History Shorts

History Shorts Network

Dive into the past with award-winning historian Peter Zablocki in this captivating daily podcast! Uncover hidden stories you never knew existed. And don't miss Friday Conversations where Peter teams up with top experts for riveting, in-depth discussions that bring history to life.

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Yesterday · 22 min
How to Turn History into Emotion: The Apollo Story, with John Monsky
In this episode of History Shorts, I sit down with John Monsky, the creator, writer, and narrator of the American History Unbound series. Monsky has developed a distinctive way of telling American history. Rather than focusing on debate, his productions immerse audiences in the lives of the people who lived through major moments. He combines live orchestras, Broadway performers, archival film and photography, historic flags and artifacts, and personal stories into large-scale performances that have filled Carnegie Hall, Boston's Symphony Hall, the Kennedy Center, and even the White House. On November 10, PBS premieres his latest production, We Chose to Go to the Moon. Filmed live at Carnegie Hall, the special retells the Apollo era through the perspectives of the astronauts, engineers, and families who experienced it—set to the music of the 1960s and '70s and featuring flags that actually traveled to the Moon. It includes a special introduction by Ron Howard and appears on the eve of Veterans Day. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
Sunday · 12 min
The Battle of Grunwald
July 15, 1410. Before one of the largest battles of medieval Europe, the Teutonic Knights sent two naked swords to the King of Poland as an insult. By nightfall, their Grand Master was dead and their army destroyed. But the borders barely moved. In this episode, we tell the story of the Battle of Grunwald — and of the six-hundred-year fight over what it meant, from Matejko's canvas to a German victory named for revenge in 1914, to a postage stamp Nazi Germany refused to tolerate. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
Saturday · 12 min
When Spain was the Richest Empire in Europe.
In 1545, the Spanish found a mountain in the Andes that seemed to be made of silver. For the next century, Spain pulled more precious metal out of the Americas than anyone in history. And yet its king went bankrupt four times. In this episode, we follow the silver from the mines of Potosí — where Indigenous workers paid the true price — through Seville, to the bankers of Genoa and the markets of China, and ask how the richest nation on earth ended up so poor. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
Friday · 28 min
President Grant's Betrayal, w/ John Reeves
Ulysses S. Grant is remembered as the general who saved the Union, and a growing number of historians rank him among the better presidents for what he tried to do during Reconstruction. John Reeves is here to complicate that picture. Reeves is the author of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee, A Fire in the Wilderness, and Soldier of Destiny, his account of Grant's rise and his break with slavery. His new book is Grant's Betrayal: Power, Corruption, and the Theft of the Black Hills (Pegasus Books). It argues that inside Grant's White House there was a secret plan to take the Black Hills from the Lakota, land the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty had set aside as theirs, and land the Lakota called Paha Sapa, the heart of everything that is. We get into the Peace Policy and whether it was ever real, the 1874 Custer expedition and the gold strike, the claim that the treaty was being subverted from the start, the roles of Orvil Grant, Philip Sheridan, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Eagle Woman, the Great Sioux War and the 1877 seizure, and how this story sits next to the recent rehabilitation of Grant's presidency. A century later a U.S. Court of Claims looked back at Grant's course and the pressure put on the starving Sioux and said a more rank case of dishonorable dealing would probably never be found in our history. Grant's Betrayal is out November 3, 2026. John Reeves: https://john-reeves.com 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
Thursday · 12 min
Cleopatra's Forgotten Daughter
When Cleopatra died in 30 BC, she left behind a ten-year-old daughter named for the moon. Cleopatra Selene was marched through Rome as a prisoner, raised by the woman her father had abandoned, and watched her brothers disappear from history. Then she became a queen. In this episode, we tell the story of the forgotten daughter who survived — and who, in a kingdom created by Rome, quietly kept her mother's Egypt alive on her coins, in her court, and in the name of her son. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian and author of Eight Days in August, Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
Wednesday · 11 min
WWII Operation Caesar
In February 1945, a brand-new German submarine slipped out of Norway bound for Japan, carrying jet engine parts, missile technology, two Japanese engineers, and about sixty-five tons of mercury. British codebreakers were reading its messages. Waiting off the coast was a small British submarine whose captain was about to attempt something no one had ever done in combat. In this episode: the only known battle in which one submerged submarine sank another — and the toxic cargo Norway is still trying to deal with eighty years later. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian and author of Eight Days in August, Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 27 · 13 min
The Julius Caesar Health Debate
In ancient Rome, a seizure during a public assembly could shut down the government — it was read as an omen from the gods. So what happens when the most powerful man in Rome is the one who keeps falling? In this episode, we look at what Plutarch and Suetonius actually said about Julius Caesar's "falling sickness," why modern doctors now suspect something else entirely, and why, in Caesar's Rome, an illness was never just an illness. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian and author of Eight Days in August, Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 26 · 12 min
Incident on Hill 192
In November 1966, five American soldiers set out on patrol in Vietnam's Central Highlands. Four of them kidnapped and murdered a young Vietnamese woman named Phan Thi Mao. The fifth refused to take part — and then refused to stay quiet. In this episode, we follow Private Robert Storeby as he reported the crime to commanders who looked away, stood up to defense lawyers who called him a liar, and watched the sentences shrink. A story about what courage looks like when the enemy is the silence around you. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian and author of Eight Days in August, Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 25 · 12 min
The House of Medici
Easter Mass, 1478. Assassins strike inside Florence's cathedral, and their targets are two brothers from a family of bankers. The plot has the backing of the Pope himself. In this episode, we tell the story of the Medici — the moneylenders who ran a republic without a crown, bankrolled Botticelli and Michelangelo, and watched their bank collapse in 1494. Most families would have been finished. The Medici went on to produce popes, queens of France, and grand dukes. Their secret: turning money into something that lasts longer than money. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 24 · 11 min
Athens vs. Sparta: The Original Superpower Rivalry
At Thermopylae and Salamis, Sparta and Athens fought side by side and beat the largest empire on earth. Fifty years later, they spent twenty-seven years trying to destroy each other. One was a seafaring democracy that built the Parthenon partly with other Greeks' money. The other was a warrior state built on fear of its own enslaved population. In this episode, we explore the original superpower rivalry — how Sparta finally won with Persian gold, and why the real winners were the powers watching from the sidelines. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 23 · 34 min
Who Was the Real William Howard Taft? w/ Walter Stahr
William Howard Taft is the only person who has been both president and chief justice, and he is still usually filed under mediocre. He called his own administration humdrum. Theodore Roosevelt made him president, then ran against him and helped drive him from office. Walter Stahr thinks that verdict is too small. The New York Times bestselling biographer of Seward, Stanton, and John Jay joins the show to talk about William Howard Taft: A Great American Life (Simon & Schuster). Five decades of public service: judge, governor of the Philippines, Roosevelt's secretary of war, president from 1909 to 1913, and then chief justice from 1921 to 1930, when Taft helped give the Supreme Court the power to choose its own cases. We get into the charge that Taft had no political skill, the 1904 campaign speeches Roosevelt asked him to give, the 1912 split and a two-state defeat, Payne-Aldrich and the tariff, the Philippines, and the White House bathtub that was never the stuck-president story the children's books tell. William Howard Taft: A Great American Life is out November 10, 2026. Walter Stahr: https://walterstahr.com 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 22 · 14 min
When FDR Wanted Hoover to be President
In January 1920, Franklin Roosevelt wrote that Herbert Hoover was "certainly a wonder" — and that he wished "we could make him President." Before the Depression, Hoover was a global hero: the man who fed occupied Belgium and whose name became a verb. Nobody even knew his party. In this episode, we follow how two friends became the most bitter rivals in twentieth-century American politics, why the qualities that made Hoover a hero later sank him, and what happened after their icy ride to the 1933 inauguration. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 21 · 12 min
How Baghdad Saved Ancient Greek Philosophy
Socrates never wrote a word. Most of Aristotle's polished writing is lost forever. And for six hundred years after Rome fell, Western Europe had barely any Aristotle at all. In this episode, we trace how the Greek philosophers invented the questions that still shape how we think — and the improbable relay race that saved their answers, from Athens to Baghdad, Córdoba, Toledo, and finally Paris. The story of Western thought turns out to be less an inheritance than a rescue, carried out by people who mostly never thought of themselves as Western. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 20 · 13 min
The Third Tier: Theaters & Prostitutes
Look up from the stage of a big-city American theater in the 1830s and you'd see three levels of seats. The pit. The family boxes. And the third tier — with its own staircase, its own street entrance, and its own bar. It was set aside for prostitutes, and many of them got in free. In this episode, we explore the "guilty third tier," why theater managers saw it as a business plan rather than a scandal, and how its disappearance quietly invented the family-friendly entertainment we take for granted today. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 19 · 15 min
The Home Remedies that Killed
For generations, nobody had to tell you what was in your medicine. Not the morphine in the syrup that quieted your teething baby. Not the arsenic in the wafers that promised a perfect complexion. Not the mercury in the nursery powders, or the radium in the tonic a Pittsburgh millionaire swore by. In this episode, we open the family medicine cabinet of the past and follow the trail of victims who forced America to finally check what was inside the bottle — and why the word "safe" was the deadliest thing on the label. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 18 · 14 min
The Most Expensive American War is...
Most people say World War II is the most expensive war in American history — $4.5 trillion in today's money. But that's only direct military spending. Add veterans' care, interest on war debt, and long-term obligations, and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have already cost approximately $8 trillion. Nearly double World War II. And the bill isn't finished. The youngest veterans are still in their thirties. Their care obligations run through 2070. Oh — and the last Civil War pension check was written in June 2020. 155 years after Appomattox. The bill for war always comes due. Just not always when you expect it. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 17 · 13 min
Eight Days that Ended the Gilded Age
On September 6th, 1901, President McKinley was shot twice at a World's Fair in Buffalo. His first instinct was to protect his attacker and spare his wife the news. He appeared to recover. An X-ray machine was on display at the Exposition — a wonder of modern science. Nobody used it. McKinley died eight days later. Theodore Roosevelt — placed in the Vice Presidency specifically to neutralize him — took the oath of office in a private house without a Bible at age 42. The men who tried to contain him had just handed him the world. Eight days in Buffalo changed everything. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 16 · 41 min
Poland: What Does it Take For a Nation to Survive, w/ Norman Davies
What does it take for a nation to survive after the state is gone? For 123 years, from 1795 to 1918, Poland did not exist on the map. It had been partitioned three times, divided among Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and written off as a finished chapter of European history. And yet the nation outlasted the states that had swallowed it. In this conversation, historian Norman Davies — author of God's Playground, Rising '44, and Vanished Kingdoms — takes up that question. What actually held Poles together when there was no Polish state: language, the Church, Romantic poetry, political habit, or the pressure of the empires trying to erase them? 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 15 · 13 min
The Search for the Last Rebel Yell
The rebel yell — the Confederate battle cry that terrified Union soldiers across four years of war — was never recorded during the Civil War. The phonograph wasn't invented until 1877. Twelve years too late. By the 1930s, the men who had made the sound were in their eighties and nineties and dying one by one. The Library of Congress captured what remains — a handful of old men stepping up to a microphone, their eyes changing, making a sound that almost disappeared from human memory entirely. We have what was captured. Just barely. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com
October 14 · 12 min
From Burnsides to Sideburns
Every time you use the word sideburns, you're accidentally commemorating one of the worst generals of the Civil War. Ambrose Burnside told Lincoln twice he wasn't the right man for the job. He was right both times. The third time he said yes — and sent 12,000 Union men across an open field at Fredericksburg toward a fortified Confederate position they never reached. The whiskers outlasted everything else. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

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