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The 160-Minute Race to Save the Titanic
One hundred and sixty minutes. That is all the time rescuers would have before the largest ship in the world slipped beneath the icy Atlantic. There was amazing heroism and astounding incompetence against the backdrop of the most advanced ship in history sinking by inches with luminaries from all over the world. It is a story of a network of wireless operators on land and sea who desperately sent messages back and forth across the dark frozen North Atlantic to mount a rescue mission. More than twenty-eight ships would be involved in the rescue of Titanic survivors along with four different countries. At the heart of the rescue are two young Marconi operators, Jack Phillips 25 and Harold Bride 22, tapping furiously and sending electromagnetic waves into the black night as the room they sat in slanted toward the icy depths and not stopping until the bone numbing water was around their ankles. Then they plunged into the water after coordinating the largest rescue operation the maritime world had ever seen and thereby saving 710 people by their efforts.The race to save the largest ship in the world from certain death would reveal both heroes and villains. It would begin at 11:40 PM on April 14, when the iceberg was struck and would end at 2:20 AM April 15, when her lights blinked out and left 1500 people thrashing in 25-degree water. Although the race to save Titanic survivors would stretch on beyond this, most people in the water would die, but the amazing thing is that of the 2229 people, 710 did not and this was the success of the Titanic rescue effort. We see the Titanic as a great tragedy but a third of the people were rescued and the only reason every man, woman, and child did not succumb to the cold depths is due to Jack Phillips and Harold McBride in an insulated telegraph room known as the Silent Room. These two men tapping out CQD and SOS distress codes while the ship took on water at the rate of 400 tons per minute from a three-hundred-foot gash would inaugurate the most extensive rescue operation in maritime history using the cutting-edge technology of the time, wireless. To talk about this race against time is frequent guest Bill Hazelgrove, author of the new book One Hundred and Sixty Minutes: The Race to Save the RMS Titanic.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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200 Years Before the French Revolution, German Peasants Tried to Overthrow The Holy Roman Empire
The German Peasants’ War of 1524-1525 was the largest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. Somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants—roughly 2% of the male population—were slain in a mere two months. While the peasant forces would ultimately prove no match for the lords, for a period of several months they managed to take control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany in pursuit of a more egalitarian order. The rebels pushed against the structures of lordship and embraced the radical and ecological potential of the Reformation in which Earth’s natural resources were gifts from God to all of humanity. Today’s guest is Lyndal Roper, author of “Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War.” We see that neither the Reformation nor the Peasants’ War can be fully understood in isolation from one another, and that the rebels’ fight for freedom was a direct response to the period of reform.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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54:42
What the Middle Ages Can Teach Us About Pandemics, Mass Migration, and Tech Disruption
The medieval world – for all its plagues, papal indulgences, castles, and inquisition trials – has much in common with ours. People living the Middle Ages dealt with deadly pandemicsmass migration, and controversial technological changes, just as we do now.Today’s guest, Dan Jones, author of POWERS AND THRONES: A New History of the Middle Ages looks at these common features through a cast of characters that includes pious monks and Byzantine emperors, chivalric knights and Renaissance artists. This sweep of the medieval world begins with the fall of the Roman empire and ends with the first contact between the Old World and the New. Along the way, Jones provides a front row seat to the forces that shaped the Western world as we know it. This is the thousand years in which our basic Western systems of law, commerce, and governance were codified; when the Christian Churches matured as both powerful institutions and the regulators of Western public morality; and when art, architecture, philosophical inquiry and scientific invention went through periods of seismic change. We discuss:• The height of the Roman empire and its influential rulers, as well as the various reasons it fell, including climate change pushing the Huns and so-called “barbarian” tribes to the empire’s borders.• The development of Christianity and Islam, as well as the power struggles and conflict ignited in the name of religion, chivalric orders such as the Knights Templar, and the rise of monasteries as major political players in the West.• The intimate stories of many influential characters of the Middle Ages, such as Constantine I, Justinian, Muhammad, Attila the Hun, Charlemagne, El Cid, Leonardo Da Vinci, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, Martin Luther, and many more.• The development of global trade routes and commerce across Europe, Asia, and Africa and the expanding map during the Age of Exploration.• The Black Death, which decimated up to sixty percent of the local population in the fourteenth century and led to widespread social unrest and the little Ice Age, the period between 1300-1850 triggered by volcanic activity that created a climate so regularly and bitterly cold that it contributed to the Great Famine of 1315-21.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Did Orson Welles’s 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast Really Cause a Mass Panic?
On a warm Halloween Eve, October 30, 1938, during a broadcast of H G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Orson Welles held his hands up for radio silence in the CBS studio in New York City while millions of people ran out into the night screaming, grabbed shotguns, drove off in cars, and hid in basements, attics, or anywhere they could find to get away from Martians intent on exterminating the human race. As Welles held up his hands to his fellow actors, musicians, and sound technicians, he turned six seconds of radio silence—dead air—into absolute horror, changing the way the world would view media forever, and making himself one of the most famous men in America. The revisionism lately of Orson Welles War of the Worlds 1938 broadcast is that it did not affect many beyond l the East Coast and most people did not believe Martians had invaded and were exterminating the human race with heat ray guns and poisonous gas. William Hazelgrove’s new book “Dead Air The Night Orson Welles Terrified America,” points to a different America thrown into mass panic from the broadcast produced and directed by the twenty-three-year-old Welles.Did people really believe that Martians were exterminating the human race and did mass panic engulf the country? Willliam Hazelgrove makes a convincing case people did believe the broadcast and the ensuing terror and panic was a real time example of what would happen if aliens ever did land on earth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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48:41
A Talk With The Polar Geographer Who Discovered Shackleton’s Endurance Under 10,000 ft of Frozen Water
On August 1, 1914, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton and his crew sailed from England, set on making history as the first to cross Antarctica. Their ship never returned from her maiden voyage. On November 22, 1915, the aptly named Endurance disappeared, crushed by ice and swallowed by the Weddell Sea. Today, nearly everyone is familiar with Shackelton’s harrowing survival story and incredible rescue of all 27 crew members. Yet Endurance was thought lost forever, impossible to find because of her remote, frozen resting place—until March 5, 2022. Today’s guest is John Shears, author of “Endurance: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Legendary Ship.” He takes us inside the Endurance22 mission to locate, film, and survey the wreck of Shackleton’s lost ship. We get a firsthand account of the search for Endurance and its discovery—upright and largely intact, at a depth of 9,869 feet underwater.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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 flew with airmen on bombing raids, a war horse who gained the rank of sergeant, and presidents who gave their best speeches while drunk.

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