History Unplugged Podcast

On May 9, 1873, as the Vienna Stock Exchange collapsed and thousands of speculators were wiped out in a single afternoon, young Salbert von Rothschild and two colleagues from the Schey and Goldschmidt banking families were nearly lynched on the floor of the exchange by infuriated stockjobbers and had to be rescued by police. That same evening, oblivious to the carnage a few hundred yards away, the Prince of Wales hosted a gala dinner at the Ministry of Finance, and the following night Emperor Franz Joseph served a state dinner for the assembled heirs to the royal thrones of Europe. Within months, the panic had crossed the Atlantic and destroyed Jay Cooke, the man who had single-handedly funded the Union's Civil War effort, shutting down the New York Stock Exchange for ten days.
Today's guest is Liaquat Ahamed, author of 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World. We discuss how the Rothschilds built their fortune smuggling gold across the English Channel during the Napoleonic Wars and became, relative to the size of the global economy, the richest family in history. We look at how Sultan Abdülaziz of the Ottoman Empire and Khedive Ismail of Egypt borrowed their nations into oblivion and were both destroyed for it, why the demonetization of silver was the most consequential economic blunder of the nineteenth century (Milton Friedman blamed it for the worst deflation in recorded history), and how a completely fabricated conspiracy theory about the Rothschilds bribing Congress sold 400,000 copies in the American heartland. Ahamed argues that the 1873 crisis created a twenty-year redistribution of wealth from farmers, workers, and small investors to the bankers most responsible for the crash, fueling populist movements that reshaped politics on every continent.
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The Disney version of Johnny Appleseed has a cheerful barefoot man in a tin pot hat scattering apple seeds for grateful pioneers to bake into pies. The real John Chapman collected his seeds for free from cidery waste, planted them into strategically fenced nurseries on land he bought ahead of the settlement line, and sold the resulting trees to colonists who used the apples almost exclusively to make hard cider and applejack brandy. He died owning 1,200 acres across three states but never touched the money, because his Swedenborgian faith taught him that suffering in this life meant blessings in the next. He wore coffee sacks as shirts, went barefoot through Ohio winters, and entertained settler children by sticking needles into his calloused feet.
Today's guest is Isaac Fitzgerald, author of *American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed*. We discuss how Chapman's father was a Minuteman who fought at Concord and later ended up in debtor's prison, why the Northwest Indian War of the 1790s, one of the worst military disasters in early American history, created the very frontier Chapman would spend his life planting, and how a forgotten Irish frontiersman named Dan McQuay who walked 1,200 miles home from New Orleans through hostile wilderness may have been the real inspiration for Chapman's rambling life.
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For the last 5,000 years, empires ruled the world — Rome administered hundreds of languages across three continents, and the Ottomans governed Christians, Jews, and Muslims under a single legal canopy. The nation-state as we know it is barely a century old for most of the world's population. In 1900, maybe 25 percent of humanity lived under nation. Today, 99 percent live in nation-states — and almost all of them were created in a single, compressed rush after 1945. And this world order could already be giving way to the next. Amazon has a larger GDP than most countries, the Bitcoin network operates outside any central bank's reach, and a 19-year-old with a smartphone can reach more people than most governments. The monopoly is gone. The question is what replaces it.
Today’s guest is Rana Dasgupta, author of After Nations. We trace how different nations came into existence and the reasons their nations formed the way they did. France built its national identity through theology, Britain through property, the United States through law, and China through controlling its massive rivers and sidestepping local rulers in the process. We see why all four models are now straining under the weight of planetary problems no border can contain. The post-1945 liberal order wasn't the natural culmination of history but a brief, unusual window of stability between eras of great-power competition. The question isn't whether the nation-state will survive, but what forms of citizenship, governance, and legitimacy can be invented to replace the functions it can no longer perform. If the last great transition produced the nation, the next one will have to produce something we don't yet have a name for.
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The Cambridge Five did more damage to the Western Bloc than any other intelligence outfit of the Cold War. They were five Cambridge graduates who drank gin at the right clubs, moved through the right corridors of British intelligence at the height of WW2, and quietly handed Stalin the keys to post-war Europe. Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and John Cairncross were recruited for their sympathies to communism because they were radicalized by the wreckage of World War I and the Great Depression. They believed that Soviet communism was the only serious answer. The Five each quickly took up a place in the British government, granting them access to top-secret intelligence that they shared with the USSR, whether decrypted German intelligence obtained from Alan Turing’s Bletchley Park and the Wehrmacht’s latest troop movements, or nuclear designs fresh from Manhattan Project labs. What followed was decades of betrayal so consequential it shaped the entire postwar map of Eastern Europe. They did this not just by passing secrets, but by condemning millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Albanians, and Baltic peoples to Soviet repression when their underground resistance networks were quietly handed over to Moscow.
Today’s guest is Antonia Senior, author of Stalin's Apostles, and she explains how she pieced together a story that was designed never to be found, because moles don't leave paper trails, and the Cambridge Five made sure their communications rarely entered any correspondence at all. We see that they did more to cause the Iron Curtain to descend deep into Europe than any other intelligence group.
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Washington was the perfect man for an impossible moment — aristocratic enough to command the respect of erudite founders like Hamilton and Jefferson, yet only a mid-level Virginia planter who understood ordinary life and could relate to common soldiers because his ancestors had fled the English Civil War with nothing and spent generations clawing their way back into respectability. That family history gave him something neither Hamilton's brilliance nor Jefferson's philosophy could manufacture: a bone-deep understanding of what it felt like to have status, lose it, and rebuild it through sheer force of will. This goes alone with his earliest military experiences in the French-Indian War: he suffered a string of frontier humiliations in the Ohio Valley that taught him the one lesson that would win the Revolution: how to survive losing.
Today’s guest is H.W. Brands, author of American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington. We see how Washington's most important acts were preserving through impossible hardships like he did at Valley Forge but also in the moments he chose not to act: not to seize power, not to crown himself, not to serve a third term. He managed Hamilton and Jefferson's explosive feud the way a patriarch manages feuding sons — with exhausted patience and the quiet authority of a man who had already outlasted everything. He ended his presidency with the most radical thing a powerful man could do in 1797, which was to simply go home. All of this made him a patriarch -- a father of an extended family that encompassed the United States -- and crafted the norms that would steady America as a nation for generations to follow.
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