PODCAST: HISTORY UNPLUGGED
J. Edgar Hoover’s 50-Year Career of Blackmail, Entrapment, and Taking Down Communist Spies
The postwar years were the era of the integration of America's professional sports. Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, Bill Willis and others became household names. Beyond sports, black movie stars made had significant cultural milestones during the decade, while television appearances remained typed and relatively rare. Music, particularly rock and roll,…
You don't have to read the ancient folklore of China, Sumeria, or anywhere else long before you encounter a dragon. Sometimes they guard treasure. Sometimes they kidnap local maidens. Sometimes they are the primary antagonist for a hero to conquer. Mostly they perform all three roles. But the problem is…
The Civil Rights movement coalesced in the 1950s and turned into a protest movement with clear goals, a well-structured leadership, and mobilized activists. Its greatest challenges came in this period, but it made possible the ground-shifting legal changes of the 1960s. Here are the main events that occurred during this…
Like they had following the Great War, black soldiers returned from WWII as champions of democracy to a society that treated them as second-class citizens. That older generation of “new negroes,” the first to come of age after both slavery and Plessy v. Ferguson, the famous case that legalized racial segregation…
For more than one thousand years, Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes at peace and sometimes at war. When Christian armies seized Jerusalem in 1099, they began the most notorious period of conflict between the two religions. Depending on who you ask, the fall of the holy city…
Once the Nazi Party took power in Germany, they managed to end democracy and turned the nation into a one-party dictatorship, launching an endless propaganda campaign to mobilize the public for war. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda arranged book burnings, lists of banned literature, and the release of films…
Two years before the Civil War, Congressman Daniel Sickles and his lovely wife Teresa were popular fixtures in Washington, D.C. society. Their house sat on Lafayette Square across from White House grounds, and the president himself was godfather to the Sickleses’ six-year-old daughter. Because Congressman Sickles is frequently out of…
The Antebellum Period is a five-decade period in American history that spans the years after the War of 1812 but before the Civil War in 1861. This period saw the end of the Founding Fathers and their generation when questions of slavery and states rights remained unresolved in the grand…
The Reconstruction Era is the period (1865-1877) during which the states that had seceded to the Confederacy were controlled by the federal government before being readmitted to the Union. The attempts to reunite the Union and the Confederacy while dismantling the legal and economic system of slavery were met with…
On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the country’s fiftieth birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on their deathbeds. They would leave behind a groundbreaking political system and a growing economy—as well as the glaring inequalities that had undermined the American experiment from its beginning.…
