The American Indian leader Wakara was among the most influential and feared men in the nineteenth-century American West. He and his pan-tribal cavalry of horse thieves and slave traders dominated the Old Spanish Trail, the region’s most important overland route. They widened the trail and expanded its watering holes, reshaping the environmental and geographical boundaries of the region. They also exacted tribute from travelers passing along the trail and assisted the trail’s explorers with their mapmaking projects—projects that shaped the political and cultural boundaries of the West. What’s more, as the West’s greatest horse thief and horse trader as well as the region’s most prolific trader in enslaved Indians, Wakara supplied Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American settlers from Santa Fe to San Bernardino with the labor and horsepower that fueled empire and settler colonial expansion as well as fueled great changes to the West’s environmental landscape.

Today’s guest is Max Mueller, author of of Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West. We look at his complex and sometimes paradoxical story, revealing a man who both helped build the settler American West and defended Native sovereignty. Wakara was baptized a Mormon and allied with Mormon settlers against other Indians to seize large parts of modern-day Utah. Yet a pan-tribal uprising against the Mormons that now bears Wakara’s name stalled and even temporarily reversed colonial expansion. Through diplomacy and through violence, Wakara oversaw the establishment of settlements, built new trade routes, and helped create the boundaries that still define the region.

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Rome began as a pagan, Latin-speaking city state in central Italy during the early Iron Age and ended as a Christian, Greek-speaking empire as the age of gunpowder dawned. Everything about it changed, except its Roman identity. This was due to a unique willingness among Romans to include new people as citizens, an openness to new ideas, and an unparalleled adaptability that enabled Romans to remake every aspect of their society in ways that made it stronger and more resilient. Romans, who believed that their city was originally settled by exiles and captives, found a balance between the embrace of new people and ideas and a conservative attachment to the core features that had traditionally defined Roman society.

Roman history is a story of 80 generations of Romans who deftly challenged the rules governing their lives—and usually did so without overturning the institutions that made them safe and prosperous. In an age when people around the world are increasingly looking to charismatic leaders promising to scrap the rules governing modern states, Rome shows why states that want to endure should be repelled by the sudden, unpredictable jolts such characters provide.

To explore this topic with us is today’s guest, Edward J. Watts, author of “The Romans: A 2000-Year History.” Rather than collapse, Watts shows how Rome endured, evolved, and redefined itself for two thousand years—from the Punic Wars to the Crusades, and from Augustus to Constantine to Charlemagne.

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Gunslinging, gold-panning, stagecoach robbing, whiskey guzzling – the myth and infamy of the American West is synonymous with its most famous town: Deadwood, South Dakota. The storied mining town sprang up in early 1876 and came raining down in ashes only three years later, destined to become food for the imagination and a nostalgic landmark that now brings in more than two and a half million visitors each year.

Once described as “the most diabolical town on earth,” Deadwood was not merely a place where outlaws lurked, like Tombstone or Dodge City, but was itself an outlaw enterprise, not part of any U.S. territory or subject to U.S. laws or governance. This gave rise to the Western outlaw behavior Deadwood is known for, but it also bred a self-reliance and a spirit of cooperation unique on the frontier, and made it an exceptionally welcoming place for Americans traditionally excluded from mainstream society.

Today’s guest is Peter Cozzens, author of “Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West. We look at the town’s complex story in full (including the stories of some of the most famous names of Deadwood — Calamity Jane, Hickok, Bullock, and Swearingen — who were made popular by David Milch’s HBO series). One frontier town came to embody the best and worst of the West—a relic of humanity’s eternal quest to create order from chaos, a greater good from individual greed, and security from violence.

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Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, was in Havana in 1898, investigating the terrible conditions endured by Cubans whom the Spanish government had forced into concentration camps, where an estimated 425,000 people died of disease and starvation. While she was there, the American warship USS Maine exploded in Havana's harbor, which served as the pretext for an American invasion, leading to the Spanish-American War. The United States swiftly invaded and won the Spanish-American War in Cuba in 1898 due to its superior naval power, the decisive charge led by Theodore Roosevelt's "Rough Riders" at San Juan Hill, and the crucial assistance from Cuban insurgents against the already exhausted Spanish forces. In the wake of the Spanish-American war, the United States freed Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spanish control and, in turn, became an empire.

This created beliefs that America was a stern yet benevolent country tasked by Destiny to enforce peace and bring prosperity to the world. That comforting thought was soon disproven, especially in the Philippines, whose people discovered they had merely swapped one colonial power for another. They then endured a vicious war that saw an estimated 600,000 Filipino deaths. Whereas the Cuban campaign brought glory to Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, “the Philippine War would be America’s most quickly forgotten war, the one least celebrated in song or legend, the one least memorialized.” And for good reason, Jackson recounts: American soldiers committed countless atrocities while being felled right and left by disease and starvation themselves; many soldiers committed suicide, and others deserted to join Filipino rebels.

Today’s guest is Joe Jackson, author of “Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of the American Empire.” We look at this decisive war that turned American into a global power, and how poor planning turned into a disaster in the Philippines, creating our first quagmire of a war, long before Iraq or Vietnam.

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Nearly 16.4 million Americans served in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II, and for millions of survivors, the fighting left many of them physically and mentally broken for life. There was a 25% death rate in Japanese POW camps like Bataan, where starvation and torture were rampant, and fierce battles against suicidal Imperial Japanese forces, like at Iwo Jima, where 6,800 Americans died. Additionally, the psychological toll of witnessing Holocaust atrocities and enduring up to three years away from home intensified the war’s brutality. This is why when they returned home, they had physical and psychological wounds that festered, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades, and sometimes for the rest of their lives.

Veterans suffering from recurring nightmares, uncontrollable rages, and social isolation were treated by doctors who had little understanding of PTSD, a term that didn’t enter the DSM until 1984. Returning veterans and their families were forced to double up with their parents or squeeze into overcrowded, substandard shelters as the country wrestled with a housing crisis. Divorce rates doubled, with more than 1 million GIs leaving or being left by their wives by 1950. Alcoholism was rampant, and an entire generation became addicted to smoking.

To explore this dark shadow that hung over the WW2 generation, we’re joined by David Nasaw, author of The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II. Those affected include the period’s most influential political and cultural leaders, including John F. Kennedy, Robert Dole, and Henry Kissinger; J. D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut; Harry Belafonte and Jimmy Stewart. We look at the ways the horrors of World War 2 shaped their lives, but we also see incredible resilience and those who found ways to move past the horrors of their wartime experiences, and what we can learn from that today.

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Robert S. McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense during JFK and LBJ’s administrations, and one of the chief architects of the Vietnam war, made a shocking confession in his 1995 memoir. He said “We were wrong, terribly wrong.” McNamara believed this as early as 1965, that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. Yet, instead of urging U.S. forces to exit, he continued to preside over the war as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s principal wartime advisor. It would be eight more years until the United States officially withdrew from Vietnam. By then, 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese had lost their lives.

Why did McNamara fight so hard to escalate a war that he’d soon realize was beyond winning? Why was he so loyal to LBJ, whom he’d later describe as “crude, mean, vindictive, scheming, and untruthful”? While these questions are personal, the answers are vital to our understanding of the Vietnam War and American foreign policy at large.

Today’s guest is Philip Taubman, author of “McNamara Wat War: A New History.” We look at McNamara’s early life and how he epitomized the 20th-century technocratic 'whiz kid' through his Harvard-honed data analysis skills, which he applied to optimize the firebombing of Tokyo during WWII and later revolutionized Ford Motor Company as president, using statistical efficiency to drive innovation. His technocratic approach shaped U.S. strategy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam War, where he relied on data-driven decision-making, though with mixed results, notably escalating Vietnam based on flawed metrics like body counts.

We look at how ultimately, McNamara’s war was not only in Vietnam. He was also at war with himself—riven by melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and a profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam before it was too late.

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The October 7th attacks of Hamas on Israel were an unprecedented, surprise incursion by land, sea, and air that stunned the world and prompted Israel to declare war. The attacks, which included massacres in Israeli communities and a music festival, resulted in the deaths of over 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and the capture of some 251 hostages. This deadly terrorist attack was years in the making, but the underlying conflict goes back much further. It starts with the 1948 formation of Israel and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the wars that began there, an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe"). But the roots of the conflict extend even further—to Ottoman-era conflict between Jewish and Arab residents, the Bar Kokhba revolts in the 2nd century AD, and battles between ancient Israel and its enemies, tracing back all the way to the Iron Age wars between Israelites and the Philistines.

The October 7 attack is seen by some as an echo of the cyclical theme of persecution and existential threat against the Jewish people chronicled in the Old Testament, recalling narratives like the Exodus and attacks on ancient Israel. The modern conflict specifically originates in the same coastal region once controlled by the Philistines—an ancient people who lived on the southern coast of Canaan from the 12th century BC until their demise in the 7th century BC. Furthermore, the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 AD) was the third and final major Jewish-Roman war, resulting in a devastating defeat for the Jewish population of Judea and leading to the Roman renaming of the province to Syria Palaestina.

Today’s guest is Dinesh D'Souza, the director and executive producer of The Dragon's Prophecy. His documentary utilizes archaeological discoveries, suggesting a historical parallel and continuation of conflict. This shows how current global instability and the conflict over Israel are part of a larger story concerning the destiny of nations.

We also look at the intersection of religion, history, and current events to see how the last 3,000 years explain what’s happening today.

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The Peloponnesian War is considered one of the most famous wars of the ancient world not only because it was a massive and devastating conflict that reshaped the Greek world, but also because its thorough documentation by the historian Thucydides transformed how we understand history and war. On the face of it, the Peloponnesian War, fought over 2000 years ago in a corner of the Mediterranean, shouldn’t have made history. While the war was quite long, lasting 27 years, and oftentimes brutal, the two major parties, Athens and Sparta, were politically irrelevant within a century of the war’s conclusion. Plus the war’s cause is murky and takes a detailed understanding of Greek’s chaotic political history. And yet, it was this conflict which would be remembered for centuries. As the subject of a detailed history by Thucydides, an Athenian war general and historian, the story of the Peloponnesian War remains essential reading for politicians, historians, and students.

Today’s guest is Polly Low, who authored part of a new translation of The History of the Peloponnesian War. The translation depicts the events of the war between Athens and Sparta that began in 431 BC and would continue until 404, a conflict that embroiled not only mainland Greece but Greek states from the eastern Mediterranean and as far west as Italy and Sicily.

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