Explore every episode of the podcast HISTORY This Week

A 5-min sample of our full interview about who Blackbeard really was, and the truth behind his pirate friends. Subscribe to HTW+ at htwpod.com or in your Apple Podcasts app to unlock full behind-the-scenes episodes.

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates.

September 26, 1960. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon meet in a CBS studio in Chicago for the first televised debate between presidential nominees. Kennedy arrives tan, relaxed, and fully prepped. Nixon arrives with a fever and a bad knee, turns down the studio makeup, and goes on live TV covered in a drugstore powder called "Lazy Shave."

It took CBS president Frank Stanton years of lobbying, and a change in federal law, to get the two men on stage. Seventy million Americans watched, and the night has been remembered ever since as the moment image beat substance. But is that really what happened? And did the TV audience and the radio audience really see two different winners?

Special thanks to our guest David Greenberg, professor of history, journalism, and media studies at Rutgers University and author of Republic of Spin: An Inside Look at the American Presidency.

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Introducing History's Greatest Mysteries–a new History Channel podcast from Rewind Studios–available wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Wednesday.

One of the holiest and most powerful relics from the Bible has been missing for over 2,000 years. While some believe the Ark of the Covenant was destroyed, many people think it’s still out there. Could new clues finally tell us what happened to the Ark, and lead us to where it can be found?

September 24, 1955. President Eisenhower is asleep in his bed at his in-laws’ house in Denver. At around 2 AM in the morning, he’s jolted awake by chest pains. No one realizes it until the morning, but Eisenhower has had a heart attack. His cardiologist calms the public and tells them that their President will be alright – with some lifestyle changes partially inspired by new, cutting-edge research from a little-known scientist: Ancel Keys. And that very research will change the way Americans, and the world, will eat forever. How did Keys, an oceanographer-turned-nutrition-scientist, end up changing the world’s relationship with fats? And was this a change for the better?

Thank you to our guests, Dr. Steven Nissen, Chief Academic Officer, Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic; Sarah Tracy, Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor, History of Medicine and Food Studies at the University of Oklahoma; and Nina Teicholz, investigative science journalist and author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.

**This episode originally aired September 21, 2020.

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1381. In the English countryside, one peasant has had enough. His resistance leads tens of thousands of armed peasants to march on London. They’re furious about taxes, about wages held down by law, about a world that feels abandoned by God. But they aren’t marching to overthrow the king. They are marching to rescue him.

Paul Greengrass and Dan Jones join Sally Helm to talk about The Uprising, the new film starring Andrew Garfield as a fictional plowman who becomes the face of England's Peasants' Revolt. They get into what life was actually like a generation after the Black Death, why the rebels burned every written record they could find, and how a disturbed 14-year-old king ended up as the last hope of the people marching on his city.

Paul Greengrass is the writer and director of The Uprising, in theaters now. Dan Jones is the film's historical advisor and the author of Summer of Blood. You can follow him at danjones.substack.com for more.

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September 20, 1187. It’s daytime outside the walls of Jerusalem. Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt, ponders his next attack. His troops encircle and lay siege to the city. They vastly outnumber the Crusader knights inside, and Saladin is on the cusp of a victory he never dreamed possible. But he has a problem. Balian of Ibelin leads the Crusader defenses within the city walls. He threatens to destroy Muslim holy sites if Saladin attacks. The Sultan must make a choice. One that will impact his legacy, the lives of thousands, and the future of Jerusalem. 

Special thanks to our guest, Dr. Suleiman Mourad, Professor of Religion at Smith College and author of Ibn Asakir of Damascus: Champion of Sunni Islam at the Time of the Crusades.

**This episode originally aired September 19, 2022.

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On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we're bringing you Blindspot: The Road to 9/11 – a collaboration between the History Channel and WNYC Studios. This was adapted from the complete nine-part series, which you can find by searching for Blindspot: The Road to 9/11 wherever you get your podcasts.

September 11, 2001. On a clear and sunny day, Captain Richard Thornton is piloting his ferry boat back and forth between New Jersey and New York City. But when he hears an airplane flying too low to the ground, he knows something is wrong. After the World Trade Center’s North Tower is struck, Thornton instinctively drives his ship down towards Lower Manhattan. He will soon be joined by countless other marine craft: ferries, fishing boats, tugboats, and more. 

With the roads, bridges, and trains that connect the island of Manhattan to the rest of the world shut down, this collection of civilian, commercial, and military boats manages to carry more than 500,000 survivors to safety. How did this impromptu evacuation, which was larger than Dunkirk during WWII, come together? And how does one ferry boat captain reflect on the shared sense of duty he felt on that fateful day?

**This episode originally aired September 6, 2021.

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September 12, 1922. Twenty-four-year-old Mollie Maggia has a toothache. In less than a year, this otherwise healthy young woman will be dead. Others like her will soon follow. They’d all shared what seemed to be a dream job: applying glow-in-the-dark paint to clock faces. The paint glowed because it was saturated with radium, the wonder element of its day. And now that radium has burrowed inside the bones and lungs of the women. How did a supposed wonder element and cure-all come to be seen for what it was – a deadly poison? And how did a group of courageous young women, racing the clock of their own mortality, expose this truth?

Special thanks to Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. Also, a huge thank you to Art Fryer, nephew of Grace Fryer, one of the “Radium Girls.”

**This episode originally aired September 12, 2022.

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A five-minute taste of our full interview on how Las Vegas became Las Vegas. Subscribe to HTW+ to hear the rest at htwpod.com or in your Apple Podcasts app.

August, sometime in the 500s BCE. In Athens, the Great Panathenaia is in full swing: chariot races, boat races, a hundred cattle slaughtered for the feast. And at the center of it, a competition in which performers recite the work of one poet, and one poet only: Homer. But nobody recites the Odyssey alone. It takes some eighteen hours. So the performers hand it off in relay, each one picking up exactly where the last man stopped.

That relay may be the closest thing we have to the truth about Homer. Almost no scholar today believes a single blind bard composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. So who made them? And what happens to a masterpiece when you accept that it never had an author?

Special thanks to our guests: Mary Ebbott, professor of classics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts; and Casey Dué, professor of classical studies at the University of Houston. They are the editors of the Homer Multitext Project, which you can find at homermultitext.org.

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August 17, 1858. New York City wakes to a hundred-gun salute. Church bells ring, flags fly from public buildings, and by nightfall, fireworks light up the sky. The city is celebrating a telegram from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. Not what it says, but how it traveled: along a 2,000-mile cable running under the Atlantic Ocean. Messages that once took two weeks by steamship now arrive in an instant. And the man behind the cable, a retired paper tycoon named Cyrus Field, is about to become the most famous person in America. But Field has a secret. His cable is already failing.

Why did a bored millionaire attempt the moonshot of the Victorian era? And how did one fragile wire lay the foundation for our connected world?

Special thanks to our guest, James M. Tabor, author of Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World at the Dawn of the Information Age.

To stay updated on all things HISTORY This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast.com. Have thoughts or questions? Email us at historythisweek@history.com.

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August 10, 1792. At midnight, a single church bell begins to ring in Paris. Then another. And another. It's not a call to mass… it's a call to arms. For three years, King Louis XVI and his family have been living as prisoners in a palace, under virtual house arrest at the Tuileries, while France fights over one seething question: can the monarchy survive the Revolution? The radicals have issued a deadline: get rid of the king by the end of August 9th, or we'll take matters into our own hands. The deadline has just passed.

Today, midnight for the monarchy. How did France, whose kings were once anointed with holy oil and believed to cure disease by touch, come to loathe Louis XVI so much? And how does centuries of royal rule come crashing down in a single day?

Special thanks to our guests: David Andress, professor of modern history at the University of Portsmouth and author of The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution; and Marisa Linton, professor of history turned prize-winning novelist. She's the author of Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution, and her latest novel, Domain of Darkness, will be published this December.

To stay updated on all things HISTORY This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast.com. Have thoughts or questions? Email us at historythisweek@history.com.

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August 7, 1889. In Liverpool's St. George's Hall, an American woman named Florence Maybrick stands behind iron bars, dressed in mourning black… for the husband she's accused of murdering. The evidence against her is thin: James Maybrick was a longtime arsenic addict who bought the poison daily, and none was found in his stomach when he died. But Florence had committed another kind of crime in the eyes of Victorian society. She'd had an affair. And to many, that moral transgression was proof enough of murder.

How did a 17-year-old American socialite end up married to a secret addict, and then put on trial for her life? How did her case ignite protests, half a million petition signatures, and the fury of Queen Victoria herself? And how did one wronged woman help change England's system of justice forever?

Special thanks to our guest, Rick Hutto, attorney and author of A Poisoned Life: Florence Chandler Maybrick, the First American Woman Sentenced to Death in England; and to Andrea Hastings-Arroyo, graduate student and library specialist at the University of Wyoming, who helped with our research.

You can find all the books we’ve used to make recent HISTORY This Week episodes at historythisweekpodcast.com.

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Listen to all 20 episodes of World War II with Tom Hanks wherever you get your podcasts!

The war is over, and the Allies are triumphant. The United States and the Soviet Union initially work together to establish a new world order, but over the course of the next four years these two nations will go from Allies of convenience to ideological adversaries, launching the next phase of global conflict under the shadow of nuclear war.

This episode features interviews with (in order of appearance):

• Michel Paradis, professor, Columbia University
• Jon Meacham, presidential historian
• Simon Sebag Montefiore, historian and author
• Timothy Naftali, senior research scholar, Columbia University
• Sarada Peri, presidential speechwriter and political analyst
• Phillips O’Brien, professor, University of St. Andrews
• Alexandra Richie, professor, Collegium Civitas
• Dan Carlin, podcaster, Hardcore History
• Michael Kimmage, professor, Catholic University of America
• Michael Neiberg, professor, US Army War College
• Dan Snow, historian and broadcaster
• A.J. Baime, journalist and author
• Robert Citino, senior historian, National WWII Museum

Sharing an episode of a show we really love, called The Rest is History. Hosted by historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, the show brings the past to life through gripping storytelling, sharp analysis and a huge sense of drama. From the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and the Norman Conquest of 1066, to the sinking of the Titanic, the Second World War and the lives of history’s most powerful rulers, Tom and Dominic unpack the people, battles and world-changing events that shaped the modern world. Their latest series explores the Founding Fathers of the United States - the ideas, rivalries and revolutions behind the birth of America.

In this episode, Dominic and Tom launch into the extraordinary life and origins of George Washington. Where did George Washington come from, and what was he like? How did he come to take on such a pivotal role in the American Revolution? And, was he really central to America’s triumphant struggle for independence? 

You can find more episodes of The Rest Is History at https://linktr.ee/RestIshistory.

July 26, 1775. In a stately mansion turned rebel headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, George Washington sits down at a dining room table and writes out his orders for the day. The brand-new commander-in-chief has a problem: his army is outfunded, outmanned, and outgunned — and if he can't communicate, he can't win. 

What Washington doesn't know is that on this very day, the Congress in Philadelphia is appointing a different kind of general to help him. A postmaster general: Benjamin Franklin. It's a strange homecoming. Franklin spent forty years building the colonial post into a marvel of efficiency… until the Crown humiliated him before the Privy Council and fired him from the job. Now, the rebels are handing it back.

How did a runaway teenage printer end up running the mail for a continent? Why did the Crown fire its best postmaster? And how did a network of post riders help win the Revolutionary War?

Special thanks to USPS Historian Steve Kochersperger, and Smithsonian National Postal Museum curators Dan Piazza and Lynn Heidelbaugh. Dan and Lynn’s new book for the Postal Museum, Routes to a New Nation, will be out in October and is currently available for pre-order.

You can find all the books we’ve used to make recent HISTORY This Week episodes at historythisweekpodcast.com. 

CORRECTION from the episode: Steve Kochersperger was not Postmaster General of Philadelphia, but Postmaster of Julian, PA.

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We have been told the American Revolution was fought over taxation and representation. But that's not what the Declaration of Independence says. According to our founders, in their own words, what they were most upset about was Native Americans. How does a whole country miss a point of its own founding document? That's the question at the heart of a new podcast called First America. Hosted and reported by Rebecca Nagle, an Indigenous author and the former host of Crooked’s This Land podcast, and featuring leading Native historians, First America unveils how our current political moment was 250 years in the making and how the founders’ treatment of Indigenous nations—and their resistance—shaped US democracy. Here’s the first episode. Find First America wherever you get podcasts.

July 14, 1850. At a swanky hotel in Apalachicola, Florida, the French consul is throwing a Bastille Day party, and he's promised his guests ice-cold champagne. There's just one problem: the town's ice shipment is delayed, and in 1850, you can't simply make ice. Or can you? Enter Dr. John Gorrie, a country physician who's spent years waging a private war against heat itself, convinced that cooling the air could stop the deadly fevers ravaging his town.

How did a doctor on the Florida frontier invent artificial cooling and take on the "Ice King" of New England? And why has history nearly erased his name?

Special thanks to Bern Nagengast, technology historian and author; and Linda Thompson, docent at the Raney House Museum in Apalachicola, Florida.

You can find all the books we’ve used to make recent HISTORY This Week episodes at historythisweekpodcast.com.

July, 1845. Dr. Smith Boughton, the man behind the mask of "Big Thunder," is sitting in a Hudson jail after a trial that ended in a hung jury.

The Anti-Renters had to celebrate Independence Day with cannon fire and readings of the Declaration, but without their leader. 

The rebellion across Upstate New York is escalating: an undersheriff with a bully's reputation is terrorizing farm families in the Catskills, masked Calico Indians are massing at rent sales, and before summer's end, a lawman will lie dying in a tenant farmer's bed. New York now has to decide: are these rebels murderers, or is the system they're fighting the real crime? 

What happens when the Anti-Renters trade their tin horns for the ballot box? And how does a local revolt over rent end up shaping the politics of a nation?

Special thanks Reeve Huston, emeritus associate professor of history at Duke University and author of Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York; Victoria Kupchinetsky and Misha Gutkin, director and producer of the film Calico Rebellion; David Fleming, the town supervisor of Nassau, NY; Nancy Newman, professor at SUNY Albany and author of the book Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York; and the Association of Public Historians of New York State.

You can find all the books we’ve used to make recent HISTORY This Week episodes at historythisweekpodcast.com.

Today, to celebrate America's 250th birthday, we have a special announcement: we are launching HISTORY This Week+ to all of our followers! (historythisweekpodcast.com/subscribe)

This is something we’ve wanted to do for a while… we’ve been listening to your feedback: you don’t love the ads, you want more history. Well, HTW+ solves both of those problems.

We are offering two tiers of our premium subscription, allowing you to unlock ad-free listening and gain access to bonus content, especially extended cuts of our interviews.

When producing these episodes, the majority of our interview tape is left on the cutting room floor, and our interview with Ken Burns is no exception. We spent over an hour with Ken and his producing partner, Sarah Botstein, discussing the launch of their documentary, The American Revolution.

As a preview of what you’ll get with an HTW+ subscription, we’re bringing you this interview in its (mostly) original form. Enjoy Sally’s conversation with Ken and Sarah, and sign up for HTW+ at historythisweekpodcast.com/subscribe.

Reach out with any questions at historythisweek@history.com.

July 4, 1839. Sixty-three years after 1776—and centuries after the medieval period—feudalism is alive and well in the United States.

High on a rocky plain in upstate New York, a crowd of tenant farmers gathers in the village of Berne to read aloud a declaration of independence… but not the one you're thinking of. These families are still bound to a landlord by perpetual leases their grandfathers signed, owing bushels of wheat and a share of every sale for as long as the land exists. 

Today they're done. They call their leases "voluntary slavery" and vow to "take up the ball of the Revolution where our fathers stopped it." It's the opening shot of the Anti-Rent War,  a revolt that will pit disguised farmers against sheriffs and posses across the Hudson Valley, and force New York to ask whether a feudal bargain has any place in a republic. 

How did manor lords survive the Revolution? And what would it finally take to break their grip?

Special thanks Reeve Huston, emeritus associate professor of history at Duke University and author of Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York; Victoria Kupchinetsky and Misha Gutkin, director and producer of the film Calico Rebellion; David Fleming, the town supervisor of Nassau, NY; Nancy Newman, professor at SUNY Albany and author of Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York; and the Association of Public Historians of New York State.

You can find all the books we’ve used to make recent HISTORY This Week episodes at historythisweekpodcast.com.

June 28, 1971. It’s the second annual “Unity Day” rally at Columbus Circle in New York City, organized by the Italian American Civil Rights League. Joe Colombo is the very public face of the League, a group that actively fights discrimination and ugly stereotypes against the Italian-American community, such as their association with organized crime and the Mafia. The problem? That same Joe Colombo is a leader of the Mafia, one of the heads of the “Five Families” in New York. It’s an open secret; many people across the city know who he really is, and the FBI is hot on his tail, trying to catch him in the act. On this day, Colombo’s dual life—as a media-facing advocate and as an underground criminal—will come crashing down in a violent display.

Special thanks to Don Capria, co-author of Colombo: The Unsolved Murder; Selwyn Raab, veteran Mafia reporter and author of Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires; and Geoff Schumacher, vice president of exhibits and programs for The Mob Museum in Las Vegas.

You can find all the books we’ve used to make recent HISTORY This Week episodes at historythisweekpodcast.com. 

**This episode originally aired June 28, 2021.

Malcolm Gladwell and President Barack Obama introduce us to one of the most chaotic,

complicated, and fascinating times in American history, revealing why Reconstruction still

defines our country today.

Listen to Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise on Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Reconstruction begins where, for most Americans, the story of the Civil War ends: The North is

victorious and slavery is abolished. But what happened next was one of the most important

decades in American history, a moment when our country grappled with its original sin and

imagined — and briefly enacted — a more perfect union.

Drawing from archives, letters, diaries, court records, eyewitness testimonies and some of

America’s most accomplished scholars and storytellers, Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise

explores this unprecedented historical moment in rich, kaleidoscopic detail. The series unpacks a

time when a determined band of reformers attempted to radically reimagine American society —

from the Constitution to the roots of its economy to the very nature of citizenship itself.

Reconstruction was a time when Americans struggled over fundamental questions about our

country. Who gets to be a citizen? Who has the right to vote? Who can own property? In short,

who belongs? Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise explores what America might have

looked like if Reconstruction had truly succeeded, and how the ultimate backlash to

Reconstruction prevented our country from becoming a truly multiracial democracy.

Guiding us through this extraordinary moment in American history is best-selling author and

host of Revisionist History Malcolm Gladwell. He’ll have help from luminaries, historians, and

storytellers such as President Barack Obama, Jelani Cobb, Wyatt Cenac, David Blight, Kai

Wright, Kellie Carter Jackson, Ashley C. Ford, Manisha Sinha, Kidada Williams, and Eric Foner.

This is a series about why America has yet to make good on the promise of Reconstruction, and

how it still might.

An Audible Original in partnership with History Channel. Produced by Higher Ground and

Pushkin Industries.

June 15, 1865. German-American statesman Carl Schurz is traveling to Washington to meet with President Andrew Johnson when he stops at a friend’s home in Philadelphia. That night, during a séance, a teenage medium claims to summon the spirit of Abraham Lincoln… and delivers Schurz a mysterious command from beyond the grave.

Soon, Johnson sends Schurz on a fact-finding mission through the defeated South. What he discovers will help shape the course of Reconstruction and expose the violence threatening America’s fragile new democracy.

Today, Sally speaks with bestselling author and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell about Reconstruction’s forgotten history, the battle over how it has been remembered, and why the questions it raised remain unfinished today.

Listen to Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise now on Audible, or anywhere you get your podcasts, starting June 18th. Link: https://lnk.to/reconstructionHW

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June 8, 1191. The Crusaders and Muslim forces are locked in battle over the city of Acre. On one side is Saladin, the great Muslim leader who has already recaptured Jerusalem. On the other, an armada arrives carrying England’s king: Richard the Lionheart.

The Crusades will become one of the defining conflicts of the Middle Ages. But for centuries, their history fades into legend… until a Scottish writer named Walter Scott brings them roaring back. His novels turn knights, tournaments, and holy war into blockbuster entertainment. But Scott’s message was more complicated than simple nostalgia: he saw the Crusades as reckless, violent, and hollow. His readers mostly saw the armor.

How did a Scottish poet revive this religious war and turn it into an international phenomenon? And how did his underlying message get lost, warped, and then repurposed to justify even more violence?

Special thanks to Ian Duncan,  professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh.

You can find the rest of the books we used to research this episode at historythisweekpodcast.com.

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June 6, 1944. As thousands of Allied soldiers prepare to storm the beaches of Normandy, they climb down rope nets into small wooden landing craft bobbing in the dark waters of the English Channel. Within hours, these boats will carry them into the largest amphibious invasion in history.

The craft are known as Higgins boats, named for their inventor, Andrew Higgins: a hard-driving New Orleans boatbuilder who built his reputation designing vessels that could speed through swamps, crash through obstacles, and go places other boats couldn't. Higgins was stubborn, abrasive, and relentless. The Navy repeatedly dismissed his ideas. He refused to go away.

How does a small-time New Orleans boatbuilder force his way into the military industrial complex? And what exactly is so special about these boxy little Higgins boats?

Special thanks to Dr. John Curatola, Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. His book is Armies Afloat: How the Development of Amphibious Operations in Europe Helped Win World War II.

You can find the rest of the books we used to research this episode at historythisweekpodcast.com.

Check out new episodes of History's Greatest Machines with Dolph Lundgren on the HISTORY Channel, premiering on June 1st. Stream the next day at History.com.

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Search "World War II with Tom Hanks" wherever you get your podcasts! New episodes drop every Tuesday.

World War II with Tom Hanks reexamines history’s most devastating conflict for a new century. Across twenty hours, the series traces the war’s full arc–from the rise of fascism to Hiroshima–uncovering the decisions, hidden networks, and lasting consequences that continue to shape our world.

Episode 1 – The Beginning

In September 1939, enabled by a secret pact between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, Germany invades Poland with its lightning style of tank warfare, plunging Europe back into war. Adolf Hitler can now pursue his longed-for racial war, as the world watches in horror, and the stage is set for global conflict.

This episode features interviews with (in order of appearance):

• Dan Carlin, podcaster, Hardcore History
• Alexandra Richie, professor, Collegium Civitas
• Robert Citino, senior historian, National WWII Museum
• Cameron Zinsou, associate professor, Command and General Staff College
• Geoffrey Wawro, professor, University of North Texas
• Jadwiga Biskupska, associate professor, Sam Houston State University
• Simon Sebag Montefiore, historian and author
• Roger Moorhouse, historian and author
• Leah Wright Rigueur, associate professor, Johns Hopkins University
• James Bulgin, Imperial War Museum
• General Wesley Clark, US Army, Ret.
• Sean McMeekin, professor, Bard College

May 30, 1945. In Washington, Secretary of War Henry Stimson calls General Leslie Groves to his office and demands answers: which Japanese cities are about to become targets for the atomic bomb? What follows will pull Stimson—a deeply religious statesman who believed in restraint, but also in overwhelming force—into a profound crisis over morality, destruction, and what modern war is becoming. 

How did Henry Stimson grapple with the bomb? And after helping usher in the atomic age, how did he reckon with what he’d done?

Special thanks to Evan Thomas, journalist and New York Times bestselling author of Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.

You can find the rest of the books we used to research this episode at historythisweekpodcast.com.

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May 23, 1934. On a muggy Louisiana morning, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow speed toward the Texas border. They’ve been on the run for over a year—wanted for robbery and murder—and the lurid news accounts of their exploits have made them famous. But today, Bonnie and Clyde’s legendary crime spree comes to an end … in a hail of bullets.

Why did some come to view these Depression Era outlaws as agents of chaos the country needed? And what was the real motivation behind their crimes?

Special thanks to our guest, John Neal Phillips, author of Running With Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults.

** This episode originally aired May 22, 2023.

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May 12, 1949. After eleven months under Soviet blockade, the people of West Berlin flood into the streets to celebrate. The lights are back on. The autobahn is open. The siege is over.

But just months earlier, West Berlin seemed doomed.

Surrounded deep inside Soviet-controlled territory, more than two million Berliners are suddenly cut off from food, fuel, electricity, and supplies after Joseph Stalin seals the city’s borders. Many fear the Western Allies will abandon Berlin altogether. Instead, American and British leaders gamble on something unprecedented: supplying an entire city by air.

In this episode, how the Berlin Airlift became the largest sustained airlift in history—and the first major showdown of the Cold War. Along the way: the flamboyant American commander known as “Howlin’ Mad” Howley, Soviet attempts to break the city’s spirit, pilots landing in near-zero visibility every few minutes, and the high-stakes crisis that helped create NATO and reshape the postwar world.

Special thanks to Giles Milton, author of  Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World. 

You can find the rest of the books we used to research this episode at historythisweekpodcast.com.

Family Lore is a weekly narrative podcast that celebrates and investigates ancestral mystique. Each episode begins with a guest sharing a fascinating family legend, followed by a historical deep-dive to uncover the truth and meaning behind the tale. Available now: link.pscrb.fm/f0281/FLFD

May 9th, 1942. In the Lustgarten, a sprawling park in the center of Berlin, a strange new attraction opens to the public. It’s a maze of tents, glowing under red lightbulbs. Inside: a staged vision of the Soviet Union. Filthy streets, starving children, torture chambers. A horror show.

The man behind it all is Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, and the most powerful figure in Berlin. Posters, radio broadcasts, films, classrooms… his message is everywhere. The enemy is at the gates. The war must be won. No matter the cost.

And Berliners are watching. Some believe it. Some look away. Some quietly resist.

Because beyond the spectacle, the war is beginning to close in. Bombs fall on the city. Neighbors disappear. Truth itself becomes something the regime can manufacture.

This is life inside Nazi Berlin at the center of World War II.

How do ordinary people live under a system built on propaganda and fear? And when the story begins to crack… what happens next?

Special thanks to Ian Buruma, professor of human rights and journalism at Bard College, and author of Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945.

For more on this story, search for “Inside the Nazis’ Supernatural Obsession” on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you listen to HISTORY This Week (aired Jun 2, 2025).

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April 25, 1859. About 150 people have gathered on the shores of Lake Manzala in Egypt. And one of them, a mustachioed, retired French diplomat, steps forward. He raises his pickaxe and strikes a ceremonial blow.

The audacious goal is to cut through the desert to connect the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea, creating a new trade route between the East and the West. Changing global trade and geopolitics forever. Today: the Suez Canal. Why did the tremendous efforts of a Frenchman end up enriching the British Empire? And how, decades later, did the canal play an unexpected role in the birth of modern Egypt?

​​Thank you to our guests, Ibrahim El-Houdaiby and Professor Aaron Jakes, for speaking with us for this episode. Thank you also to Dr. Bella Galil for talking with us. If you want to read more about the Suez Canal, Zachary Karabell's Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal is a great resource. 

** This episode originally aired April 25, 2022.

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April 20th, 2004. A quiet suburban development outside Seattle. Brand-new homes. Fresh lawns not yet grown in.

Then, in the middle of the night—sirens. Flames ripping through two houses.

Investigators quickly find the cause: homemade incendiary devices. And a message, left behind at another site: “urban sprawl has become a central issue in the struggle to protect the earth.” Signed, the Earth Liberation Front.

The ELF is already known to authorities: a shadowy network of environmental activists who operate in secret, striking targets they see as destroying the planet. But this attack feels different. Closer to home.

Today: one man’s journey into the Earth Liberation Front. From suburban childhood to underground cells…from protest to arson.

What draws someone into a movement like this? How does activism turn into sabotage? And when it comes to defending the Earth…how far is too far?

Special thanks to Matthew Wolfe, author of Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage.

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April 18, 1806. In his study, President Thomas Jefferson signs a law that doesn’t look like an act of war. It bans imports. Leather. Silk. Glass. Playing cards. A strange list. A quiet move. But Jefferson is trying to confront one of the most powerful empires in the world, without firing a shot.

Britain is stopping American ships at sea. Boarding them. Taking sailors by force. The country is furious. War feels close.

Jefferson has another idea.

How did Jefferson—an avatar of individual liberty—become the president who suspended due process, militarized the coastline, and nearly tore his country apart? And what can his legacy teach us about the prevailing winds of global trade?

Special thanks to Harvey Strum, professor of History and Political Science at Russell Sage College in Albany and Troy, New York; and Lawrence Hatter,  associate professor of Early American History at Washington State University.

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This episode comes from Points North, a podcast about the land, water, and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. You can listen to Points North wherever you get your podcasts.

Lake Champlain is more than 16 times smaller than Lake Ontario, the smallest Great Lake. But in 1998, Congress designated Lake Champlain as the sixth Great Lake, teeing off a historical and cultural fight over which lakes can really call themselves Great.

Radio excerpts in this episode were originally broadcast on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Weekend Edition”. TV excerpts from “NBC Nightly News”.

April 7, 1922. A cabinet secretary signs a secret deal and locks it in his desk.

The land in question holds one of the largest untapped oil reserves in the country. Officially, it belongs to the U.S. Navy. Unofficially, it’s just been handed to a private oilman – no bidding, no oversight, no witnesses.

For Albert Fall, it’s a win-win. For the oil industry, it’s a jackpot. But big money is hard to hide.

Within days, the deal leaks. At first, no one seems to care. The economy is booming. The president is popular. Washington shrugs. Then, investigators start asking a simple question: where did Albert Fall get all of this new money?

Before Watergate, there was Teapot Dome.

How did a secret oil deal become the biggest political scandal of its time? And how did it change the way the U.S. government polices itself?

Special thanks to Joshua Kastenberg,  professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law; and Jack McElroy, author of  Citizen Carl: The Editor Who Cracked Teapot Dome, Shot a Judge, and Invented the Parking Meter. 

Other sources include: The Teapot Dome Scandal by Laton McCartney, Tempest Over Teapot Dome by David Stratton, and Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana by J. Leonard Bates.

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April 3, 1851. A man who escaped slavery is grabbed off the streets of Boston and thrown into a carriage. He fights back, shouting to the crowd, but it doesn’t matter. Under a new federal law, even the North isn’t safe.

The Fugitive Slave Act has turned cities like Boston into hunting grounds. Freedom seekers are being captured, and ordinary citizens are being forced to help.

But across the North, resistance is growing. In Pennsylvania, a man named William Parker is building a network to fight back. When slavecatchers come to his door, that resistance explodes into violence.

How did one law push the country dramatically closer to war? And what happens when the people targeted by this law refuse to surrender?

Special thanks to  Dr. Iris Leigh Barnes, director of the Hosanna School Museum; Christy Coleman, public historian and museum executive; Kellie Carter Jackson,  chair of the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College; and Jamahl Wimberley, who provided the voice of William Parker.

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March 29th, 1923. A new play opens in Berlin, and quietly changes the future. Onstage are workers who never tire, never complain, and never stop. They’re faster, stronger, and more efficient than humans in every way. They’re called robots.

A sci-fi play born out of war and industrialization sparks a global obsession and a lasting fear. Because from the very beginning, the robot wasn’t just a technological breakthrough. It was a rebellion waiting to happen.

How did a playwright invent the robot? Why did his idea spread so quickly? And what does it reveal about the way we think about the future of science?

Special thanks to Dennis Jerz, Professor of English and Media at Seton Hill University; John Jordan, author of Robots; and Jitke Cejkova, editor of R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life.

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March 18, 1879. A crowd gathers around an indoor track in Brooklyn, NY, as an Irish immigrant named Bartholomew O’Donnell attempts a strange feat: walking 80 miles in 26 hours. Newspapers claim he’s eighty years old. Lap after lap, he circles the track: smoking a pipe, sipping hot tea, and pushing through the night.

O’Donnell came to New York thirty years earlier, fleeing the Great Potato Famine. Like many Irish immigrants, he spent decades doing manual labor and trying to get ahead in a city that often viewed newcomers with suspicion.

For generations, stories like his shaped how historians understood famine-era Irish immigrants.

In this special live episode recorded at the Tenement Museum ahead of St. Patrick’s Day, Sally speaks with historian Tyler Anbinder, author of Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York, about what new research reveals about the lives of Irish immigrants in America, and what their story can tell us about immigration today.

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Why did Orson Welles take on a murder mystery? Listen for yourself.

This week, we're sharing a special preview of Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier from the podcast Radio Diaries. In this series, we learn how Welles used his platform to shed light on a crime in a small, southern town. A crime that became a spark for the budding Civil Rights movement.

For more, visit radiodiaries.org

March 10, 1949. Defendant Mildred Gillars arrives at a courthouse to hear her verdict. To trial-watchers, she’s known as Axis Sally—the American woman who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin during World War II. In taunting tones, she spent years pushing anti-Semitic and anti-Allies messages aimed at weakening the morale of American soldiers. But Gillars insists that she’s misunderstood, even innocent. That she’s an artist, she loves her country, and was forced to do what she did… or die. How did a struggling actress from Maine become a potent weapon of the Nazis? And is there a way to understand the choices that she made?

Special thanks to our guests, Richard Lucas, author of Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany, and Michael Flamm, professor of history at Ohio Wesleyan University. Thanks also to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress.

** This episode originally aired March 6, 2023.

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March 5, 1953. The Premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, is on his deathbed, and he’s turning blue. At the end of his life, Stalin is surrounded by his closest advisors, but these comrades aren’t hoping for his quick recovery. For days, they’ve been sneaking away from their vigil, plotting. The moment Stalin’s heart stops, they leap into action. What happens when a tyrant falls? And what role did the inner circle play in bringing an end to Stalin? 

Special thanks to our guest, Sheila Fitzpatrick, historian and author of The Death of Stalin.

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March 1, 1951. Two Texas horse trainers sit down to lunch with Walt Disney. They assume he wants to use their animals in a movie. Instead, Walt leans in and tells them about something that doesn’t exist yet. Not a carnival. Not an amusement park. Something movie-like in the real world. And if he’s going to build it, he’ll need horses.

At that moment, Disneyland is just an idea in Walt’s head. But within a few years, he’ll clear 160 acres of orange groves in Anaheim and attempt to build that dream in barely twelve months. The budget will balloon. The rivers will drain into the soil. The rides will be welded together overnight. And Walt will stake his company — and his personal fortune — on opening the gates on time.

Why was Disneyland such a gamble? And how did Walt essentially invent a whole new form of live entertainment?  

Special thanks to our guests: Leslie Iwerks,  director of Disneyland Handcrafted; Mark Catalina, producer of Disneyland Handcrafted;  Becky Cline, director of the Walt Disney Archives; and Tom Fitzgerald, chief storytelling executive and senior creative executive  at Walt Disney Imagineering.

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February 14, 1905. A stick of dynamite detonates under the Hudson River — and the ground above swallows a locomotive whole. It's the latest setback in an audacious plan to tunnel beneath the river and bring trains into Manhattan. The Pennsylvania Railroad is the largest corporation in the world, but the goopy riverbed keeps fighting back. How did they finally make it across? And why are these 115-year-old tunnels still the most critical infrastructure in America today?

Special thanks to our guests: Polly Desjarlais, content and research manager at the New York Transit Museum; Jill Jonnes, author of Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels; and Andy Sparberg, former LIRR manager, transit historian, and author of From a Nickel to a Token: The Journey from Board of Transportation to MTA.

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HISTORY This Week will return with new episodes this Monday, February 16th, with a story about the most vital train tunnels in the United States.

The North River Tunnels—their formal name—connect New Jersey to Penn Station in New York City, carrying 200,000 passengers every day. These tunnels underneath the Hudson are now over 115 years old, and are in desperate need of repair.

The tunnel rehabilitation effort will be the largest infrastructure project in the country. It’s just getting underway, but now, the funding has been tied up in a political battle between the Trump Administration, Amtrak, and the states of New York and New Jersey.

The stakes could not be higher. If these tunnels were to fail, up to 20% of U.S. GDP could be at risk.

In this episode, we will unpack just how difficult it was to dig these tunnels in the first place. One man, Pennsylvania Railroad President Alexander Cassatt, was determined to build this critical rail connection, ultimately linking the entire Eastern Seaboard via train for the first time, using engineering methods that had never been tried before.

If he failed, his corporation—the largest in the world at the time—would have been doomed.

🎧 Stay tuned this Monday, February 16th, for the full story.

Feb 13, 1920. For over thirty years, Black baseball players have been locked out of the major leagues. So on this day in Kansas City, Rube Foster, a former pitcher and now a team owner, is trying to make his own league just for Black players. He has gathered owners of other Black baseball teams, who currently play each other in one-off matchups or face independent teams in random games around the country. But Foster wants them to get organized, and soon, the Negro National League would be born. 

But up to this point, how did Black baseball survive after segregation became the unofficial policy of the major leagues? And how did Black players, owners, and managers join together to create something that no baseball fan could ignore?

Special thanks to our guests, Phil S. Dixon, author and Negro Leagues researcher; and Bob Kendrick, President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, MO.

** This episode originally aired Feb 7, 2022.

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February 4, 1955. In a New York courtroom, the Comics Czar takes the stand. He’s in charge of enforcing a new code, meant to keep comic books from corrupting America’s youth, and he’s here to prove that his work has cleaned up the industry. But that afternoon, a noted psychologist named Fredric Wertham argues that his work has not nearly gone far enough. When the hearing comes to a close, the committee is left to decide: what is the future of the comic book? Why did one of the country’s leading psychologists see them as a major threat to American children? And what can the Great Comic Book Scare teach us about moral panics?

Special thanks to our guests, David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague; and Jeremy Dauber, author of American Comics: A History.

** This episode originally aired Jan 31, 2022.

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On January 5, 2026, Jirdes Winther Baxter passed away at 101 years old — the last known survivor of the 1925 diphtheria epidemic in Nome, Alaska.

A few years ago, we told the story of the Serum Run: the desperate relay of mushers and sled dogs who carried a life-saving antitoxin across Alaska, including to an 11-month-old Baxter. Today, that run lives on through the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Enjoy this classic HTW story, and stay tuned for new episodes soon!

January 27, 1925. Musher “Wild Bill” Shannon and his team of sled dogs race off into the frigid Alaskan night. He’s carrying a package of life-saving serum, wrapped in fur to keep it from freezing. There’s no time to waste: nearly 700 miles away, in the snowed-in town of Nome, children are dying of diphtheria. Twenty mushers and hundreds of dogs are about to take part in an almost superhuman effort to ferry desperately needed medicine across the howling Alaskan wilderness. Who were they, and what did they endure to reach their goal? And as they pressed on, how did their efforts grip the nation?

Special thanks to our guests, Pam Flowers, author of Togo and Leonhard, and Bob Thomas, author of Leonhard Seppala: The Siberian Dog and The Golden Age of Sleddog Racing 1908-1941.

** This episode originally aired Jan 23, 2023.

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