History Unplugged Podcast

John Jay was a giant in the Founding Fathers generation. He was a diplomat, Supreme Court justice, coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and key negotiator at the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War. His children and grandchildren were also key players in the Early American Republic. They pushed changes in public opinion about slavery, moving the Overtone window on slavery from support to begrudging acceptance to calls for abolition. The changes played out over the generations in the family. Jay’s Huguenot grandfather, Augustus Jay, arrived in New York in the 1680s, thought the family’s ownership of enslaved people was a marker of their “social ascendancy.” Jay himself owned slaves and was largely silent on the issue while pushing for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. But his involvement in foreign affairs fostered his abolitionist leanings, leading him to become the first president of a pioneering antislavery society. He enacted a gradual emancipation law as governor of New York in the 1790s. Today’s guest is David Gellman, author of Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York. He shows how American values were transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond through an extremely important family. In the 1830s and ’40s, Jay’s son William Jay and grandson John Jay II were radical abolitionists that called for slavery’s immediate end. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. They lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles. One such servant fell ill and died after she was jailed for running away from John Jay’s household in FranceThe Jays, as well as those who served them, show the challenges of obtaining and holding onto liberty. This family’s story helps us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As a child, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, along with her five brothers, was raised to revere the tribal legends of the Alsop and Roosevelt families. Her parents’ marriage, lived in the spotlight of 1950s Washington where the author’s father, journalist Stewart Alsop, grew increasingly famous, was not what either of her parents had imagined it would be. Her mother’s strict Catholicism and her father’s restless ambition collided to create a strangely muted and ominous world, one that mirrored the whispered conversations in the living room as the power brokers of Washington came and went through their side door. Through it all, her mother, trained to keep secrets as a decoding agent with MI5, said very little. Today’s guest is Elizabeth, auth or of her memoir “Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies.”She explores who her mother was, why alcohol played such an important role in her mother’s life, and why her mother held herself apart from all her children, especially her only daughter. In the author’s journey to understand her parents, particularly her mother, she comes to realize that the secrets parents keep are the ones that reverberate most powerfully in the lives of their children.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Entrepreneurship didn’t begin with Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, or Adam Smith. Depending on how one interprets the archeological record, it goes back at least 9,000 years, when Neolithic tribes set up bead-making factories to transform worthless stones into jewelry, trading them for raw materials.This culture of business spread and grew more sophisticated. Four thousand years ago the first LLCs appeared in Mesopotamia. Entrepreneurs became a respected and important part of life, and a dynamic entrepreneurial culture that worked like Silicon Valley does today. To discuss this 10,000-year story of business is today’s guest, Derek Lidow, author of “The Entrepreneurs: The Relentless Quest for Value.” We delve into the deep history of innovation to deliver essential new insights into how entrepreneurs have created value throughout history and continue to bring about change. We explore how the archeological record proves entrepreneurship eventually develops in all urban cultures, how some groups of entrepreneurs have been hidden from history (women, slaves, ethnic and religious minorities, the underclass, and immigrants), and how monopolists like J.P. Morgan or Mark Zuckerberg threaten this entrepreneurial spirit, and what can be done about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

George Richardson (1824-1911) was a traveling Methodist preacher who rode on a circuit across the antebellum Midwestern frontier and became increasingly caught up in the abolitionist movement. He became a “station master” on the Underground Railroad and served as chaplain to a black regiment during the Civil War. The soldiers under his care were survivors of the Ft. Pillow Massacre, in which the Confederates refused to take black soldiers as prisoners of war and unlawfully executed them instead. In the 1870s, he founded a college in Texas for the formerly enslaved. When the Ku Klux Klan burned the school down, he built another one and rode on a circuit to teach those who were unable to travel to the attend. Today’s guest is James D. Richardson –an ancestor of George Richardson, and also a retired journalist and Episcopalian priest. He retraced the steps of George across nine states, uncovering letters, diaries, and more memoirs hidden away. He’s the author of the new book, The Abolitionist’s Journal: Memories of an American Antislavery FamilyWe discuss what motivated George to become an abolitionist, the personal and financial challenges this brought on him and his family, and the incredible hardship that the formerly enslaved faced when they tried to build lives for themselves after emancipation when they had nothing or, thanks to the loansharking nature of sharecropping, less than nothing.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

During World War II, Elaine Black Yoneda [1906-1988], the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, spent eight months in a concentration camp—not in Europe, but in California. She was an activist who voluntarily joined her incarcerated Japanese-American husband, Karl, and their son, Tommy, at the Manzanar Relocation Center. But her beliefs were, to put it simply, complicated. While in the camp, Elaine and Karl publicly supported the United States’ decision to exclude Japanese Americans from the coast (they hated America’s internment policy but hated the threat of fascism in Europe even more and would do anything to support the Allied war effort).Today’s guest is Rachel Schreiber, author of Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration. We discuss the story of this activist and her challenges to stand up for persecuted Americans of ethnic Japanese descent and whether she was unique in her beliefs or if her story suggests a more complicated WW2-era American society that we typically understand. We discuss the ways Yoneda’s work challenged mainstream society and how she reconciled the contradictory political and social forces that shaped both her life and her family’s. Her story was one of many in the history of Japanese-American exclusion and incarceration during WWII and helps us understand this complicated history better.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As the editor of the Saturday Review for more than thirty years, Norman Cousins had a powerful platform to shape American public debate during the height of the Cold War. Although he was a low-key, nebbish figure, under Cousins's leadership, the magazine was considered one of the most influential in the literary world and his advocacy on nuclear disarmament affect world politics ( his 1945 anti-nuclear essay “Modern Man is Obsolete” was read by over 40 million).Cousins was respected by both JFK and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev, whom he visited at his vacation home on the Black Sea. As such, he met with both and passed messages between the two, getting involved in several secret citizen diplomacy missions during the height of the Cold War. He even played a major role in getting the Limited Test Ban Treaty signed. He also wrote JFK's famous 1963 American University commencement speech ("not merely peace in our time but peace for all time."Today’s guest is Allen Pietrobon, author of Norman Cousins: Peacemaker in the Atomic AgeCousins was much more important than we realize: he may very well have averted nuclear war.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

William Aspinwal was many things. A child soldier. A ladies’ man. A mechanic. A tramp. A drunkard. A husband married five times. Each of these descriptions capture an aspect of his life, yet none do him justice. And they don’t explain how he became one of the most unlikely folk heroes of pre-World War One America.Known later as “Roving Bill,” Aspinwal’s story begins when he was severely wounded and left for dead while fighting for the Union in the Battle of Champion Hill, one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. He recovered from his wounds but lived the next 60 years with shrapnel embedded in his brain and right arm. After the war, due to what we recognize now as PTSD, he wandered throughout the United States for the rest of his days, amiably making friends, working hard, and then pulling up stakes when it all became too comfortable.To discuss his story, one that is left out of Reconstruction narratives, is today’s guest, Owen Clayton, author of Roving Bill Aspinwall: Dispatches from a Hobo in Post-Civil War America. Beyond travelling the states, Aspinwal spent 24 years writing letters to temperance advocate and professor, John McCook. His letters give a lucid account of the realities of living on the road as well as the challenges Bill faced dealing with his lingering war injuries both mental and physical.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Several thousand Japanese Americans were trained by the US Military Intelligence Service and sent to the Pacific to serve as interpreters, translators, and interrogators, even as their own families were being held in internment camps in America. Why haven’t we heard about their story?Today’s guest is Bruce Henderson, author of “Bridge to the Sun.” He follows six of these soldiers, who were among the first Japanese Americans to serve in combat after Pearl Harbor, as they fight two wars simultaneously: one, overseas against their ancestral homeland, the other, against prejudice back home in America. Exploring several first-person accounts including personal interviews, oral histories, diaries, and previously classified records, we look at the courage, heroism, and patriotism of these troops.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The qualities that made Franklin Roosevelt great weren’t things that he was born with but arguable the things that he had to learn in the hardest years of his life. Many thought of Roosevelt as the quintessential political natural. But the essential Roosevelt traits – his strategic ability, his gifts as an orator, his understanding of suffering and his own ability to ease it – were all born in the seven years he spent trying to recover from the effects of polio. To understand what made FDR a great president in a time of cascading global crises, you have to look at the lessons he took away from the greatest crisis of his own life.Today’s guest is Jonathan Darman, author of “Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President.” We explore his searing struggle with polio, and how he emerged from illness with a strength and wisdom that propelled him towards one of the most consequential and ambitious presidencies in U.S. history. FDR’s bout with polio transformed him into a leader with the compassion and courage to lead and motivate Americans through the Great Depression and World War II.Before polio, FDR was a handsome, vain, shallow politician who expected that things would always come easy to him because, up to then, most things always had. “He had a youthful lack of humility,” said his friend (and future Labor Secretary) Frances Perkins, “a streak of self-righteousness and a deafness to the hopes, fears, and aspirations which are the common lot.” Getting polio and losing the use of his legs at age 39 upended his plans for a future that had always seemed certain. It forced him to develop new skills – oratorical presence, strategic thinking, a sense of timing. It also helped him discover what suffering is really like and his own unique ability to ease it in others. “I would like to think that he would have done the things he did without his paralysis,” Perkins later said, “but . . . I don’t think he would have unless somebody had dealt him a blow between the eyes.”FDR’s experience taught him the practical necessities that people most require when they are experiencing adversity. For FDR, these necessities included clear, honest, detailed communication about the path ahead and ways to accurately measure progress; support systems that foster a sense of dignity, purpose and community; experts who provide advice but also promote a sense of partnership and autonomy in one’s own recovery; and the ability to sustain optimism while also staying focused on what is achievable and realSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

John Donne was not a typical English clergyman. Before his ordination, the 17th century Anglican priest had worked as a poet, lawyer, pirate, satirist, politician, and chaplain to the King, before ultimately becoming dean of the St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. But it was his preaching and writing that made him famous. He was so popular that thousands came to hear him, nearly killing some attendees in a stampede in one incident in 1623.It was his power over language that made him a celebrity. Most famous for his love poetry and erotic verse, Donne wrote about spirituality, and sex in a way that nobody else has, before or since. Taken together, Donne’s writings cements him as one of the finest writers in English, up there with Shakespeare. Despite his fame at the time, today he is a mystery. No diary entries, firsthand accounts, or manuscript drafts of his poems remain. What we do know of his life is that he suffered incredible hardship. He was a father of 10, often lived in squalor, and wrote a treatise on suicide as a young man. Yet despite these problems, or perhaps because of them, he was full of awe and wonder and captured that better than any other writer of his time.Today’s guest is Katherine Rundell, author of Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. She discusses how Donne saw with such a unique perspective and how he set down what he knew with such precision and flair that we can seize hold of it and carry it with us today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.