History Unplugged Podcast

In 1976, nine French wine judges did the unthinkable: they blindly selected two California wines over France's most elite vintages in what became known as the Judgment of Paris. This shocking upset sent shockwaves through the wine world and forever changed the global industry. French wine had dominated for centuries, built on a rigid classification system and prestigious terroir, but California winemakers like Warren Winiarski of Stag's Leap and Mike Grgich of Chateau Montelena proved that world-class wines could be produced anywhere with the right combination of climate, soil, and expertise. The tasting was organized by British expat Steven Spurrier, who ran a Paris wine shop and saw the American Bicentennial as a perfect marketing opportunity—but neither he nor the lone reporter in attendance, George Taber of Time magazine, expected California to actually win.
Today's guest is Kevin Ferguson, author and grandson of legendary winemaker Mario Gemello, who ran the Gemello Winery in Mountain View, California for nearly half a century. Ferguson shares the immigrant roots of California's wine industry, including how a $190 loan from the Beltramo family allowed his great-grandfather to bring his family from Piedmont, Italy to America. He discusses the legacy of working-class winemakers like his grandfather, whose 1970 Cabernet finished first in the 25th anniversary re-enactment of the Judgment of Paris, and explores how wineries like Ridge—founded by retired SRI engineers—brought scientific precision to the Santa Cruz Mountains. As we approach the 50th anniversary events in 2026, Ferguson reveals how this single tasting transformed California from an upstart curiosity into a world-class wine region that continues to rival the best of France.
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Throughout the 16th century, one man stood between the Ottoman Empire and European domination, yet his name has been largely forgotten. Gabriele Tadino was an Italian military engineer whose genius transformed medieval warfare and saved Europe from one of history's greatest conquerors, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. In 1522, Tadino defied his Venetian masters by sneaking away in the night to defend Rhodes, where 700 Knights Hospitaller faced an impossible siege against 100,000 Ottoman troops. His revolutionary innovations—from acoustic devices using stretched skins and bells to detect enemy tunnels, to star-shaped fortifications that could withstand cannon fire—turned him into a legend among Renaissance military minds. Despite losing an eye in combat, Tadino continued directing the defense, holding off Suleiman for six months and forcing the Sultan to negotiate a peaceful surrender rather than achieve outright victory.
Today’s guest is Edoardo Albert, author of “The Man Who Stopped the Sultan.” We see how Tadino's expertise came at a crucial moment when gunpowder was rendering centuries-old walls obsolete and Europe's power-hungry rulers—Henry VIII, Francis I, and Charles V—were too divided to mount a unified defense against Ottoman expansion. He pioneered counter-mining techniques like "camouflets," controlled explosions that buried enemy sappers alive, and ventilation shafts that redirected the force of gunpowder blasts away from fortress walls. His genius extended from Crete's massive Martinengo Bastion, which still stands today, to the walls of Vienna in 1529, where his underground warfare tactics stopped Suleiman's advance into Central.
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America's Founding Fathers feared a standing army would inevitably threaten civilian governance. Yet 250 years later, the U.S. military remains a strange outlier among nearly every nation that has ever existed—maintaining its strength and popularity while never attempting a coup. How did America get this right when so many other nations, from Turkey to Latin America, have seen their militaries seize power?
The story begins with George Washington, who inspired mutinous soldiers to become the first army in a thousand years not to threaten democracy. But Washington's example alone doesn't explain America's success. Structural factors—dispersed urban centers, a benign international security environment, and urgent domestic threats from Native American conflicts—created a weak federal army and strong militia system that prevented military consolidation of power.
Today's guest is Kori Schake, author of The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States. We see many counter-intuitivie things, like how the Founding Fathers had it backwards. The creation of a professional military actually reduced challenges to civilian control. We know this because key crises tested this system that the US military was able to overcome without seizing power. They include Alexander Hamilton's ambitions to raise an army for foreign conquest, Aaron Burr's plot to overthrow the United States, Andrew Jackson's unauthorized invasion of Florida, Ulysses S. Grant navigating feuds between president and Congress, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, Truman's firing of MacArthur during the Korean War, and confusion over nuclear launch authority during the Cold War.
As the public increasingly pulls the military into partisan divisions, the question remains: can America's exceptional civil-military relations endure?
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Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists famously described the First Amendment as building a "wall of separation between church and State." This line has been the gold standard for those who point to the secular origins of America and the threat of funding any sort of religious activity. But this idea of America as a secular republic built on Enlightenment ideals misses a critical truth: Christianity has been at the center of American public life since European colonization began 500 years ago. The Constitution didn't create a wall between church and state—it inadvertently created a "free market" for religion that allowed Christian activists to expand their influence in unexpected ways.
Today's guest is Matthew Avery Sutton, author of Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity. We see the different versions of Christianity imported during European colonization and how the absence of state control unleashed wildly eccentric religious movements that couldn't have happened in Europe. From revivalist preachers like Jonathan Edwards and Peter Cartwright to Billy Graham, and from liberal Congregationalists to twentieth-century mainline denominations, American Christianity constantly evolved.
We see this in the story of Abraham Lincoln, whose skepticism toward traditional Christianity in his twenties nearly derailed his political career. In his 1846 race against Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright, Lincoln faced accusations of being an infidel after openly rejecting his family's Christian faith. This episode reveals how, contrary to popular belief, America's founding generation allowed religious liberty not out of principle, but pragmatism—they needed to keep a fractious coalition together.
To understand what makes America unique, we must account for how Christianity shaped—and was shaped by—every major historical development in U.S. history. From tent revivals to megachurches, from abolition to segregation, Christianity's "free-market" evolution in America created something unlike anywhere else in the world.
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There’s an argument to be made that every technology advance in communication – from cave paintings to fake AI movie trailers – is at its root an attempt to tell stories. Our first night-fires created the earliest audiences for spoken stories. In time, the development of rhyme, song, and other mnemonic devices allowed those spoken stories to be preserved for generations; pictures drawn on cave walls turned preservation into permanence, telling stories we still experience thousands of years later; writing enabled storytellers to spread tales to faraway places; the Chinese invented printing with moveable metal type around 700 AD; the Toltecs independently invented it at about the same time; 750 years later Gutenberg independently invented it again, adding a converted wine press to create the mass production of mass communication. Over time, printing presses increased the number of storytellers and the size of their audiences by many orders of magnitude, a trend which led us to great revolutions, and electric, then electronic, then digital storytelling and all our storytelling tools of today—and tomorrow’s.
Today’s guest is Kevin Ashton, author of “The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art.” We see how humans alone possess the desire to share our hopes and beliefs, to understand and connect with others, to process events that have come before and anticipate events that will come next. That innate urge to communicate has impacted every aspect of human history, and it is so ingrained in the fabric of our existence that language did not come to being so that we could tell stories—stories gave us language. Human storytelling has led to innovations in astronomy, entertainment, technology, and beyond, and brought about revolutions, religions, political movements, and so much more.
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