Posts Tagged ‘Professor Buzzkill’
Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Speech about Martin Luther King
Historian Ray Boomhower joins us to analyze the famous speech given by RFK in Indianapolis, on hearing about the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. It’s one of the most famous and touching speeches in modern American history, and is usually credited with keeping Indianapolis calm in the wake of that horrible tragedy.…
Read MoreThe Unknown Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King did so much more for American society, and wanted so much more from the US government and US elite, than most people realize. Popular history has airbrushed out far too much about his life and work. Professor Phil Nash reminds us of the importance of King’s work, especially during the forgotten…
Read MoreMCM Robert Sherrod
Reporters and photographers rarely get discussed on this show. And that’s a pity because, in one way at least, reporters and photographers help provide a lot of the original material that historians use to study events and try to build up as full a picture as possible about the past. But one of the…
Read MoreCivil War Medicine
We usually hear that surgery and medical treatment during the Civil War was backward butchery. But was it? Historian Nic Hoffman from Kennesaw State University tells us how complicated it really was. We discuss: medical care before the war; the shock of Civil War carnage and how medics initially reacted; and changes in medical treatment…
Read MoreChurchill, “Blood, Sweat, and Tears.” Quote or No Quote?
With the popular film, The Darkest Hour, getting even more attention now because Gary Oldman won the Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Winston Churchill, I have even more reason than usual to point out bogus Churchill quotes. But I thought I’d talk about something that Churchill actually said, and that was…
Read MoreBenjamin Lay, Quakerism, and Anti-Slavery
We interview Professor Marcus Rediker about his new book, Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist. Benjamin Lay was one of the most famous anti-slavery protesters in colonial Pennsylvania in the early 1700s. He agitated against slavery and the slave trade in very unusual ways, and was eventually kicked out of…
Read MoreWCW Alison Palmer
It’s a Woman Crush Wednesday! Alison Palmer was a pioneer in gaining increased women’s rights and human rights in the American State Department. While working there in the 1950s and 1960s, Palmer ran up against the glass ceiling when trying to advance in the civil service at the State Department. She found it almost…
Read MoreThe Pentagon Papers
The Pentagon Papers Professor Phil Nash helps us explain the complicated and much-mythologized history of the Pentagon Papers, which is shorthand for the government-funded study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. According to New York Times in 1996, the Pentagon Papers showed that the government had, “systematically lied, not only to the…
Read MoreVenus de Milo
It’s all fun and games until someone loses their arms It’s the 8th of April 1820. On the Greek Aegean island of Milos, a man named Yorgos Kentrotas was collecting stones from an ancient ruin near his farm. He came across a small niche in a wall in that ruin. It caught his attention because…
Read MoreThe Liberty Bell
Examining the source of the crack It’s a dramatic and poignant story, Buzzkillers. July 4, 1776: the Second Continental Congress had been meeting in Philadelphia for over a year, trying to hammer out how to win the Revolutionary War and establish an independent nation. On that day they agreed to adopt the Declaration of Independence. The…
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