History Unplugged Podcast

On the night of April 21, 1986, an estimated 30 million Americans sat in front of their televisions waiting for a moment that almost no one alive had ever seen: a live, prime-time excavation of a gangster's secret vault. Geraldo Rivera, recently fired from ABC News and hungry for a comeback, had convinced Tribune Broadcasting to stake its credibility on a two-hour live special built around a single, tantalizing question: what had Al Capone hidden in the sealed basement of his Chicago headquarters? The network flew in IRS agents to handle the expected cash, a county medical examiner to process any bodies, and locksmiths to crack whatever fortress Capone had left behind. What they found, on live television, in front of 30 million viewers, was dirt and a few empty gin bottles.
William Hazelgrove, author of Capone's Vault, joins the show to explain why the special was a ratings triumph anyway, and why that's the more interesting story. Capone had been dead for nearly 40 years, yet his myth was so potent, his legend so carefully self-constructed during his lifetime, that the mere possibility of a hidden room full of gold and skeletons was enough to hold the country's attention for two hours. The empty vault didn't kill the spectacle, it completed it, proving that anticipation is a more powerful television engine than any actual revelation. What Geraldo Rivera stumbled into that night, almost by accident, was the blueprint for every reality TV cliffhanger, true-crime docuseries, and hype-culture livestream that would follow in the next four decades.
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Part 2 of our exploration of how the U.S. dollar is older than the United States itself and has a level of power beyond the Federal Reserve and even beyond the U.S. government. We’re joined by guest Brendan Greeley, author of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money.
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The U.S. dollar's origin story begins not in Philadelphia or Washington, but in a half-frozen mining valley in 16th-century Bohemia, where Saxon miners accidentally named their town after a saint and set the world's dominant currency in motion. That currency's history stretches from a 1518 christening party all the way to the eurodollar markets of Cold War London — and the central is that money is a product, not a symbol of sovereignty. From Spanish silver hollowing out Toledo's workshops to enslaved people serving as bank collateral in antebellum New Orleans, the dollar's history is less a triumph than a series of accidents and power grabs.
Today’s guest is Brendan Greeley, author of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money, and he explains how colonial Americans invented paper money not as a revolutionary act but as a desperate workaround for chronic small-change shortages — and how that same improvised spirit resurfaced when a Maytag dealer in Iowa printed his own dollars to keep a Depression-era town alive. He also dismantles the myth that Nixon's 1971 decision to close the gold window turned money into "fiat" — arguing that gold never gave the dollar its value, only controlled it. What actually sustained the dollar across five centuries was something more mundane: banks, habits, laws, and the accumulated trust of people who had no other options.
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One of the greatest threat to early America was piracy, but it wasn’t found in the Caribbean or Gulf Coast. It was pirates on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Samuel Mason fought bravely at the 1777 Siege of Fort Henry, became a Justice of the Peace in the Northwest Territory, then turned Cave-in-Rock into a strategic base for organized river piracy where he lured flatboat crews with promises of "liquor and entertainment" before robbing and murdering them. Mason thrived because the new republic had weak, fragmented control over its western territories. Jurisdiction overlapped between local authorities, territorial governments, Spanish Louisiana, and American claims. He exploited every gap. His story ended when two of his own men killed him, severed his head, and tried to collect bounty money in Natchez, only to be recognized as outlaws themselves and hanged.
Today's guest is Carter Smith, author of From Patriot to Pirate: The Outlaw Life of Sam Mason. We discuss why Mason kicked the infamous Harpe brothers out of his gang because their extreme brutality threatened to draw too much attention to his organized operation. Smith explains how the collapse of frontier order after the Revolution pushed respected veterans into outlawry. Mason wasn't a wandering thug. He was organized, strategic, and dangerous. His life reveals what criminal opportunity looked like when the map said one thing but actual control on the ground said something else.
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When Russia's Dowager Empress was pregnant with the future Tsar Nicholas II in 1868, she dreamed that a peasant would one day kill her son. The idea terrified her, and for the rest of her days she lived under the fear of this prophecy. It may have come true with the arrival at court of a mysterious, barely literate wandering monk from Siberia, Grigori Rasputin. He had a pale face, long hair and penetrating eyes gave him an almost hypnotic quality. Though he had no official position at court, Rasputin’s hold over the Romanovs became the stuff of legend. Exaggerated accounts of political and financial corruption swirled around him, to say nothing of the stories of his debauchery with the Empress and even her daughters. The consequences of the rumor and conspiracy theories were devastating—when the February revolution broke out in 1917, hardly a sword was raised in the Tsar’s defense.
Today's guest is Antony Beevor, author of Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs. We look at how Rasputin was able to wield such power, mostly by tricking the Royal Family into thinking he could heal Tsarevich Alexei’s hemorrhages. We also look at his legendary assassination, in which conspirators allegedly fed him cyanide-laced cakes, shooting him twice, and throwing him into the freezing Neva. Despite his death, nothing changed, as the Romanov dynasty collapsed three months later in the February Revolution and the entire family was murdered by Bolsheviks a year after that. We see that Rasputin was less the cause of the Romanov collapse than its most visible symptom, explaining that when a government is ruled by an isolated royal family, it creates a vacuum that only a swindler or visionary can fill.
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