History Unplugged Podcast

In 1784, a young German immigrant named Bernard Quaritch walked into the London office of Henry George Bohn, one of the largest booksellers in England, and told him: "Mr Bohn, you are the first bookseller in England. I mean to become the first bookseller in Europe." Bohn hired him as an assistant. Within a few years, Quaritch had opened his own shop, issued a catalogue called "Quaritch's Cheap Book Circular," and begun bidding at auctions with a ferocity that alarmed every dealer in the room. When a rival complained that Quaritch was watching him at a sale and driving up prices, Quaritch replied: "My opponents I naturally cripple as much as I can at sales." By the time he died, Disraeli and Gladstone were regular customers, his final catalogue ran to 4,066 pages with a 427-page index, and he had fulfilled his promise.
Today's guest is Andrew Pettegree, author of The Bookshop: A History. We discuss how almost nothing about the modern bookshop existed before 1800, from window displays to browsing to dust jackets to paying in cash, why itinerant booksellers were burned alive for smuggling Protestant books while elderly women were arrested in London for selling sedition, and how the railway created an entirely new retail model when W. H. Smith opened the first station bookstall at Euston in 1848. Finally, we see Amazon was not the first great disruptor in the history of bookselling but merely the latest in a series stretching back to the printing press itself.
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On May 29, 1453, Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II captured Constantinople, bringing an end to over a thousand years of Byzantine rule. The city's formidable walls, which had stood nearly impenetrable for eight centuries, finally fell to hisforces. With its conquest, Constantinople was declared the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. Some historians marked this conquest as the end of the Middle Ages.
Built by Theodosius II to safeguard the "New Rome," these walls stretched from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara, marking the borders of ancient Istanbul. Through centuries of earthquakes, sieges, and urban expansion, their gates and fortifications have endured, preserving the legacy of the city's past.
To discuss the world-history importance of this conquest is today’s guest, Alexander Christie-Miller, author of “To The City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul.”
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In the summer of 1849, Edgar Allan Poe knocked on the door of his friend John Sartain's Philadelphia workshop, wild-eyed and without luggage. He had fled a train in New Jersey after overhearing passengers plotting to kill him. His senses had grown so acute, he said, that he could hear whispers from miles away. He asked for a razor to shave off his mustache so his assassins would not recognize him. Sartain, who was not about to hand his friend a blade, cut it off with scissors instead. That night, Sartain followed Poe on a midnight walk to a rickety platform high above the Schuylkill River and stood between him and the drop, hoping the man beside him could pull himself back from the edge. A few weeks later, Poe was found delirious outside a Baltimore polling place wearing clothes that were not his own. He died four days after that. He was forty years old.
Today's guest is Emily Ogden, author of Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe. We discuss how Poe was orphaned at two, raised by a foster father who disinherited him, and married his thirteen-year-old first cousin, whose five-year death from tuberculosis drove the most productive and most desperate period of his career. We look at why Poe’s compulsive self-sabotage, from quitting steady jobs to destroying his chances for a government sinecure by getting drunk and insulting everyone at the party. We see that Poe's genius was to turn toward darkness rather than away from it, and that in doing so he created a space where the rest of us can tolerate ourselves as we actually are: limited, cruel, perverse, and mortal, but still glittering with a heavenly light.
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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.
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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 – 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.
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