History Unplugged
500 episodes listed below
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For history lovers who listen to podcasts, History Unplugged is the most comprehensive show of its kind. It's the only show that dedicates episodes to both interviewing experts and answering questions from its audience. First, it features a call-in show where you can ask our resident historian (Scott Rank, PhD) absolutely anything (What was it like to be a Turkish sultan with four wives and twelve concubines? If you were sent back in time, how would you kill Hitler?). Second, it features long-form interviews with best-selling authors who have written about everything. Topics include gruff World War II generals who...
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Scott Rank makes historical power clearer by tracing decisions through institutions, money, technology, and the people positioned to influence events.
History Unplugged follows consequential decisions into the rooms, institutions, and financial systems that shaped them. Scott Rank's interviews range from Soviet Olympic doping and Truman's wartime decision-making to religion in American public life, while conversations about…
A revolution runs on IOUs here, if you're the sort who asks who kept accepting them.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Dutch sawmill becomes an overlooked engine behind shipbuilding, trade, and the Dutch East India Company's rise.
The sawmill does not usually sit alongside gunpowder, the steam engine, compasses, blast furnaces, or the printing press in the usual roll call of world-shaping inventions.
A blind tasting in Paris turns California wine into a direct challenge to French wine authority.
The 1976 Judgment of Paris gives this episode its sharp break point: nine French judges, tasting blind, chose two California wines over France's elite vintages and unsettled a wine world built around French authority.
Daniel Boone's legend feels sturdier when frontier exploits are set beside the labor of building a fort.
Daniel Boone is presented as a frontier hero shaped by pursuit, endurance, and a striking tie to an adversary. The episode follows his three-day tracking of Shawnee raiders after his daughter and two others were taken, then his survival through the ten-day siege at Boonesboro…
A civilian exchange shows how war turned nationality, ancestry, and home into competing claims.
History Unplugged treats Pearl Harbor's aftermath less as a tidy prisoner swap than as a knot of citizenship, ancestry, and wartime logistics.
A tense escape carries Gabriel Tadino into Rhodes' desperate defense.
Gabriel Tadino enters the episode as a major military scientist and engineer of the 16th century, pulled toward a starkly uneven fight: 700 Knights Hospitaller and several thousand mercenaries against 100,000 Ottoman troops at Rhodes.
A clear look at why the United States stayed a civil-military outlier.
The episode takes up a familiar worry: a standing army can crowd out civilian control, and the United States somehow avoided that outcome. Washington gets due credit, but the stronger material is the structural one, with geography, a relatively calm foreign-security setting, and…
A focused look at how Paine turned revolutionary ideas into language people could use.
This review treats Thomas Paine as more than a pamphleteer. It follows how his plain, direct prose helped turn the break with Great Britain into something ordinary readers could take in, and then act on.
A stark look at Unit 731, wartime impunity, and the machinery of forgetting.
History Unplugged treats Unit 731 as part of the wider record of wartime atrocity, setting Japan's secret program in occupied China beside the medical crimes of Joseph Mengele at Auschwitz.
History with teeth, politics with memory.
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
This episode explores the 1976 Judgment of Paris blind wine tasting where California wines unexpectedly beat elite French vintages, forever changing the global wine industry.
This episode explores the life and legacy of Thomas Willing, the wealthy Philadelphia merchant who bankrolled the American Revolution as an arms smuggler and later became the first president of the Bank of the United States.
Paper money begins as an IOU, and the episode keeps that idea close.
Historian Jack Kelly discusses his book on Thomas Paine, arguing that the revolutionary writer was far more than just the author of 'Common Sense'.
Historian Corey Shockey explores why the United States military, uniquely among global powers, has never attempted a coup or threatened democracy.
Historian Matthew Avery Sutton discusses his book 'Chosen Land,' arguing that Christianity has been central to American public life and politics since colonization, challenging the secular narrative of the nation's founding.
This episode explores how the Soviet Union and later Russia used state-sponsored doping, shamateurism, and scientific training to turn Olympic sports into a tool for geopolitical propaganda.
This episode explores the history of swords as humanity's first weapons designed exclusively for killing other humans, focusing on the discovery and significance of the Bamburgh Sword - a 7th century pattern-welded weapon so sophisticated it could only have belonged to a king.
This episode explores the legendary $20 billion San Jose Spanish treasure galleon, lost in 1708, and the decades-long quest by an unlikely Cuban-American explorer to find it.
Historian Alex Wellerstein challenges conventional views of Harry Truman's decision to use atomic bombs, arguing the process was far messier than a rational calculation and that Truman privately held deep anti-nuclear convictions.
Archaeologist Nancy O'Malley joins the History Unplugged Podcast to discuss her research on Daniel Boone's frontier settlements in Kentucky.
The episode starts with Washington's crossing on the Delaware.
Ashton argues that stories came before language.
Host Scott interviews science journalist Matt Kaplan about his book detailing historical and modern scientists who faced ridicule, exile, and persecution for correct but controversial discoveries.
Host Scott interviews historian Connor Heffernan about how 19th-century strongmen and colonial exchanges created the first globalized fitness trends.
This episode examines Imperial Japan's secret Unit 731, which conducted horrific biological warfare experiments on thousands of prisoners in occupied Manchuria during WWII.
Gabriel Tadino arrives under pressure.
This episode explores the little-known WWII program where the US and Japan exchanged civilians trapped behind enemy lines after Pearl Harbor.
Host Scott interviews author Jaime Davila about his argument that the wind-powered sawmill, invented in 1593 by Cornelius Cornelius Zune, was the key invention that created the modern world.
Soccer can make a nation feel seen.
An interview with author Jess Venner about the lives of ordinary people in Pompeii before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
History Unplugged Podcast host Scott interviews Simon Morrison, author of A Kingdom in a Village, about Moscow's rise from a 1147 settlement to Russia's capital.
History Unplugged Podcast presents Richard Bell’s argument that the American Revolution became a global war involving France, Spain, the Netherlands, the Caribbean, and Europe.
This episode explores how the brain shapes war and war shapes the brain, featuring neuroscientist Nicholas Wright.
An interview exploring how William F.
An interview with historian Mikhail Zygar about the collapse of the Soviet Union and its lasting impact on Russia and global politics.
This episode explores the forgotten role of Alabama Union soldiers in the Civil War, particularly their contribution to Sherman's March to the Sea.
This episode explores the life of Alexander Keene Richards, a pioneering thoroughbred breeder who imported Arabian horses to improve American racing stock.
An interview with historian Prit Buttar about the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, focusing on the conditions of starvation and survival.