History Unplugged Podcast

The Cambridge Five did more damage to the Western Bloc than any other intelligence outfit of the Cold War. They were five Cambridge graduates who drank gin at the right clubs, moved through the right corridors of British intelligence at the height of WW2, and quietly handed Stalin the keys to post-war Europe. Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and John Cairncross were recruited for their sympathies to communism because they were radicalized by the wreckage of World War I and the Great Depression. They believed that Soviet communism was the only serious answer. The Five each quickly took up a place in the British government, granting them access to top-secret intelligence that they shared with the USSR, whether decrypted German intelligence obtained from Alan Turing’s Bletchley Park and the Wehrmacht’s latest troop movements, or nuclear designs fresh from Manhattan Project labs. What followed was decades of betrayal so consequential it shaped the entire postwar map of Eastern Europe. They did this not just by passing secrets, but by condemning millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Albanians, and Baltic peoples to Soviet repression when their underground resistance networks were quietly handed over to Moscow.
Today’s guest is Antonia Senior, author of Stalin's Apostles, and she explains how she pieced together a story that was designed never to be found, because moles don't leave paper trails, and the Cambridge Five made sure their communications rarely entered any correspondence at all. We see that they did more to cause the Iron Curtain to descend deep into Europe than any other intelligence group.
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Washington was the perfect man for an impossible moment — aristocratic enough to command the respect of erudite founders like Hamilton and Jefferson, yet only a mid-level Virginia planter who understood ordinary life and could relate to common soldiers because his ancestors had fled the English Civil War with nothing and spent generations clawing their way back into respectability. That family history gave him something neither Hamilton's brilliance nor Jefferson's philosophy could manufacture: a bone-deep understanding of what it felt like to have status, lose it, and rebuild it through sheer force of will. This goes alone with his earliest military experiences in the French-Indian War: he suffered a string of frontier humiliations in the Ohio Valley that taught him the one lesson that would win the Revolution: how to survive losing.
Today’s guest is H.W. Brands, author of American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington. We see how Washington's most important acts were preserving through impossible hardships like he did at Valley Forge but also in the moments he chose not to act: not to seize power, not to crown himself, not to serve a third term. He managed Hamilton and Jefferson's explosive feud the way a patriarch manages feuding sons — with exhausted patience and the quiet authority of a man who had already outlasted everything. He ended his presidency with the most radical thing a powerful man could do in 1797, which was to simply go home. All of this made him a patriarch -- a father of an extended family that encompassed the United States -- and crafted the norms that would steady America as a nation for generations to follow.
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Many so-called timeless beliefs about money pitched by financial advisors today (compound interest, real estate, index funds, retiring early) are not timeless pieces of wisdom, but a set of ideas invented within the last century, mostly by accident. In fact, the biggest financial dangers come from building a financial strategy around government rules that seem like they’ve existed forever but can change overnight. In 1913, when the income tax was created, interest on debt was explicitly excluded from taxation. For 70 years, savvy investors borrowed as much as possible and deducted the losses. Then Ronald Reagan changed it in 1986, in one legislative stroke. Hundreds of thousands of investors found themselves buried under debt they'd structured around a rule that no longer existed
Today’s guest is Joseph Moore, author of How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (and Didn't). We dig into the counterintuitive lessons hiding in plain sight across American history: why Abigail Adams was arguably a better investor than Warren Buffett; how Benjamin Franklin preached against debt while secretly building his printing empire on borrowed money; why one-third of American families once rented out rooms to boarders as their primary wealth-building strategy, until the government outlawed it; and how Dave Ramsey's entire financial philosophy was forged in a single day when the government changed a tax rule and wiped him out. Another lesson with modern parallels is that the FIRE movement — Financial Independence Retire Early — has deep roots in American history, but its most celebrated practitioners were almost always hiding a financial subsidy. Henry David Thoreau, patron saint of anti-consumerism, built his cabin on someone else's land and had his mother bring him food. He later returned to capitalism and ran a successful factory.
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When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul he boasted that he killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. This is the truth about the Roman empire: Rome could not function without slavery as it underpinned every single part of their economy. Without the millions of people snatched from their homes in the aftermath of war, kidnapped from the streets, sold into slavery as punishment, or born into it as “home bred slaves”, the Roman empire’s great aqueducts and temples could never have been built. There would be no coins or tiles to find in fields, no limitless manpower for the army and navy that conquered the Mediterranean, no marble palaces or underfloor heating, and certainly no life of unimaginable luxury for the top of Roman society. Slavery in Rome could be very good or bad depending on the job. Highly educated Greek slaves served as physicians, accountants, architects, and tutors for aristocratic sons and daughters. At the bottom of the hierarchy were sulfur mine workers, who worked in toxic, collapsing tunnels and were often blinded by their masters to remind them they would be there for the rest of their short miserable lives.
Today's guest is Emma Southon, author of Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire. We discuss how Rome evolved from a sanctuary for men fleeing slavery into the most extensive chattel slave system in history, and how Spartacus horrified Rome not by winning battles but by forcing 300 Roman prisoners to fight as gladiators at his co-commander's funeral. We also look at why there was never a Roman abolition movement because Romans understood that slavery destroyed people but concluded this was the slaves' problem, not theirs.
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A gladiator named Diodorus defeated his opponent Demetrius in the arena, accepted his submission, discarded his own helmet and shield, and reached for the palm branch that marked his victory. Then the referee refused to honor the submission and ordered the fight to continue. Diodorus was killed. His tombstone, which survives, reads: "Murderous Fate and the cunning treachery of the referee killed me, and leaving the light, I have gone to Hades." Another gladiator named Urbicus, who had once spared a defeated opponent and was later killed by that same man in a rematch, left behind the most chilling last words in Roman history: "I advise that he who defeats a man should kill him."
Today's guest is Harry Sidebottom, author of *Those Who Are About to Die: A Day in the Life of a Roman Gladiator*. Structured as a single twenty-four-hour cycle from the gladiators' last supper through the morning beast hunts, midday executions, and afternoon combat, Sidebottom's book dismantles almost everything Hollywood has taught us about the arena. We discuss why gladiators were deliberately fattened on barley stew so their subcutaneous fat would produce spectacular bleeding from non-fatal wounds, how Roman senators kept illegally sneaking into gladiatorial schools despite repeated bans stretching across two centuries, why the Colosseum was built on top of Nero's artificial lake using plunder from the sack of Jerusalem, and how Galen pioneered human surgery by first vivisecting a live monkey and then treating wounded gladiators at Pergamum. We also look at why epileptics drank gladiator blood as medicine (and why Roman doctors reluctantly admitted it might work), how twenty-nine Saxon prisoners strangled each other without a rope rather than fight, and why Constantine did not actually abolish gladiatorial combat despite what every Christian source claims.
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