Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchRichard Nixon: From Poker-Playing Navy Officer to Watergate and the Fall of a Presidency
Episode 6859
Richard Nixon learned to bluff playing poker in the Navy during World War II, and he spent the rest of his career applying those skills to politics —…
1 week, 1 day ago
Salvador Allende: Chile's Elected Socialist and the Other September 11th
Episode 6860
On September 11, 1973 — exactly twenty-eight years before the attacks on the World Trade Center — the Chilean military bombed the presidential palace…
1 week, 1 day ago
Nicholas II: The Last Tsar, the Diamond-Studded Armor, and the Fall of Imperial Russia
Episode 6857
Nicholas II was the last Emperor of Russia — a man who inherited the largest country on earth and lost it all through a combination of personal weakn…
1 week, 1 day ago
Marie Antoinette: The Austrian Teenager Used as a Pawn and Executed as a Scapegoat
Episode 6856
Marie Antoinette was shipped to France at fourteen as a political pawn, married to a man who ignored her for seven years, blamed for a nation's finan…
1 week, 1 day ago
John Quincy Adams: The President Whose Greatest Work Came After the White House
Episode 6855
John Quincy Adams served one miserable term as president — widely considered a failure — and then did something no other former president has done: h…
1 week, 1 day ago
Louis XIV: How a Terrified Child King Built Himself Into the Sun
Episode 6853
Louis XIV became king of France at four years old and nearly lost his throne during the Fronde rebellions before he turned thirteen. That childhood t…
1 week, 1 day ago
Kim Il-sung: How a Guerrilla Fighter Made Himself North Korea's Eternal President
Episode 6852
Kim Il-sung died in 1994 but remains the constitutionally designated Eternal President of North Korea. No other leader in modern history has achieved…
1 week, 1 day ago
John Jay: The First Chief Justice Whose Treaty Made America Burn Him in Effigy
Episode 6854
John Jay was the first Chief Justice of the United States, a co-author of the Federalist Papers, and the man who negotiated the treaty with Britain t…
1 week, 1 day ago
Margaret Thatcher: From Rejected Chemistry Graduate to the Iron Lady Who Remade Britain
Episode 6849
Margaret Thatcher was rejected by ICI after a chemistry degree, told she was too strident for politics, and dismissed by the British establishment at…
1 week, 1 day ago
Che Guevara: From Argentine Guerrilla Fighter to the World's Most Profitable Capitalist Brand
Episode 6848
Che Guevara spent his life fighting capitalism, and capitalism won — by printing his face on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and dorm room posters sold for pr…
1 week, 1 day ago