Dave Does History

In September of 1759, two armies faced each other on a plateau outside Quebec City, on land that belonged to a farmer named Abraham Martin. History remembers it as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.James Wolfe, the young British general already dying of illness, gambled everything on a nighttime landing and a climb up a cliff the French thought was impassable. By dawn, four thousand redcoats stood ready. Montcalm, the French commander, chose to attack immediately rather than wait for reinforcements.The French fired too soon. The British waited, then unleashed a crushing volley at close range. Within minutes the French line collapsed. Wolfe was shot three times and died hearing of his victory. Montcalm was mortally wounded and died the next day.The battle lasted less than an hour, but it ended French Canada, gave Britain control of the St. Lawrence, and set the colonies on the road toward revolution.

On July 16, 1950, in the early chaos of the Korean War, a Catholic chaplain named Father Herman Felhoelter made a choice that would define the very idea of sacrifice. Surrounded by wounded American soldiers who could not be moved, he stayed behind as the enemy advanced.He knelt to pray over the dying and was gunned down mid-prayer, alongside the men he refused to leave.This is the story of the Chaplain–Medic Massacre, one of the first and most horrifying atrocities of the war. It is a story of faith, courage, and the cold brutality of battle.But more than that, it is a story that reminds us what it means to stand for something greater than yourself. In this episode of Dave Does History, we remember the man who carried no weapon, wore a cross on his arm, and walked into eternity doing what he was called to do: pray.

In the early months of World War II, deep beneath enemy waters, the crew of the USS Silversides faced an unimaginable challenge: an emergency appendectomy performed without a doctor, using improvised tools, and under constant threat of enemy attack. Join us as we dive into the incredible story of Pharmacist’s Mate Thomas A. Moore, who defied the odds to save his crewmate’s life in one of the most daring medical feats in naval history. From bent spoons as surgical tools to a harrowing depth charge escape, this episode captures the ingenuity, resilience, and courage that defined the silent service during WWII.

This week on Dave Does History, the American Revolution is stripped of its romance and examined where wars are actually won or lost: logistics.Picking up in the brutal winter of 1775–1776, Dave Bowman walks listeners into British-occupied Boston, a city encircled, frozen, and starving. What emerges is not a tale of grand ideology or battlefield heroics, but of an empire choking on distance, delay, and bureaucratic blindness. British troops, unable to be properly supplied or housed, turn to distraction, staging plays in the heart of a Puritan city while hunger and resentment close in around them.That misplaced confidence collapses spectacularly on January 8, 1776, when American forces exploit the moment to strike, not for victory, but for humiliation and message. From there, the story widens. Boston becomes a case study in imperial failure, revealing how the Atlantic Ocean, slow communication, and fractured governance undermine Britain’s ability to rule from afar.Through the lens of Jefferson’s grievances and Eisenhower’s warning that professionals study logistics, this episode reframes the Revolution as an autopsy of a system that could not outrun distance. It is not a story of sudden defeat, but of slow erosion, where an empire discovers too late that power cannot survive on assumptions alone.

Thomas Paine did not arrive in history as a marble statue ora finished idea. He arrived tired, broke, and angry, with ink on his fingersand a habit of saying the quiet part out loud. When Americans remember theRevolution, they tend to remember generals on horseback and signatures onparchment. They forget the man hunched over scrap paper by candlelight, turningfrustration into sentences that ordinary people could understand.Paine did not command armies. He did something far moredangerous. He told people that authority had to justify itself, that traditionwas not an argument, and that liberty was not a favor granted by kings. Hewrote for farmers, laborers, and soldiers who were cold, unpaid, and uncertainwhether any of this was worth the cost. His words did not promise comfort. Theydemanded courage.This episode follows Paine from obscurity to influence andthen into exile, tracing how the same clarity that helped ignite independencelater made him unwelcome in polite company. He was celebrated when he wasuseful and discarded when he refused to stop asking questions. By the end ofhis life, the nation he helped create no longer knew what to do with him.This is not a story about a flawless founder. It is the storyof a necessary one. A man who believed that common sense was revolutionary, andwho paid the price for proving it.

It sounds like a tall tale told too late at night. A submarine in the Rocky Mountains, sitting on a frozen lake nearly nine thousandfeet above sea level, more than a thousand miles from the nearest ocean. But this story is not folklore. It is documented, photographed, and quietly stubborn in its facts.In the winter of 1944, residents of Central City, Colorado,watched a rusted, cigar shaped vessel rise from the ice of Missouri Lake after forty-five years underwater. The band played a patriotic tune better suited to a harbor than a mining camp, and someone cracked a joke about the longest crash dive in history. They were not wrong.This is the story of the Rocky Mountain submarine, built insecret in 1898 by a skilled and eccentric engineer named Rufus T. Owens. It is a story about ambition, miscalculation, and the peculiar American habit of attempting the impossible simply because no one has proven it cannot be done.

"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny." With these words, the Declaration of Independence transformed a political dispute into an existential struggle for survival. To the American Patriots, the arrival of 30,000 German soldiers—popularly known as "Hessians"was the ultimate betrayal by King George III.Demonized in the press as "blood-thirsty butchers" and even rumored to be cannibals, these troops were not actually independent guns-for-hire, but "auxiliaries" rented out by their princes to fund European state budgets. Their presence on American soil radicalized the colonies, serving as the "clinching argument" that reconciliation with the Crown was impossible. Yet, the story of the Hessians is also one of surprising integration. While they arrived as symbols of tyranny, thousands would eventually desert the British army to become American citizens. Join us as we uncover the "Mercenary Shadow"—the military necessity, the propaganda war, and the human story behind the German soldiers who unintentionally helped birth a new nation.

I do not usually stop what I am doing to listen to Supreme Court oral arguments. That is lawyer country. Necessary work, important work, but not usually where historians spend their time. But this week, something in one of those arguments stopped me cold. Not because of the outcome, which we do not yet know. Not because of the modern policy question involved. But because of how history was used.Or more precisely, how it was handled.During arguments over a Hawaii firearms law, attorneys defending the statute reached back into the Reconstruction era and cited the post Civil War Black Codes as historical precedent. Laws written in 1865 and 1866 to control, restrict, and terrorize newly freed Black Americans. Laws so abusive that they triggered the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment itself.Those laws were presented, in the Supreme Court of the United States, as examples of acceptable historical regulation.If you are not a historian of Reconstruction, that might sound odd. If you are, it should feel deeply unsettling.This episode is not about whether Hawaii’s law is right or wrong. It is not about modern politics. It is about how history works, what it is for, and what happens when we treat the past as a collection of citations instead of a story with meaning.Because some laws are precedents.And some laws are warnings.

Before the first shots were fired, before tea hit the water,the American Revolution was already underway, quietly, methodically, and with paperwork.This episode begins in places that do not make it ontocommemorative mugs. Courtrooms. Docks. Ledger books. It begins with a simple realization that spread through the colonies like a winter chill. British authority was no longer bound by its own rules. The law, once assumed to be ashield, had started to feel like a weapon.We tend to remember rebellion when it looks dramatic. Weforget it when it looks procedural. But long before muskets cracked at Lexington, colonists were watching ships seized under cannon, neighbors dragged into courts without juries, and legal rights evaporate behind polite language and official seals. These were not accidents. They were patterns.Today on Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, we look at twomaritime flashpoints that forced that truth into the open. The seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty. The burning of HMS Gaspee. On the surface, they look like local disputes. They exposed something far more dangerous. A system willing to deny juries, relocate trials, and treat distance itself aspunishment.These events did not just provoke anger. They taught alesson. When law becomes untethered from consent, resistance stops being radical and starts being rational.This is the story of how paperwork, procedure, and powerpushed America toward independence.

On January 17, 1955, there was no cheering crowd, no grand speech echoing across the harbor, and no sense that history was demanding attention. There was only a submarine easing away from a pier in Groton, Connecticut, and a short signal sent by flashing light. Underway on nuclear power. Ten words that quietly ended an era that had ruled the seas since coal smoke and canvas.This is not a story about a miracle machine or a flawless triumph. It is a story about discipline, stubbornness, risk, and a Navy willing to trust mathematics and metal more than tradition. USS Nautilus did not simply go to sea, she changed what going to sea meant. She broke the old bargains that submariners had lived with for decades, the need to surface, the tyranny of fuel, the constant negotiation between endurance and survival.In this episode, we walk through that moment and everything that made it possible. The engineers in the desert, the admiral who refused shortcuts, the crew who stepped aboard something the world had never seen before. No mythology, no inflated heroics, just the hard truth of how the Nuclear Navy began. Quietly, deliberately, and forever.

In January of 1786, a quiet vote in the Virginia General Assembly changed the way the modern world understands belief, power, and conscience. There were no parades, no ringing bells, and no sense that history had just pivoted. Yet with the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, something ancient finally loosened its grip. For the first time, a government walked away from controlling belief and trusted its people to carry faith, doubt, and conviction on their own.This story is not about abstract philosophy or tidy slogans. It is about jail cells and tax collectors, about preachers hauled into court, about lawmakers who feared that liberty might unravel moral order. It is about Thomas Jefferson writing a law that dared to claim the human mind was created free, and James Madison fighting to defend that idea when compromise seemed safer. It is also about ordinary Virginians, Baptists, Presbyterians, and dissenters who refused to keep paying for a church they did not belong to.The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom did not promise harmony. It promised restraint. It did not elevate religion or suppress it. It stepped aside. In this episode, we walk through the long road to that decision, the battles that nearly derailed it, and the legacy it left behind, one that still shapes the First Amendment and the global understanding of freedom of conscience today.

January in the Green Mountains has never been gentle. It strips away comfort, soft thinking, and easy assumptions. In that kind of cold, people tend to tell the truth, or at least the version of it they are willing to live with. On January 15, 1777, a group of settlers gathered in a small courthouse in Westminster and did something the American story still struggles to categorize. They declared independence, not from a distant king alone, but from a neighboring colony that claimed ownership of their land, their labor, and their future.This is not a tale of powdered wigs and polished speeches. It is a story rooted in mud, timber, disputed deeds, and men who had already learned that law could be used as a weapon. Vermont did not drift into independence on a philosophical breeze. It fought its way there through land disputes, court orders, whippings in the woods, and blood spilled on courthouse steps. The revolution here was practical before it was idealistic.For fourteen years, Vermont existed as something awkward and unresolved, a republic without recognition, a state before it was allowed to be one. In that space, it experimented boldly, sometimes uncomfortably, with ideas of liberty, labor, and power. This video walks through that uneasy birth, not as legend, but as lived history, fingerprints still visible on the banister.

Philadelphia did not merely witness rebellion. It engineered amplification.This episode opens in a city that understood a hard, unfashionable truth. Ideas do not change history because they are elegant. They change history because they are repeated until they feel unavoidable. Philadelphia was not built for reverie. It was built for movement. Goods, rumors, sermons, pamphlets, all circulating with the same restless energy. If an idea could not survive contact with ink, paper, and working hands, it did not last long .By early 1776, the argument for independence was no longer a polite theory. It was a physical object. Folded. Smudged. Passed hand to hand. Sometimes read aloud by men who barely read at all. This was not the hush of a library. It was the racket of a print shop doing what print shops do best, turning thought into force.Thomas Paine did not sound like a philosopher auditioning for posterity. He sounded like

Philadelphia did not just host a revolution. It operated one.This episode begins in a city that understood something the textbooks tend to skip over. Ideas do not change the world because they are true. They change the world because they move. Because someone prints them, stacks them, sells them, reads them aloud, and refuses to let them sit quietly on a shelf.By early 1776, Philadelphia had become the loudest room in America. Not because it shouted, but because it repeated. Ink, paper, muscle, and risk. A working city doing what working cities do best, turning raw material into something that could not be ignored.At the center of it all stands a pamphlet that did not ask permission and a printer who did not blink.Thomas Paine did not arrive as a philosopher polishing arguments for posterity. He arrived like a man soaked to the bone, pointing out that the roof belonged to someone an ocean away. He asked questions so blunt they sounded obvious only after you heard them. Why an island ruled a continent. Why birth masqueraded as authority. Why patience had begun to look like surrender.But Paine alone does not explain the moment. Words need machinery. They need presses bolted to floors, type worn smooth by human hands, and printers willing to sell treason one sheet at a time.That is where Robert Bell enters the story.This episode is about noise. The good kind. The kind made when metal meets paper again and again until dissent stops being private and starts sounding inevitable.Before there was a bell in a tower, there was a Bell in a shop.And that was enough to wake a continent.

January 1776 is usually remembered as a moment of clarity. Common Sense appears, the fog lifts, and independence suddenly feels inevitable. But that is not how it actually happened.This episode tells the messier story, the human one. A story about cold winters and empty pockets. About a radical writer who believed words could change the world, and a flamboyant printer who believed controversy could sell anything. About a handshake deal that collapsed, money that vanished, mittens that were never bought, and a pamphlet that escaped everyone’s control.Common Sense did not spread because it was orderly or polite. It spread because it was cheap, stolen, argued over, and fought about in public. Its impact came not just from what it said, but from how it was printed, pirated, and pushed into the streets.This is the story behind the ink. And why the American Revolution was never as tidy as we like to remember.

Alexander Hamilton is one of the most argued over figures in American history, and that alone tells you something important. He was never comfortable, never easy, and never interested in applause. Born illegitimate in the Caribbean, raised amid loss and instability, Hamilton arrived in America with no inheritance except urgency. He believed independence without structure was an illusion and that liberty required systems strong enough to survive human nature.We trace Hamilton’s life from obscurity to influence, from the chaos of revolution to the hard work of building a nation that could actually function. We will follow him as soldier, writer, constitutional architect, and the first Secretary of the Treasury, a man who wired the republic with credit, authority, and consequence. We will also confront his flaws, his scandals, his enemies, and the choices that led to his violent death.Hamilton did not ask to be loved. He asked to be effective. Two centuries later, the country is still living inside the systems he built.

Rome did not fall in a day, and it did not fall because one man crossed a river. That is the version history likes because it is neat and dramatic and wrong in the ways that matter. The crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC was not a sudden act of ambition. It was the final symptom of a republic that had been quietly coming apart for a generation.By the time Julius Caesar reached that narrow stream, the Roman political system was already jammed solid. Power had shifted away from institutions and toward personalities. Laws had become weapons. Compromise was treated as weakness. The Senate still spoke the language of tradition, but it no longer controlled events. When a system cannot resolve conflict through its own rules, it eventually hands the problem to force.This video is not about celebrating Caesar or condemning him. It is about understanding the machinery that failed before his boots ever touched the water. We will trace how informal alliances replaced law, how fear radicalized politics, and how a constitution designed for a city state collapsed under the weight of empire.The Rubicon matters not because it was crossed, but because by then there was nowhere else to go.

In January 1788, the future of the American experiment advanced not with shouting crowds or dramatic reversals, but with a quiet vote in Connecticut. It was the fifth state to ratify the United States Constitution, and the outcome was never really in doubt. What makes this moment worth our attention is not the margin of victory, but the manner in which the decision was made. Connecticut was known then, as it often is now, for being steady, deliberate, and restrained. That temperament shaped how the state approached revolution, governance, and ultimately the Constitution itself.Connecticut was not indifferent. It was cautious. Its delegates understood that the Constitution was imperfect, that power carried risks, and that liberty did not preserve itself automatically. They accepted the document not as an article of faith, but as a workable framework designed to survive uncertainty, foreign threats, and human fallibility.At the heart of the story is a simple idea. Union was not an abstract ideal. It was a matter of survival. Connecticut’s ratification helped legitimize the Constitution at a critical moment, proving it could earn the assent of the most careful members of the union. This is a story about decisions made without applause, and why those decisions often matter most.

In January of 1788, the future of the American experiment moved forward not with fireworks or fiery speeches, but with a measured vote in a cold New England hall. Connecticut did what it had always done. It listened, it weighed, and it decided. This was the fifth state to ratify the Constitution, a moment often treated as a footnote, yet one that carried real consequence. Connecticut was not a hotbed of revolutionary passion. It was something rarer and more dangerous to ignore, a place where stability mattered and where compromise was treated as a civic virtue rather than a surrender. The very framework of the Constitution rested on a solution proposed by Connecticut men, which meant this vote was never just symbolic. It was personal. In this episode, we walk through that quiet decision, the arguments that shaped it, and the deeper fears that hovered behind polite debate. This is a story about union, defense, and the uncomfortable truth that liberty survives only when it is structured well enough to endure uncertainty.

Good morning and welcome back to Dave Does History, where the past is not dead, not even sleeping, and occasionally still smells like smoke.Today we pick up the Liberty 250 series at the moment when grievances stop being theoretical and start leaving people homeless. Long before the Declaration was signed, long before independence was inevitable, British policy chose fire as its argument. Towns burned. Harbors closed. Governors ruled from cannon decks instead of capitols. And the colonies took notes.This episode walks through the winter of 1775 and 1776, when Lord Dunmore’s choices in Virginia did more to unite the colonies than any speech or pamphlet ever could. Norfolk burns. Society fractures. Reconciliation quietly dies without a press release.Jefferson would later compress all of this into one sentence. We are here to unpack what that sentence really cost.History rarely announces the moment when compromise becomes impossible. It just lights the match and waits.