Episodios

  • Washington's Crossing

    Washington's Crossing
    Dec 25 2025
    Every nation has a moment when the story almost ends. For the American Revolution, that moment came in December of 1776. The army was shrinking. The government was running. The public was tired. Even George Washington thought the game might be nearly up. What followed was not a miracle and not a legend. It was a gamble made by exhausted men in freezing darkness, guided by bad maps, worse weather, and a single hard truth. If this failed, there was no Revolution left to save.
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    5 m
  • The Leopoldville Coverup

    The Leopoldville Coverup
    Dec 24 2025
    Christmas Eve, 1944. The war is supposed to be turning in the Allies’ favor. The lights of France are visible from the deck. Home feels close enough to imagine. Then a single torpedo reminds everyone that war does not care about calendars, carols, or confidence. Tonight on Dave Does History, we are telling the story of the SS Léopoldville, a troopship sunk just five and a half miles from safety, taking nearly eight hundred American soldiers with it. This is not a tale of heroism neatly wrapped in victory. It is a story of confusion, bad assumptions, language barriers, and systems that failed when they were needed most. It is also a story that was deliberately buried for decades, leaving families with silence instead of answers. The Léopoldville disaster matters because it was preventable, forgotten, and human. And because history does not only fail on battlefields. Sometimes it fails quietly, in the dark, while everyone assumes someone else is paying attention.
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    5 m
  • DDH - The Christmas Carol

    DDH - The Christmas Carol
    Dec 23 2025
    Every December we return to A Christmas Carol the way we return to familiar music. We know the notes. We know the ending. We know exactly how it is supposed to make us feel. And that is precisely the problem. In this episode of Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, we pull the story back out of its comfortable holiday wrapping and look at what Dickens was actually doing in 1843. This was not a bedtime story. It was a warning. Dickens was not trying to redeem one grumpy old man. He was indicting a society that had learned how to explain suffering away with respectable words and tidy laws. Scrooge is not a monster. He is lawful, rational, and catastrophically wrong. The ghosts are not magical fixes. They expose. They accuse. They do not excuse. This episode asks the question Dickens intended. Not whether Scrooge changed, but whether we ever do once the lights come up and the book is closed.
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    52 m
  • WTF - Merry Christmas, You Wankers

    WTF - Merry Christmas, You Wankers
    Dec 21 2025
    Welcome to *What the Frock*, where the holiday cheer comes with footnotes and the goodwill is thoroughly cross examined. In this episode, Dave and Rod wander straight into Victorian England, a place absolutely convinced it had solved humanity, morality, and the correct volume at which joy should be expressed. Spoiler alert, it had not. What starts as a simple question, why Americans say “Merry Christmas” while Brits insist on “Happy Christmas,” turns into a full scale rummage through moral panic, class anxiety, bad history, and the peculiar Victorian talent for turning joy into a character flaw. Along the way, Dickens gets his due, Malthus gets side eyed, and the idea that suffering builds character gets dragged into the light where it does not age well. If you like your Christmas thoughtful, argumentative, slightly irreverent, and allergic to smug certainty, you are in the right place. Say it however you like. Just understand why some people were afraid of the word “merry.”
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    59 m
  • The Rebpublic of Fredonia

    The Rebpublic of Fredonia
    Dec 21 2025
    On the morning of December 21, 1826, a flag went up over the Old Stone Fort at Nacogdoches. It was red over white, roughly made, stitched by hands more accustomed to frontier repairs than nation building. It did not rise to the sound of drums or cannon. It was hauled up on a wooden pole by men who looked over their shoulders as often as they looked at their handiwork. Beneath it stood a small crowd, some curious, some committed, most uncertain. The flag announced the birth of the Republic of Fredonia.
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    5 m
  • The Flying Tigers

    The Flying Tigers
    Dec 19 2025
    The image is familiar even if the story behind it is not. A fighter plane with shark teeth painted on its nose, a grin aimed straight at history. For decades that image has stood in for courage, swagger, and American defiance before Pearl Harbor. But the real story of the Flying Tigers is stranger, rougher, and far more human than the legend suggests. This episode of Dave Does History walks into that space carefully. Not to knock the myth down, and not to polish it brighter, but to understand what actually happened when a small group of American pilots resigned their commissions, signed civilian contracts, and flew into a war their country had not officially joined. These men were not mercenaries in the simple sense, and they were not knights of the air either. They were professionals caught in a moment when politics, necessity, and survival collided. What you are about to hear is the story of how the American Volunteer Group came together, how they fought, and why they mattered. It is about improvisation under pressure, hard lessons learned quickly, and the quiet understanding that war rarely waits for clean rules. The shark teeth are still there. This time, we look behind them.
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    5 m
  • Valley Forge

    Valley Forge
    Dec 19 2025
    The winter encampment that Americans reflexively call “Valley Forge” has become a kind of historical shorthand, a single frozen tableau where virtue shivers nobly and emerges purified. That picture is comforting, and like most comforting pictures, it is incomplete. The army that staggered into Valley Forge in December 1777 had been forming, failing, adapting, and nearly coming apart since the summer of 1775. Valley Forge was not the beginning of the story, and it was not even the worst chapter. It was the reckoning.
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    4 m
  • The Last Ditch effort

    The Last Ditch effort
    Dec 18 2025
    There are winters when history stands very still, almost as if the world is bracing for something it already knows it cannot avoid. The winter of 1860 felt like that. One can imagine the heavy December air in Washington settling over the capital like a thick blanket that even the most stubborn stove fires could not quite chase away. The legislators walked through the corridors with forced conversations and polite nods, but there was a hollow ring to every greeting. The nation had reached a point where its disagreements were no longer political quarrels but questions about the very structure of its future. Abraham Lincoln had been elected with a firm pledge that slavery would not expand into the territories. To the Deep South, this was something far beyond a routine policy dispute. It sounded like a warning bell. It sounded like a door closing. It sounded, to many, like the first quiet toll of a funeral.
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    4 m