Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchSarah Emma Edmonds: Private Franklin Thompson, Deserter Poster and Pension
Episode 13070
Sarah Emma Edmonds was born in December 1841 in New Brunswick, where an abusive father resented that she was not a boy. At 15 she fled an arranged ma…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Winfield Scott Hancock: A Saddle Nail at Gettysburg and the 1880 Election
Episode 13069
Winfield Scott Hancock, born in Pennsylvania in 1824 and named for the War of 1812 hero, graduated 18th of 25 at West Point and missed the assault on…
4 days, 18 hours ago
William Quantrill: The Ohio Schoolteacher Who Taught Jesse James to Raid
Episode 13068
William Clarke Quantrill was born in Ohio in 1837, began teaching school at 16 to pay off his late father's debts, and drifted west to Kansas in 1857…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Union Blockade: Prize Money, British Runners and Egypt's Cotton Bankruptcy
Episode 13067
In April 1861 Abraham Lincoln declared a blockade of 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline when the U.S. Navy had only three ships able to enforce it,…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Braxton Bragg: A Shell Under His Cot, Shiloh's Hornet's Nest and a Mutiny
Episode 13066
Braxton Bragg was born in 1817 in Warrenton, North Carolina, the son of a carpenter who grew wealthy, and grew up amid unproven local rumors that his…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Robert E. Lee's Contradictions: Zero Demerits, Granny Lee and Wesley Norris
Episode 13065
Robert E. Lee was born in 1807 to Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III, who was jailed twice for debt and fled to the West Indies…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Boston Corbett: The Hat Maker Who Shot Booth Through a Burning Barn
Episode 13064
Thomas Corbett was born in London in 1832, grew up in New York, and trained as a hat maker, inhaling mercury nitrate vapors linked to the condition b…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Gatling Gun: Richard Gatling's Life-Saving Idea, the Gorlov and the A-10
Episode 13063
Richard Jordan Gatling, a North Carolina inventor of seed planters and wheat drills, patented his battery gun in 1862 believing that one machine doin…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Stand Watie: New Echota Signer and the Last Confederate General to Yield
Episode 13062
Stand Watie, born Degataga in 1806 in the Cherokee Nation in what is now Georgia, was the last Confederate general to surrender in the field, signing…
4 days, 18 hours ago
Ambrose Burnside: Jilted at the Altar, His Carbine and Ohio's Order No. 38
Episode 13061
Ambrose Burnside was born in Indiana in 1824, apprenticed as a tailor, and reached West Point through his father's political connections, where he pi…
4 days, 18 hours ago