History Shorts

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. In this episode, we open the family medicine cabinet of the past and follow the trail of victims who forced America to finally check what was inside the bottle — and why the word "safe" was the deadliest thing on the label.
🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.
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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 approximately $8 trillion. Nearly double World War II. And the bill isn't finished. The youngest veterans are still in their thirties. Their care obligations run through 2070. Oh — and the last Civil War pension check was written in June 2020. 155 years after Appomattox. The bill for war always comes due. Just not always when you expect it.
🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.
⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review
🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D
☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast
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🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

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 eight days later. Theodore Roosevelt — placed in the Vice Presidency specifically to neutralize him — took the oath of office in a private house without a Bible at age 42. The men who tried to contain him had just handed him the world.
Eight days in Buffalo changed everything.
🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.
⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review
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🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

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 outlasted the states that had swallowed it.
In this conversation, historian Norman Davies — author of God's Playground, Rising '44, and Vanished Kingdoms — takes up that question. What actually held Poles together when there was no Polish state: language, the Church, Romantic poetry, political habit, or the pressure of the empires trying to erase them?
 
🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.
⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review
🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D
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🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

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 dying one by one. The Library of Congress captured what remains — a handful of old men stepping up to a microphone, their eyes changing, making a sound that almost disappeared from human memory entirely.
We have what was captured. Just barely.
🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.
⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review
🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D
☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast
▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast
🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com