November 25, 1758. A cold rain falls on the forks of the Ohio. Exhausted British and provincial soldiers, expecting a final desperate battle, instead find only smoking ruins where Fort Duquesne stood the day before. The French have blown up their own magazines and vanished up the Allegheny River in the night. No flags are struck. No volleys are fired. Yet in that quiet moment the strategic heart of North America changes hands forever.

This is the story of the Forbes Campaign, a six-month ordeal of axes, frostbite, and forced marches that finally broke French power in the Ohio Country. Led by a dying Scottish general and a Virginian colonel who had first tasted defeat on these same rivers four years earlier, a hybrid army cut a new road across the Alleghenies and forced the French to destroy the fort they could no longer hold. What followed was not just the birth of Fort Pitt and the city of Pittsburgh, but the opening of the American interior. This is how the continent’s future was decided, one muddy mile at a time.

On Thanksgiving Eve 1971, while millions of Americans prepared for turkey and football, a nondescript man in a business suit bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle for twenty dollars cash. He gave his name as Dan Cooper, boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305, and settled into seat 18C with a bourbon and 7-Up.

Less than thirty minutes after takeoff, he handed flight attendant Florence Schaffner a note claiming he had a bomb. What followed was the most audacious crime in commercial aviation history. Cooper collected $200,000 in ransom, released the passengers in Seattle, and then ordered the crew to fly toward Mexico at low altitude. Somewhere over the dark, rain-soaked forests of southwest Washington, he opened the Boeing 727’s unique rear stairway and parachuted into the night with the money.

He vanished completely. No trace of the man, the parachute, or most of the cash has ever been found. The press soon misnamed him D.B. Cooper, and America gained its only unsolved skyjacking and one of its greatest folk legends.

Today we're talking about the single most important defense of free speech ever written in English: John Milton's Areopagitica, published illegally in November 1644 while England was busy tearing itself apart in civil war.

Parliament had just killed the king's censorship machine, watched ideas explode everywhere, panicked, and promptly rebuilt the exact same censorship machine under new management. Milton, already public enemy number one for arguing you should be allowed to divorce a bad spouse, responded by printing a blazing manifesto without a license and basically told the government: "Congratulations, you just became the tyrant you overthrew."

What he gave us wasn't just a complaint. It was the philosophical foundation for everything the First Amendment would later become: the conviction that real virtue has to be tested, that truth isn't fragile, and that the answer to bad ideas is never silence; it's a fair fight.

So buckle up. Four hundred years later, we're still living in the world Milton demanded. Let's go find out why.

The Juan Fernández Islands first caught my attention thanks to a documentary so wildly inaccurate that it should have come with a warning label. The history was nonsense, the claims were absurd, yet the imagery was stunning. Those rugged cliffs rising from the Pacific, the wind carved ridges, and the lonely bays felt like a place where the world still keeps its secrets. It was the kind of landscape that stays with you long after the credits roll.

In this episode we look past the fiction and into the real story of these islands. We explore how a frustrated navigator discovered them, how pirates and castaways turned them into a refuge, how Alexander Selkirk survived four years alone, and how war and disaster kept shaping the community that lives there today. The truth is better than anything a bad documentary could dream up, and it is well worth the journey.

Josiah Bartlett does not always get the fanfare of the larger revolutionary names, yet his fingerprints are all over the birth of the nation. He was a frontier doctor who challenged the medical habits of his day and saved lives by trusting observation over superstition. He was a legislator who refused to bow to royal pressure. When the moment of truth came in July of 1776, he was the first delegate called and the first to vote for independence. His signature followed right after John Hancock on the Declaration, a quiet reminder that courage often arrives without spectacle.

In this episode we look at how a shoemaker’s son from Amesbury became a founding governor, a key voice in the Continental Congress, and one of the earliest advocates for professional medicine in America. His life shows how steady character can shape a country just as much as fiery speeches or battlefield glory.

The story of the American Revolution usually unfolds with images of muskets, marches, and men debating the future of a continent. Yet the fight for liberty also lived in quieter rooms where spinning wheels hummed and tea went untouched. The Daughters of Liberty stepped into that space and turned ordinary domestic life into a political force that Parliament never saw coming.

Their work pulled women into a struggle that claimed to speak for all Americans while giving them no formal voice. They answered this slight with resolve. They controlled the household purse, so they made the boycotts real. They spun cloth when British imports dried up. They brewed liberty tea from herbs and leaves. Some carried intelligence for Washington. Some fought. Many organized. All left a mark.

Their efforts carried the Revolution forward. Their legacy reminds us that liberty depends on the courage of people who refuse to sit quietly while history unfolds around them.

In the quiet backcountry of South Carolina, a small trading village called Ninety Six became the unlikely center of a civil war within the American Revolution. It was a crossroads of trails and tempers, where Loyalists and Patriots clashed not just over independence, but over who truly represented justice and order.

In this episode, we look at the two sieges that defined Ninety Six: the first in 1775, when neighbors turned their guns on each other at Savage’s Old Fields, and the second in 1781, when General Nathanael Greene tried to break the British Star Fort. These battles tell a story of courage, confusion, and divided loyalties that tore the South apart.

Ninety Six reminds us that the Revolution was never just fought on distant battlefields. It was fought in backyards, in friendships, and in the hearts of ordinary people choosing between rebellion and the crown.

Welcome to another captivating episode of Dave Does History, recorded live on Bill Mick LIVE on November 18, 2025.

After a five-week recovery from shoulder surgery, historian Dave Bowman makes a triumphant return to explore a profound and often overlooked influence on America's founding: Virgil's ancient epic, The Aeneid.

Far from mere mythology to the Founding Fathers, this Roman masterpiece shaped their understanding of liberty as dutiful obedience to a higher moral order, not unchecked personal desire. Dave reveals how Aeneas's sacrifices mirror the Declaration of Independence, where duty triumphs over temptation, and ordered freedom demands virtue above all.

Join Bill Mick and Dave as they connect classical wisdom to today's challenges, reminding us why forgetting these roots leaves a nation adrift. Essential listening for anyone who loves history that matters.