Episodes

  • History and the Supreme Court

    History and the Supreme Court
    Jan 22 2026
    I do not usually stop what I am doing to listen to Supreme Court oral arguments. That is lawyer country. Necessary work, important work, but not usually where historians spend their time. But this week, something in one of those arguments stopped me cold. Not because of the outcome, which we do not yet know. Not because of the modern policy question involved. But because of how history was used. Or more precisely, how it was handled. During arguments over a Hawaii firearms law, attorneys defending the statute reached back into the Reconstruction era and cited the post Civil War Black Codes as historical precedent. Laws written in 1865 and 1866 to control, restrict, and terrorize newly freed Black Americans. Laws so abusive that they triggered the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment itself. Those laws were presented, in the Supreme Court of the United States, as examples of acceptable historical regulation. If you are not a historian of Reconstruction, that might sound odd. If you are, it should feel deeply unsettling. This episode is not about whether Hawaii’s law is right or wrong. It is not about modern politics. It is about how history works, what it is for, and what happens when we treat the past as a collection of citations instead of a story with meaning. Because some laws are precedents. And some laws are warnings.
    Show more Show less
    17 mins
  • DDH - An Instrument of Arbitrary Power

    DDH - An Instrument of Arbitrary Power
    Jan 20 2026
    Before the first shots were fired, before tea hit the water, the American Revolution was already underway, quietly, methodically, and with paperwork. This episode begins in places that do not make it onto commemorative mugs. Courtrooms. Docks. Ledger books. It begins with a simple realization that spread through the colonies like a winter chill. British authority was no longer bound by its own rules. The law, once assumed to be a shield, had started to feel like a weapon. We tend to remember rebellion when it looks dramatic. We forget it when it looks procedural. But long before muskets cracked at Lexington, colonists were watching ships seized under cannon, neighbors dragged into courts without juries, and legal rights evaporate behind polite language and official seals. These were not accidents. They were patterns. Today on Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, we look at two maritime flashpoints that forced that truth into the open. The seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty. The burning of HMS Gaspee. On the surface, they look like local disputes. They exposed something far more dangerous. A system willing to deny juries, relocate trials, and treat distance itself as punishment. These events did not just provoke anger. They taught a lesson. When law becomes untethered from consent, resistance stops being radical and starts being rational. This is the story of how paperwork, procedure, and power pushed America toward independence.
    Show more Show less
    29 mins
  • WTF - Bat (CRAP) Crazy

    WTF - Bat (CRAP) Crazy
    Jan 18 2026
    Welcome back to *What the Frock?*, the show where a rabbi, a friar, and a strong cup of coffee try to make sense of a world that has clearly skipped a few maintenance checks. In this episode, we start where all serious analysis begins, with football heartbreak and bad bets. From there, we wander, cheerfully and with intent, into the strange new marketplace where people no longer wager on games but on governments, resignations, and the expiration dates of world leaders. Not *if*, mind you, but *when*. That alone should tell you something about the age we are living in. Along the way, we ask uncomfortable questions about media, madness, and why shouting has replaced persuasion. We talk about the economics of outrage, the difference between conviction and performance, and what happens when even the loudest voices start blinking at the craziness around them. We also notice something quieter and far more unsettling, the absence of celebration as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches with barely a whisper. There are no tidy answers here. Just history, skepticism, gallows humor, and a shared sense that silence often says more than noise ever could. Pull up a chair. Pour a drink if that is your custom. The frock is on, and the world is still strange.
    Show more Show less
    56 mins
  • 41 Cold War Sentinels - USS Benjamin Franklin SSBN-640

    41 Cold War Sentinels - USS Benjamin Franklin SSBN-640
    Jan 17 2026
    She was built to disappear. Not in the romantic sense, not like a magician’s flourish or a ship slipping into fog for the sake of poetry, but in the colder, more disciplined sense of Cold War necessity. USS Benjamin Franklin was designed to vanish into the acoustic shadows of the ocean, to become a rumor instead of a presence, a probability instead of a target. That was the deal struck between the Navy and history in the early 1960s. If the submarine could not be found, then war itself might be kept at bay.
    Show more Show less
    6 mins
  • Underway On Nuclear Power

    Underway On Nuclear Power
    Jan 17 2026
    On the morning of January 17, 1955, the Thames River at Groton looked much as it always had in winter. Gray water, cold air, men in heavy coats moving with the practiced economy of sailors who knew their business. Nothing in the scene warned the casual observer that the age of naval propulsion was about to change course. At 11:00 a.m., the submarine tied to the pier eased herself free, not with drama or spectacle, but with a kind of quiet confidence. A few minutes later, a short message blinked out by signal lamp to the tender alongside. “Underway on Nuclear Power.” It was ten words, plain and unsentimental, and it marked the first time in human history that a vehicle moved under the control of sustained nuclear fission. The boat was the USS Nautilus, and the world did not yet grasp what had just slipped its moorings.
    Show more Show less
    8 mins
  • Religious Freedom

    Religious Freedom
    Jan 16 2026
    In January of 1786, a quiet vote in the Virginia General Assembly changed the way the modern world understands belief, power, and conscience. There were no parades, no ringing bells, and no sense that history had just pivoted. Yet with the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, something ancient finally loosened its grip. For the first time, a government walked away from controlling belief and trusted its people to carry faith, doubt, and conviction on their own. This story is not about abstract philosophy or tidy slogans. It is about jail cells and tax collectors, about preachers hauled into court, about lawmakers who feared that liberty might unravel moral order. It is about Thomas Jefferson writing a law that dared to claim the human mind was created free, and James Madison fighting to defend that idea when compromise seemed safer. It is also about ordinary Virginians, Baptists, Presbyterians, and dissenters who refused to keep paying for a church they did not belong to. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom did not promise harmony. It promised restraint. It did not elevate religion or suppress it. It stepped aside. In this episode, we walk through the long road to that decision, the battles that nearly derailed it, and the legacy it left behind, one that still shapes the First Amendment and the global understanding of freedom of conscience today.
    Show more Show less
    6 mins
  • Vermont

    Vermont
    Jan 15 2026
    January in the Green Mountains has never been gentle. It strips away comfort, soft thinking, and easy assumptions. In that kind of cold, people tend to tell the truth, or at least the version of it they are willing to live with. On January 15, 1777, a group of settlers gathered in a small courthouse in Westminster and did something the American story still struggles to categorize. They declared independence, not from a distant king alone, but from a neighboring colony that claimed ownership of their land, their labor, and their future. This is not a tale of powdered wigs and polished speeches. It is a story rooted in mud, timber, disputed deeds, and men who had already learned that law could be used as a weapon. Vermont did not drift into independence on a philosophical breeze. It fought its way there through land disputes, court orders, whippings in the woods, and blood spilled on courthouse steps. The revolution here was practical before it was idealistic. For fourteen years, Vermont existed as something awkward and unresolved, a republic without recognition, a state before it was allowed to be one. In that space, it experimented boldly, sometimes uncomfortably, with ideas of liberty, labor, and power. This video walks through that uneasy birth, not as legend, but as lived history, fingerprints still visible on the banister.
    Show more Show less
    7 mins
  • DDH - It's Just Common Sense!

    DDH - It's Just Common Sense!
    Jan 13 2026
    Philadelphia did not merely witness rebellion. It engineered amplification. This episode opens in a city that understood a hard, unfashionable truth. Ideas do not change history because they are elegant. They change history because they are repeated until they feel unavoidable. Philadelphia was not built for reverie. It was built for movement. Goods, rumors, sermons, pamphlets, all circulating with the same restless energy. If an idea could not survive contact with ink, paper, and working hands, it did not last long . By early 1776, the argument for independence was no longer a polite theory. It was a physical object. Folded. Smudged. Passed hand to hand. Sometimes read aloud by men who barely read at all. This was not the hush of a library. It was the racket of a print shop doing what print shops do best, turning thought into force. Thomas Paine did not sound like a philosopher auditioning for posterity. He sounded like
    Show more Show less
    36 mins