Episodios

  • 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
  • Io Saturnalia!

    Io Saturnalia!
    Dec 17 2025
    Rome was not a civilization that believed in accidents. It believed in structure, ritual, and the careful management of human behavior. When Romans celebrated Saturnalia each December, they were not indulging in a lapse of discipline. They were engaging in something older, stranger, and far more deliberate. Saturnalia was not a party that got out of hand. It was a pressure release designed by people who understood that a society held too tightly eventually breaks.
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    6 m
  • DDH - An Early Note on an American Melody

    DDH - An Early Note on an American Melody
    Dec 16 2025
    This week on Dave Does History, we step backward before we move forward. Long before July of 1776, long before Jefferson put pen to parchment, there was another moment when ordinary people decided that silence was no longer an option. They wrote their grievances down and dared the system to listen. In this episode of Liberty 250, we travel to England in December of 1640, to the Root and Branch Petition, a document most Americans have never heard of but whose fingerprints are all over the Declaration of Independence. It is the story of what happens when institutions stop working, when courts enforce power instead of restraining it, and when people discover that gentle correction has failed. This is not a tale of riots or revolutions, at least not at first. It is about legitimacy, authority, and the dangerous moment when citizens conclude that the structure itself is broken. Understanding that moment helps us understand our own founding, and why Americans learned to list their grievances and demand change in writing.
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    34 m
  • The Cone of Goodness

    The Cone of Goodness
    Dec 15 2025
    The ice cream cone is a small, crunchy piece of confidence. It is what a child chooses when a paper cup feels too ordinary and a bowl feels like homework. It is also, if we are being honest, an edible promise that you will handle your responsibilities. You will not spill. You will not drip down your wrist. You will not lose control of the situation in public. A cone is an optimistic contract between gravity and human dignity, signed in sugar and immediately challenged by summer heat.
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    6 m
  • Jesus 11.0

    Jesus 11.0
    Dec 14 2025
    This week on What the Frock, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod wander cheerfully into dangerous territory, the kind where theology, technology, and human incompetence all trip over the same loose cable. It starts with a simple question that should probably never be asked out loud before coffee. What if the Messiah returned as artificial intelligence. From there, things proceed exactly as you would expect, with skepticism, laughter, and a strong resistance to worshiping anything that requires a software update. Along the way, the conversation turns practical and uncomfortable. While people dream about perfect digital saviors and benevolent machine kings, real institutions struggle to follow their own rules. When governments cannot manage paperwork, and roads become more dangerous through bureaucratic indifference, the idea that code will save us starts to look like another golden calf with better lighting. This episode is funny, pointed, and unapologetically human. It asks hard questions, mocks easy answers, and reminds us that wisdom does not come preinstalled.
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    59 m
  • Kanadehon Chuhingura

    Kanadehon Chuhingura
    Dec 14 2025
    There is a particular corner of Japanese history where the past still feels alive. It is quiet, disciplined, and cold around the edges. Every December, when the year is wearing thin, people gather at a small temple in Tokyo. They burn incense and bow before a row of graves. These stones belong to men who are long dead, yet their story has managed to outlive entire dynasties and ideologies. The world calls them the Forty Seven Ronin. Japan calls them gishi, men of righteousness. Historians call them something else, something harder to pin down. They stand at the crossroads of fact and legend, a place where accuracy and imagination shake hands and agree not to fight about it. The story opens in the year 1701, in Edo Castle, where a lord lost his temper, a bureaucrat lost some skin, and the shogun lost all patience. That moment set in motion a tale of honor, grief, loyalty, and vengeance that refuses to fade away, no matter how many centuries drift past.
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    7 m