Over a 100,000 Jewish Americans lived in the Old South before the Civil War. They were active members of society, involved in farming, business, and politics (one Secretary of State of the Confederacy was Jewish).

One of which was Emma Mordecai. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South. She also lived well within the social parameters established for Southern white women, espoused Southern values, and owned enslaved African Americans.

In today’s episode, we discuss her Civil War experiences, and those of Jewish Southerners at large. We are joined by Melissa Klapper, who with Diane Ashton, edited and published The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai.

Over a 100,000 Jewish Americans lived in the Old South before the Civil War. They were active members of society, involved in farming, business, and politics (one Secretary of State of the Confederacy was Jewish).
One of which was Emma Mordecai. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South. She also lived well within the social parameters established for Southern white women, espoused Southern values, and owned enslaved African Americans. In today’s episode, we discuss her Civil War experiences, and those of Jewish Southerners at large. We are joined by Melissa Klapper, who with Diane Ashton, edited and published The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai.

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

The Jewish Confederates

Ramón Mercader expected to easily kill Leon Trotsky, silently and instantly. He had rehearsed the blow for months, practiced the angle, tailored a pocket into his raincoat to conceal the shortened ice axe. On August 20, 1940, he stood behind Trotsky -- who was the principle leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russian but exiled by Stalin after losing a power struggle -- in the study of his fortified villa in Coyoacán, Mexico, raised the weapon, and shut his eyes as the blade fell. What followed was not silence but a scream so raw that it froze the room. Trotsky did not collapse. He rose from his chair, seized the assassin's wrist, bit down on his hand, and forced the weapon loose. Blood streaming down his face, he stumbled into the dining room and gave his final order: "He must not be killed. He must be made to talk." He died twenty-six hours later. Thirty years after that, on his own deathbed, Mercader told his wife: "Trotsky is waiting for me on the other side. And he is still screaming."

Today's guests are H. Keith Melton and Nigel West, authors of The Assassination of Leon Trotsky: Espionage, Scandal, and the Crime of the Century, the product of fifty years of investigation that took the authors to Moscow, into declassified Soviet intelligence files, and into the homes of the operatives' families. We discuss how Stalin's campaign against Trotsky was not a single plot but a global war of extermination that destroyed his entire family before it destroyed him, how a GPU mole named Sylvia Callen served as the personal secretary to the head of the American Trotskyist movement for nine years without detection, and how the first assassination attempt sprayed over three hundred rounds into Trotsky's bedroom and somehow failed to kill anyone. We look at how the assassin's convent-educated mother directed the backup plot that succeeded, why Ramón Mercader maintained his false identity inside a Mexican prison for a decade despite relentless interrogation, and how new medical evidence suggests Trotsky might have survived the attack if his doctors had operated differently. The authors argue that Trotsky's assassination was not a historical anomaly but a template for state-directed political murder that continues to echo from the Litvinenko poisoning to the Skripal attack today.

Ram&oacute;n Mercader expected to easily kill Leon Trotsky, silently and instantly. He had rehearsed the blow for months, practiced the angle, tailored a pocket into his raincoat to conceal the shortened ice axe. On August 20, 1940, he stood behind Trotsky -- who was the principle leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russian but exiled by Stalin after losing a power struggle -- in the study of his fortified villa in Coyoac&aacute;n, Mexico, raised the weapon, and shut his eyes as the blade fell. What followed was not silence but a scream so raw that it froze the room. Trotsky did not collapse. He rose from his chair, seized the assassin's wrist, bit down on his hand, and forced the weapon loose. Blood streaming down his face, he stumbled into the dining room and gave his final order: "He must not be killed. He must be made to talk." He died twenty-six hours later. Thirty years after that, on his own deathbed, Mercader told his wife: "Trotsky is waiting for me on the other side. And he is still screaming."
Today's guests are H. Keith Melton and Nigel West, authors of The Assassination of Leon Trotsky: Espionage, Scandal, and the Crime of the Century, the product of fifty years of investigation that took the authors to Moscow, into declassified Soviet intelligence files, and into the homes of the operatives' families. We discuss how Stalin's campaign against Trotsky was not a single plot but a global war of extermination that destroyed his entire family before it destroyed him, how a GPU mole named Sylvia Callen served as the personal secretary to the head of the American Trotskyist movement for nine years without detection, and how the first assassination attempt sprayed over three hundred rounds into Trotsky's bedroom and somehow failed to kill anyone. We look at how the assassin's convent-educated mother directed the backup plot that succeeded, why Ram&oacute;n Mercader maintained his false identity inside a Mexican prison for a decade despite relentless interrogation, and how new medical evidence suggests Trotsky might have survived the attack if his doctors had operated differently. The authors argue that Trotsky's assassination was not a historical anomaly but a template for state-directed political murder that continues to echo from the Litvinenko poisoning to the Skripal attack today.

Stalin’s Ordered Killing of Trotsky Created the Playbook for Modern Political Assassination

In 533, a twenty-eight-year-old general named Belisarius sailed from Constantinople with 15,000 men to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals, a kingdom that had held it for nearly a century since the sack of Rome. The last time the Eastern Empire had attempted the crossing, the entire fleet had been destroyed. Belisarius landed, defeated the Vandal king in two battles, entered Carthage without a fight, sat on the enemy's throne, and was awarded the first proper Roman triumph in five hundred years. Then Justinian sent him to retake Italy with 7,000 troops. He took Sicily, took Naples, took Rome, and held it against a Gothic army that outnumbered him roughly twenty-to-one for over a year, personally leading cavalry charges from the crumbling Aurelian Walls. When the Goths offered him the crown of the Western Roman Empire, he pretended to accept, walked into Ravenna, arrested the Gothic leadership, and shipped them to Constantinople. Italy was Roman again. And Justinian, terrified of the man who had made it possible, recalled him, stripped his command, and never gave him the resources to finish anything again.

Today's guests are Matteo and Matthew Storm, the father-and-son hosts of Lost Roman Heroes, who devoted a five-part series and over five hours to the life of Belisarius. We discuss why a man who did more than anyone since Aurelian to restore the Roman Empire has been almost completely erased from popular memory, how the Plague of Justinian and a volcanic winter destroyed everything Belisarius had reconquered, why Procopius wrote two radically contradictory portraits of the same man, and whether Antonina was the most unfairly maligned woman in Byzantine history or one of its most destructive. We look at why Justinian gave the eunuch Narses everything he never gave Belisarius and what that reveals about how empires manage the men they depend on, why the legend of Belisarius blinded and begging in the streets has persisted for fifteen hundred years despite being almost certainly false, and whether a civilization truly dies when its last true believer falls.

In 533, a twenty-eight-year-old general named Belisarius sailed from Constantinople with 15,000 men to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals, a kingdom that had held it for nearly a century since the sack of Rome. The last time the Eastern Empire had attempted the crossing, the entire fleet had been destroyed. Belisarius landed, defeated the Vandal king in two battles, entered Carthage without a fight, sat on the enemy's throne, and was awarded the first proper Roman triumph in five hundred years. Then Justinian sent him to retake Italy with 7,000 troops. He took Sicily, took Naples, took Rome, and held it against a Gothic army that outnumbered him roughly twenty-to-one for over a year, personally leading cavalry charges from the crumbling Aurelian Walls. When the Goths offered him the crown of the Western Roman Empire, he pretended to accept, walked into Ravenna, arrested the Gothic leadership, and shipped them to Constantinople. Italy was Roman again. And Justinian, terrified of the man who had made it possible, recalled him, stripped his command, and never gave him the resources to finish anything again.
Today's guests are Matteo and Matthew Storm, the father-and-son hosts of Lost Roman Heroes, who devoted a five-part series and over five hours to the life of Belisarius. We discuss why a man who did more than anyone since Aurelian to restore the Roman Empire has been almost completely erased from popular memory, how the Plague of Justinian and a volcanic winter destroyed everything Belisarius had reconquered, why Procopius wrote two radically contradictory portraits of the same man, and whether Antonina was the most unfairly maligned woman in Byzantine history or one of its most destructive. We look at why Justinian gave the eunuch Narses everything he never gave Belisarius and what that reveals about how empires manage the men they depend on, why the legend of Belisarius blinded and begging in the streets has persisted for fifteen hundred years despite being almost certainly false, and whether a civilization truly dies when its last true believer falls.

Belisarius Reconquered Africa and Italy for Rome. Why Did Rome Destroy Him for It?

A coast guardsman named Earl Cunningham froze to death on Lake Michigan trying to rescue five fishermen trapped on a drifting ice sheet. His last words were "I wish I could see my wife and three children once more." That was February 1936. A few months later, the same country that had been paralyzed by temperatures of negative sixty was recording temperatures above 110. Sidewalks exploded. Spare tires detonated and sent hubcaps through restaurant windows. A heat-crazed elephant in San Francisco killed its zookeeper and was sentenced to death after a courtroom trial. People slept on rooftops to escape the heat and rolled off to their deaths. At least 12,000 North Americans died in what remains the deadliest heat wave in the continent's history.

Today's guest is Geoff Williams, author of The Summer of Death: The Great Heat Wave of 1936 and the Making of Modern-Day America. We discuss how a Polish immigrant died tending furnaces at a Chevrolet factory because that was the job given to immigrants and Black workers, why Marlene Dietrich fainted shooting a movie in the Arizona desert where the baby camel died with sand in its stomach, and how men were arrested for taking their shirts off at the beach while a Kentucky police matron ordered officers to cite girls over ten for wearing shorts. Williams argues that the summer of 1936 was the hinge point that created modern America, forcing the country to embrace air conditioning, rethink how workers are protected, and begin the first serious conversations about climate change, and that nearly every lesson from that catastrophe has since been either forgotten or actively ignored.

A coast guardsman named Earl Cunningham froze to death on Lake Michigan trying to rescue five fishermen trapped on a drifting ice sheet. His last words were "I wish I could see my wife and three children once more." That was February 1936. A few months later, the same country that had been paralyzed by temperatures of negative sixty was recording temperatures above 110. Sidewalks exploded. Spare tires detonated and sent hubcaps through restaurant windows. A heat-crazed elephant in San Francisco killed its zookeeper and was sentenced to death after a courtroom trial. People slept on rooftops to escape the heat and rolled off to their deaths. At least 12,000 North Americans died in what remains the deadliest heat wave in the continent's history.
Today's guest is Geoff Williams, author of The Summer of Death: The Great Heat Wave of 1936 and the Making of Modern-Day America. We discuss how a Polish immigrant died tending furnaces at a Chevrolet factory because that was the job given to immigrants and Black workers, why Marlene Dietrich fainted shooting a movie in the Arizona desert where the baby camel died with sand in its stomach, and how men were arrested for taking their shirts off at the beach while a Kentucky police matron ordered officers to cite girls over ten for wearing shorts. Williams argues that the summer of 1936 was the hinge point that created modern America, forcing the country to embrace air conditioning, rethink how workers are protected, and begin the first serious conversations about climate change, and that nearly every lesson from that catastrophe has since been either forgotten or actively ignored.

The Jewish Confederates

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