Most of us only know Thomas Paine for one thing: writing Common Sense in 1776, which helped kickstart the Revolution by selling hundreds of thousands of copies. But he was far more than a writer. Paine actively served with George Washington's army during its darkest days and then used his pen to advocate for global freedom in both the French Revolution and against organized religion. His revolutionary fervor spanned the globe, leading him to champion the French Revolution with Rights of Man and challenge religious orthodoxy in The Age of Reason/

Paine's later involvement with the French Revolution, his Enlightenment opinions, and his unorthodox view of religion plunged his reputation into a controversy that continues to this day.

Today’s guest is Jack Kelly, author of “Tom Paine's War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time.” We look at how Paine shaped the war. He convinced the colonies that war should grow from a reform movement to a full revolution: The entire British system of hereditary monarchy and aristocratic rule was a form of tyranny, making the case that separation from Great Britain the only logical course for America.

Most of us only know Thomas Paine for one thing: writing Common Sense in 1776, which helped kickstart the Revolution by selling hundreds of thousands of copies. But he was far more than a writer. Paine actively served with George Washington's army during its darkest days and then used his pen to advocate for global freedom in both the French Revolution and against organized religion. His revolutionary fervor spanned the globe, leading him to champion the French Revolution with Rights of Man and challenge religious orthodoxy in The Age of Reason/
Paine's later involvement with the French Revolution, his Enlightenment opinions, and his unorthodox view of religion plunged his reputation into a controversy that continues to this day.
Today&rsquo;s guest is Jack Kelly, author of &ldquo;Tom Paine's War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time.&rdquo; We look at how Paine shaped the war. He convinced the colonies that war should grow from a reform movement to a full revolution: The entire British system of hereditary monarchy and aristocratic rule was a form of tyranny, making the case that separation from Great Britain the only logical course for America.

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.
&nbsp;

History Unplugged

The Man Who Sold the War: Tom Paine's Journey from Common Sense to Global Firebrand

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.

The Gold Rush Created Get Rich Quick Schemes and ‘Move Fast and Break Things’

Early America’s most important invention wasn’t Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod, or the cotton gin. It was the world's first fully automated flour mill, built by Oliver Evans in the 1780s. Evans's mill used a conveyor-belt grain elevator, leather straps, wheels, and Archimedean screws to process wheat from raw grain to finished flour without human hands touching it.  Prior to Oliver Evans's automated system, milling relied on waterwheels or wind to turn heavy millstones, but every intermediate step required grueling manual labor to haul heavy grain sacks up ladders and shovel meal across floors. This invention ranks right below potatoes’ arrival in Europe or Haber-Bosch synthesis of nitrogen for fertilizer or Norman Borlaug’s dwarf wheat in making food cheaper. It also made America unique among nations in the world in that it never experienced a bread riot or mass executions of peasants stealing during a time of famine. It also shows how much we overlook the importance of bread in American history.

Today's guest is Andrew Coe, author of American Bread: A History. We discuss how the Pilgrims nearly starved because they couldn't grow wheat in New England and were saved by a dense loaf of rye and cornmeal that became America's first national food, and how Sylvester Graham convinced thousands of Americans in the 1830s that white bread and sexual desire were destroying the nation. We look at industrialization of food that would culminate in Wonder Bread, and how Vietnam War protesters boycotted Wonder Bread while Zen Buddhists at a California monastery wrote the book that launched the modern whole-grain movement. Coe argues that the story of American bread is the story of America itself: a nation that learned to survive on unfamiliar grain, built an industrial system that stripped bread of everything worth eating, and is now slowly trying to rediscover what it lost.

Early America&rsquo;s most important invention wasn&rsquo;t Benjamin Franklin&rsquo;s lightning rod, or the cotton gin. It was the world's first fully automated flour mill, built by Oliver Evans in the 1780s. Evans's mill used a conveyor-belt grain elevator, leather straps, wheels, and Archimedean screws to process wheat from raw grain to finished flour without human hands touching it.&nbsp; Prior to Oliver Evans's automated system, milling relied on waterwheels or wind to turn heavy millstones, but every intermediate step required grueling manual labor to haul heavy grain sacks up ladders and shovel meal across floors. This invention ranks right below potatoes&rsquo; arrival in Europe or Haber-Bosch synthesis of nitrogen for fertilizer or Norman Borlaug&rsquo;s dwarf wheat in making food cheaper. It also made America unique among nations in the world in that it never experienced a bread riot or mass executions of peasants stealing during a time of famine. It also shows how much we overlook the importance of bread in American history.
Today's guest is Andrew Coe, author of American Bread: A History. We discuss how the Pilgrims nearly starved because they couldn't grow wheat in New England and were saved by a dense loaf of rye and cornmeal that became America's first national food, and how Sylvester Graham convinced thousands of Americans in the 1830s that white bread and sexual desire were destroying the nation. We look at industrialization of food that would culminate in Wonder Bread, and how Vietnam War protesters boycotted Wonder Bread while Zen Buddhists at a California monastery wrote the book that launched the modern whole-grain movement. Coe argues that the story of American bread is the story of America itself: a nation that learned to survive on unfamiliar grain, built an industrial system that stripped bread of everything worth eating, and is now slowly trying to rediscover what it lost.

The Man Who Sold the War: Tom Paine's Journey from Common Sense to Global Firebrand

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