The 17th-century battlefield ushered in a new era, with formed musketeers and pistol-wielding cavalry gradually taking over from the knights and men-at-arms that had dominated the European battlefield. But knights could still be found on these battlefields as late as the 1640s, proudly donning their full-plated armor as their lightly clad compatriots looked on in a mix of envy and confusion. What were they doing fighting 17th-century battles?

Today’s guest is Myke Cole, author of “Steel Lobsters: Crown , Commonwealth, and the Last Knights in England.” We examine the life and times of Sir Arthur Hesilrige and his Regiment of Horse, known as "the Lobsters" as they were encased in plate armor. We cover the full history of England's last knights, from the seeds of their creation in Hesilrige’s experience as a young cavalry officer, to their final defeat at Roundway Down in July 1643, and the decision to abandon their armor.

The 17th-century battlefield ushered in a new era, with formed musketeers and pistol-wielding cavalry gradually taking over from the knights and men-at-arms that had dominated the European battlefield. But knights could still be found on these battlefields as late as the 1640s, proudly donning their full-plated armor as their lightly clad compatriots looked on in a mix of envy and confusion. What were they doing fighting 17th-century battles? Today’s guest is Myke Cole, author of “Steel Lobsters: Crown , Commonwealth, and the Last Knights in England.” We examine the life and times of Sir Arthur Hesilrige and his Regiment of Horse, known as "the Lobsters" as they were encased in plate armor. We cover the full history of England's last knights, from the seeds of their creation in Hesilrige’s experience as a young cavalry officer, to their final defeat at Roundway Down in July 1643, and the decision to abandon their armor.

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.

A show about American history, world history, World Wars 1 & 2, the Civil War, and much more.

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged is one of the longest-running history podcasts of its kind, with over 1,000 episodes covering everything from Alexander the Great's plans for European colonization to the untold story of Alabamians who fought for Sherman deep inside Confederate territory. Topics range from the Bronze Age Collapse to the naval campaigns of the Barbary Wars to Daniel Boone's forced adoption by a Shawnee chief. Guests on the show include history professors, Pulitzer Prize winners, consultants for historical films, and outsiders like Joakim Brodén from Sabaton. The show is hosted by Scott Rank, a history professor specializing in the Ottoman Empire and author of 12 books. And for those who love to spin the wheel of what-if, the show regularly ventures into alternate history, exploring questions like what the USSR's victory in the Cold War would have meant for the modern world, or how our current map might look if the Confederacy had survived the Civil War.

 

History Unplugged is one of the longest-running history podcasts of its kind, with over 1,000 episodes covering everything from Alexander the Great's plans for European colonization to the untold story of Alabamians who fought for Sherman deep inside Confederate territory. Topics range from the Bronze Age Collapse to the naval campaigns of the Barbary Wars to Daniel Boone's forced adoption by a Shawnee chief. Guests on the show include history professors, Pulitzer Prize winners, consultants for historical films, and outsiders like Joakim Brod&eacute;n from Sabaton. The show is hosted by Scott Rank, a history professor specializing in the Ottoman Empire and author of 12 books. And for those who love to spin the wheel of what-if, the show regularly ventures into alternate history, exploring questions like what the USSR's victory in the Cold War would have meant for the modern world, or how our current map might look if the Confederacy had survived the Civil War.
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History Unplugged

England's Last Knights Fought in Armor Until the 1640s

In 1861, an archaeologist named James Farrer broke into a grass-covered Neolithic tomb on the Orkney Islands expecting to find ancient bones and treasure. The tomb was empty. But its walls were covered with runic inscriptions, dozens of them, carved by Norse visitors centuries earlier. Most were mundane: "Arnfinnr Food carved these runes." Some were lewd: Two were extraordinary: "Crusaders broke into this barrow." "Jerusalem-men broke this mound." Theworlds of the Viking north and the Crusades are artificially separated in the popular imagination, but Scandinavians were among the most enthusiastic, brutal, and consequential crusaders in history – working as the shock troops of the first four crusades, and single-handedly converting pagan Baltic Europe to Christianity in a couple of centuries.

Today's guest is Thomas Williams, former curator at the British Museum and author of God's Hammer: A History of the Viking Crusades. We discuss how Scandinavians went from being Christianity's most terrifying enemies to some of its most enthusiastic holy warriors within two centuries, why Harald Hardrada served as a Byzantine mercenary across the Mediterranean and may have policed the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem sixty years before the First Crusade, and how Vladimir of Kyiv chose Byzantine Christianity over Islam partly because "drinking is the joy of the Russes." We look at how the Norwegian King Sigurd fought his way through the entire Mediterranean six years after the First Crusade to help capture the port of Sidon and received a splinter of the True Cross, and why the Danish conquest of a pagan temple fortress on the Baltic island of Rügen established the template for centuries of northern holy war. Williams argues that crusading gave the violence that had always defined Norse culture a new legitimacy and a new set of enemies, and that they had found a way to be Vikings and Christians at the same time.

In 1861, an archaeologist named James Farrer broke into a grass-covered Neolithic tomb on the Orkney Islands expecting to find ancient bones and treasure. The tomb was empty. But its walls were covered with runic inscriptions, dozens of them, carved by Norse visitors centuries earlier. Most were mundane: "Arnfinnr Food carved these runes." Some were lewd: Two were extraordinary: "Crusaders broke into this barrow." "Jerusalem-men broke this mound." The worlds of the Viking north and the Crusades are artificially separated in the popular imagination, but Scandinavians were among the most enthusiastic, brutal, and consequential crusaders in history &ndash; working as the shock troops of the first four crusades, and single-handedly converting pagan Baltic Europe to Christianity in a couple of centuries.
Today's guest is Thomas Williams, former curator at the British Museum and author of God's Hammer: A History of the Viking Crusades. We discuss how Scandinavians went from being Christianity's most terrifying enemies to some of its most enthusiastic holy warriors within two centuries, why Harald Hardrada served as a Byzantine mercenary across the Mediterranean and may have policed the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem sixty years before the First Crusade, and how Vladimir of Kyiv chose Byzantine Christianity over Islam partly because "drinking is the joy of the Russes." We look at how the Norwegian King Sigurd fought his way through the entire Mediterranean six years after the First Crusade to help capture the port of Sidon and received a splinter of the True Cross, and why the Danish conquest of a pagan temple fortress on the Baltic island of R&uuml;gen established the template for centuries of northern holy war. Williams argues that crusading gave the violence that had always defined Norse culture a new legitimacy and a new set of enemies, and that they had found a way to be Vikings and Christians at the same time.

Vikings Went from Christendom’s Terror to Its Best Crusaders

When the First Crusade arrived at the walls of Antioch in 1097, the two most powerful Muslim rulers in Syria were not preparing a joint defense. They were trying to destroy each other. Ridwan of Aleppo and his brother Duqaq of Damascus had been locked in a fratricidal war over their dead father's territories, and neither would yield an inch to help the other. When Karbugha of Mosul finally assembled a massive coalition army to crush the crusaders, it collapsed in a single afternoon despite overwhelming numerical superiority, because the Arab contingents distrusted the Turkish ones, Ridwan was stirring up trouble from the sidelines, and no one trusted anyone else enough to commit fully to the fight. The First Crusade succeeded not because of any tactically brilliant move of Godfrey of Bouillon (although the Siege of Jerusalem was impressive) but because the Islamic world was tearing itself apart.

Today's guest is Nicholas Morton, author of The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East. We discuss how the Seljuk Turkish invasions reshaped the Middle East far more profoundly than the crusaders ever did, why the Fatimid Empire initially treated the crusaders as useful allies against the Seljuks and then made a catastrophic diplomatic blunder at Jerusalem that turned a potential partnership into an existential war, and how the Italian merchant cities of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice were the true kingmakers of the Crusader States because the Franks had almost no ships. We look at how Saladin spent far more of his career fighting fellow Muslims than fighting Christians and needed the Battle of Hattin to justify his entire political project to his own coalition, and why the war for control of Egypt between 1163 and 1169 was the strategic hinge that made the fall of Jerusalem virtually inevitable. Morton argues that the crusades were not a clash of civilizations but one disruption among many in a region already convulsed by Seljuk expansion, Fatimid collapse, and Byzantine intervention, and that placing the holy wars within this wider framework makes the religious fervor that drove them more remarkable, not less.

When the First Crusade arrived at the walls of Antioch in 1097, the two most powerful Muslim rulers in Syria were not preparing a joint defense. They were trying to destroy each other. Ridwan of Aleppo and his brother Duqaq of Damascus had been locked in a fratricidal war over their dead father's territories, and neither would yield an inch to help the other. When Karbugha of Mosul finally assembled a massive coalition army to crush the crusaders, it collapsed in a single afternoon despite overwhelming numerical superiority, because the Arab contingents distrusted the Turkish ones, Ridwan was stirring up trouble from the sidelines, and no one trusted anyone else enough to commit fully to the fight. The First Crusade succeeded not because of any tactically brilliant move of Godfrey of Bouillon (although the Siege of Jerusalem was impressive) but because the Islamic world was tearing itself apart.
Today's guest is Nicholas Morton, author of The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East. We discuss how the Seljuk Turkish invasions reshaped the Middle East far more profoundly than the crusaders ever did, why the Fatimid Empire initially treated the crusaders as useful allies against the Seljuks and then made a catastrophic diplomatic blunder at Jerusalem that turned a potential partnership into an existential war, and how the Italian merchant cities of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice were the true kingmakers of the Crusader States because the Franks had almost no ships. We look at how Saladin spent far more of his career fighting fellow Muslims than fighting Christians and needed the Battle of Hattin to justify his entire political project to his own coalition, and why the war for control of Egypt between 1163 and 1169 was the strategic hinge that made the fall of Jerusalem virtually inevitable. Morton argues that the crusades were not a clash of civilizations but one disruption among many in a region already convulsed by Seljuk expansion, Fatimid collapse, and Byzantine intervention, and that placing the holy wars within this wider framework makes the religious fervor that drove them more remarkable, not less.

Why the Most Powerful Muslim Rulers in the Middle East Considered the Crusaders a Minor Annoyance

On the morning of January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall climbed into a ditch beside a half-finished sawmill in the Sierra Nevada foothills, stooped down, and found gold. He crawled out clutching his hat to his chest like a hurt child, showed the men a teaspoon of yellow flakes, and said "I have found it." Within a year, fifty thousand people from all six continents were racing to California. Within a decade, 848 tons of gold had been ripped from the earth, nearly five times the amount Spain had extracted from the Americas in 150 years. Within two decades, the nation had been torn apart by civil war and four Sacramento shopkeepers with no engineering experience had built a railroad across the continent using twenty thousand Chinese laborers.

Today's guest is Nathaniel Philbrick, author of The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World. We discuss how California went from a sparsely populated Mexican territory to the most diverse place on earth within months, and how its explosive admission as a free state in 1850 shattered the balance between slave and free states and set the nation on a path to civil war that two California senators, one from Mississippi and one from New York, fought out in miniature before one of them was killed in a duel. We look at how the Rush created the template Americans have been following ever since: the conviction that wealth is there for the taking if you move fast enough, that the rules can be written after the money is made, and that whoever gets there first wins, a logic that ran straight from the hydraulic mines that blasted apart mountainsides through the four Sacramento shopkeepers who built the transcontinental railroad to Leland Stanford's horse farm at Palo Alto, where the same culture of speculative risk and ruthless speed became Silicon Valley.

On the morning of January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall climbed into a ditch beside a half-finished sawmill in the Sierra Nevada foothills, stooped down, and found gold. He crawled out clutching his hat to his chest like a hurt child, showed the men a teaspoon of yellow flakes, and said "I have found it." Within a year, fifty thousand people from all six continents were racing to California. Within a decade, 848 tons of gold had been ripped from the earth, nearly five times the amount Spain had extracted from the Americas in 150 years. Within two decades, the nation had been torn apart by civil war and four Sacramento shopkeepers with no engineering experience had built a railroad across the continent using twenty thousand Chinese laborers.
Today's guest is Nathaniel Philbrick, author of The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World. We discuss how California went from a sparsely populated Mexican territory to the most diverse place on earth within months, and how its explosive admission as a free state in 1850 shattered the balance between slave and free states and set the nation on a path to civil war that two California senators, one from Mississippi and one from New York, fought out in miniature before one of them was killed in a duel. We look at how the Rush created the template Americans have been following ever since: the conviction that wealth is there for the taking if you move fast enough, that the rules can be written after the money is made, and that whoever gets there first wins, a logic that ran straight from the hydraulic mines that blasted apart mountainsides through the four Sacramento shopkeepers who built the transcontinental railroad to Leland Stanford's horse farm at Palo Alto, where the same culture of speculative risk and ruthless speed became Silicon Valley.

England's Last Knights Fought in Armor Until the 1640s

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