History Shorts

In 1675, King Charles II of England declared war on an unlikely enemy: the coffeehouse. These weren't taverns or gambling halls—they were places where ordinary people gathered to read newspapers, exchange ideas, and debate politics over a cup of coffee. In an age when unsafe drinking water meant beer was often the everyday beverage, coffee created something revolutionary: rooms full of sober, alert citizens thinking for themselves.
 
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Welcome back to THE HISTORIANS — the series here on History Shorts where I sit down with two leading historians for an unscripted conversation about the questions that have shaped how we understand our past.
For episode two, I sat down with two of the foremost authorities on the American Wild West to ask one deceptively simple question:
How wild was the Wild West, really?
Paul Andrew Hutton is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, a six-time winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Undiscovered Country. Mark Lee Gardner is the bestselling author of Rough Riders, Shot All to Hell, and To Hell on a Fast Horse, whose WIRED video on the Wild West has been viewed nearly six million times.
What follows is a warm, opinionated conversation ranging from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show — which created the very conventions we still associate with Western film and fiction today — to whether Wyatt Earp is wildly overrated while Kit Carson remains the most underrated figure in American history.
 
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When the American Civil War ended, the fighting was over—but for thousands of families, the agony had only just begun. Sons, husbands, and brothers had vanished without a trace, leaving loved ones desperate for answers the government could not provide.
In this episode of History Shorts, we tell the remarkable story of Clara Barton and her creation of the Missing Soldiers Office in Washington. Best known today as the founder of the American Red Cross, Barton first devoted herself to one of the Civil War's most heartbreaking challenges: identifying the missing. Working from a modest office, she answered tens of thousands of letters, searched military records, corresponded with former soldiers, and helped families discover the fate of loved ones who had simply disappeared into the chaos of war.
 
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In the 1970s, a tiny electronic device sparked one of the most unexpected battles in education. It wasn't over politics, funding, or curriculum. It was over whether students should be allowed to use calculators.
In this episode of History Shorts, we explore the surprising controversy known as the "Calculator Wars." As handheld calculators became affordable and classrooms across America began adopting them, many teachers feared students would lose the ability to perform basic arithmetic, think critically, or truly understand mathematics. The debate became so heated that, at one national mathematics education conference, protesters picketed their own professional gathering, arguing that calculators threatened the very future of math education.
 
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I'm delighted to be joined by acclaimed historian and author Jane Rogoyska.
In her powerful new book, Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War, Jane tells the extraordinary true story of one iconic Parisian hotel — the Hôtel Lutetia — and uses it as a haunting window into the human drama of World War II.
Once a glamorous Left Bank landmark and favorite haunt of artists and writers like Picasso, Matisse, James Joyce, and André Gide, the Lutetia became a refuge for German exiles and anti-Nazi dissidents fleeing Hitler in the 1930s. Then, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, it was seized and transformed into the headquarters of the Abwehr — the German military intelligence service. After liberation, it took on one final, heartbreaking role as a repatriation center for survivors returning from concentration camps.
 
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