History Unplugged Podcast

The thirteen colonies that became the United States were just half of the British colonies that existed in the 18th century. The empire stretched from New England, south to Georgia and Florida and the islands of the West Indies, east to India, Scotland, and Ireland, and south again to British forts on the West coast of Africa. Because of this, the revolution of 1776 wasn’t isolated to the North American eastern seaboard. It was a world-historical crisis that swept up American Indian nations, Caribbean islands, West African forts, Indian cities, Scottish drawing rooms, German principalities, Cuban harbors, Chinese trading houses, and a fledgling colony in Sierra Leone. The result is a Revolution that was on the one hand a political struggle for the 13 colonies, but it was also a genuinely global catastrophe in which Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans, German soldiers, French philosophes, Caribbean planters, Indian merchants, and Spanish generals all fought for their own competing visions of what "freedom" actually meant.
Today’s guest is Sarah Pearsall, author of Freedom Round the Globe. We see how the fight for liberty went far outside the borders of the American colonies. When the British Parliament imposed the Stamp Act in 1765, the protests and violent crowd actions that erupted were not confined to Boston or Virginia, they broke out with equal fury in St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and other Caribbean colonies. But they chose to stay loyal because they feared slave uprisings more than they resented Parliament. The French alliance that saved American independence at Yorktown drove France itself toward bankruptcy and revolution. And there were at least two would-be fourteenth colonies (British Florida and Quebec) courted by Americans but believed their fortunes were better served in other places than the Revolution. The Revolution was not a contained colonial rebellion. It was a world war, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783 settled the claims of dozens of nations, most of whom had nothing to do with the thirteen colonies.
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In June 1909, five automobiles lined up in front of New York's City Hall to attempt something no car had ever done: drive all the way to Seattle. The Ocean-to-Ocean Race was supposed to be a publicity stunt for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, but it became something far more consequential, a 4,100-mile brawl through gumbo mud, quicksand, flooded rivers, and snow-choked mountain passes that would help launch the Model T, expose the wretched state of America's roads, and change the trajectory of the automobile industry forever. Henry Ford entered two stripped-down Model Ts priced at $850 against rivals costing five to ten times as much, betting his company's future on the proposition that a lightweight, affordable car could outrun and outlast them all.
Today’s guest is Eric Moskowitz, author of The Hardest, Longest Race. We see the real story is far messier than Ford's victory narrative. The Shawmut Motor Company, a tiny Boston outfit that had lost everything in a factory fire and entered the race as a last-ditch gamble to survive, battled the Fords neck and neck across twelve states, only to be sabotaged by bribed ferrymen, blocked by armed guards at river crossings, and ultimately cheated by an illegal engine swap that Ford concealed until a small-town fraud investigator from Idaho uncovered the shipping receipts. The Automobile Club of America stripped Ford of the win and awarded the trophy to the Shawmut, but by then nobody was listening, Ford's dealers had already papered the country with victory ads, and the Shawmut Motor Company was dead. We see that the century of the automobile had the most unlikely origin story.
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On the night of April 21, 1986, an estimated 30 million Americans sat in front of their televisions waiting for a moment that almost no one alive had ever seen: a live, prime-time excavation of a gangster's secret vault. Geraldo Rivera, recently fired from ABC News and hungry for a comeback, had convinced Tribune Broadcasting to stake its credibility on a two-hour live special built around a single, tantalizing question: what had Al Capone hidden in the sealed basement of his Chicago headquarters? The network flew in IRS agents to handle the expected cash, a county medical examiner to process any bodies, and locksmiths to crack whatever fortress Capone had left behind. What they found, on live television, in front of 30 million viewers, was dirt and a few empty gin bottles.
William Hazelgrove, author of Capone's Vault, joins the show to explain why the special was a ratings triumph anyway, and why that's the more interesting story. Capone had been dead for nearly 40 years, yet his myth was so potent, his legend so carefully self-constructed during his lifetime, that the mere possibility of a hidden room full of gold and skeletons was enough to hold the country's attention for two hours. The empty vault didn't kill the spectacle, it completed it, proving that anticipation is a more powerful television engine than any actual revelation. What Geraldo Rivera stumbled into that night, almost by accident, was the blueprint for every reality TV cliffhanger, true-crime docuseries, and hype-culture livestream that would follow in the next four decades.
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Part 2 of our exploration of how the U.S. dollar is older than the United States itself and has a level of power beyond the Federal Reserve and even beyond the U.S. government. We’re joined by guest Brendan Greeley, author of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money.
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The U.S. dollar's origin story begins not in Philadelphia or Washington, but in a half-frozen mining valley in 16th-century Bohemia, where Saxon miners accidentally named their town after a saint and set the world's dominant currency in motion. That currency's history stretches from a 1518 christening party all the way to the eurodollar markets of Cold War London — and the central is that money is a product, not a symbol of sovereignty. From Spanish silver hollowing out Toledo's workshops to enslaved people serving as bank collateral in antebellum New Orleans, the dollar's history is less a triumph than a series of accidents and power grabs.
Today’s guest is Brendan Greeley, author of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money, and he explains how colonial Americans invented paper money not as a revolutionary act but as a desperate workaround for chronic small-change shortages — and how that same improvised spirit resurfaced when a Maytag dealer in Iowa printed his own dollars to keep a Depression-era town alive. He also dismantles the myth that Nixon's 1971 decision to close the gold window turned money into "fiat" — arguing that gold never gave the dollar its value, only controlled it. What actually sustained the dollar across five centuries was something more mundane: banks, habits, laws, and the accumulated trust of people who had no other options.
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