators who believed they were saving the Republic. Five days later, their plan was already unraveling. At Caesar's public funeral, Mark Antony displayed Caesar's bloodied and torn toga before an enraged Roman crowd....
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Eight Days in August - The Collapse of Japan
In the early hours of August 15, 1945, Japanese officers stormed the Imperial Palace. Their target wasn't the emperor. It was a phonograph record. Recorded on August 14, it contained Emperor Hirohito's announcement accepting surrender. The conspirators sealed the palace, cut communications…
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The Osage Reign of Terror
In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world, thanks to oil discovered beneath their Oklahoma reservation. Then they began dying. Osage men and women were poisoned, shot, and killed in mysterious circumstances. Behind many of the deaths was a...
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The 1927 Bath School Disaster
On May 18, 1927, the small farming community of Bath, Michigan, suffered the deadliest school attack in American history. Explosives secretly planted beneath the local school detonated shortly after classes began, collapsing an entire section of the building. As parents, teachers, and neighbors...
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Inside the National WWI Museum, w/ Christopher Warren
Dr. Christopher Warren, Vice President of Curatorial Affairs and Chief Curator at the National WWI Museum and Memorial, joins History Shorts for a full conversation about the Great War, memory, and why World War I still matters. The National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City is America's...
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Battle of Blair Mt. and the Origins of 'Redneck'
In 1921, thousands of armed coal miners marched through the mountains of West Virginia. Many wore red bandanas around their necks—one historical association behind the term "redneck." Their destination was Blair Mountain, where company-backed forces waited. What followed became the largest armed...
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Ishi Walks Out of the Foothills
In August 1911, a starving man walked out of the foothills near Oroville, California—and into a world that believed his people had disappeared. He became known as Ishi, a member of the Yahi people whose community had been devastated by disease, displacement, and violence during California's...
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The Crazy 1904 St. Louis Olympic Marathon
The 1904 Olympic marathon may have been the strangest race in history. Runners battled brutal heat, choking dust, and almost no drinking water. One competitor was chased off course by wild dogs. Another stopped along the way to eat rotten apples. Then there was Thomas Hicks, whose trainers kept…
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The Truth About the Mad Queen of Madagascar
In 1828, Queen Ranavalona I took the throne of Madagascar—and began one of the most controversial reigns in African history. Determined to preserve Malagasy independence from growing European influence, Ranavalona expelled missionaries, restricted Christianity, resisted foreign powers, and…
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Dearfield: A Microcosm of Great Depression's Ghost Towns
In 1910, Dearfield, Colorado, was founded on the High Plains as an agricultural community where Black Americans could build something largely denied to them elsewhere: land, independence, and economic opportunity. Against difficult odds, Dearfield grew. Families farmed the surrounding land,...
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The Poison Squad
At the turn of the twentieth century, America's food supply could be terrifying. Manufacturers routinely added chemicals and preservatives to food—with little regulation and few requirements to tell consumers what they were eating. So government chemist Harvey Wiley conducted an extraordinary...
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Fascism Didn't Come From Europe, w/ Joseph Kelly
When Americans watched fascists march down Main Street in the 1930s, they told themselves it was a European import—new, foreign, un-American. Joseph Kelly says that story is wrong. In The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915, Kelly traces a homegrown political tradition from...
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The Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy w/ Ben Macintyre
Ben Macintyre joins History Shorts to discuss his new book Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy. In 1981, Tehran was still reeling from the Iranian Revolution. The Shah was gone, Ayatollah Khomeini's regime was consolidating power, and the Soviet Union was actively...
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Princess Caraboo Fools England
In 1817, a mysterious young woman appeared in an English village speaking an unknown language and wearing exotic clothing. She claimed to be Princess Caraboo, royalty from the distant island of Javasu who had been kidnapped by pirates and escaped by jumping overboard near England. High society…
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The Complicated History of the Pinkertons
Before the FBI or Secret Service became household names, there were the Pinkertons. Founded by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton in 1850, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency hunted train robbers, infiltrated criminal gangs, protected Abraham Lincoln, and developed an enormous network of...
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The Truth Behind the War of the Worlds Broadcast
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles interrupted America's radios with terrifying news: Martians had invaded New Jersey. Except they hadn't. Welles's War of the Worlds was a radio drama presented partly as breaking-news bulletins. Some listeners who tuned in late mistook fiction for reality, and...
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Anti-German Hysteria of World War I
Before World War I, German was everywhere in America. Millions of Americans spoke it. German-language newspapers flourished. Schools taught it. Churches worshipped in it. Entire communities conducted daily life in German. Then America entered the war. Suddenly, the language of millions of…
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WWII's Operation Fish
In 1940, with Nazi Germany sweeping across Europe and invasion seemingly possible, Britain faced an extraordinary question: What happens to the country's wealth if Hitler reaches London? The answer was Operation Fish. In one of the largest movements of wealth in history, Britain secretly shipped...
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Russia's Invisible Rocket Man
He launched Sputnik. He sent Yuri Gagarin into space. He helped turn the Soviet Union into the world's first space superpower. And almost no one knew his name. Sergei Korolev was the brilliant engineer behind the Soviet Union's greatest early triumphs in the Space Race. But before becoming the...
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The Persian King who Punished the Ocean
In 480 BC, Persian King Xerxes I was preparing one of the largest invasions of ancient Greece ever attempted. To move his enormous army into Europe, his engineers constructed floating bridges across the Hellespont, linking Asia and Europe. Then a storm destroyed them. According to the Greek...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Dive into the past with award-winning historian Peter Zablocki in this captivating daily podcast! Uncover hidden stories you never knew existed. And don't miss Friday Conversations where Peter teams up with top experts for riveting, in-depth discussions that bring history to life.
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How many episodes does History Shorts have?
History Shorts currently has 789 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is History Shorts about?
Dive into the past with award-winning historian Peter Zablocki in this captivating daily podcast! Uncover hidden stories you never knew existed. And don't miss Friday Conversations where Peter teams up with top experts for riveting, in-depth discussions that bring history to life.
How often does History Shorts release new episodes?
History Shorts releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 789 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
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You can listen to History Shorts on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts History Shorts?
History Shorts is created and hosted by History Shorts.
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