THE HISTORIANS #3: History's Myth of the Lone Hero, w/ Hampton Sides & H.W. Brands
Release Date: 11/06/2026
The Dodleston Messages
History Shorts
In 1984, a schoolteacher in the English village of Dodleston borrowed a BBC Micro computer from work and took it home. Then messages began appearing on it that nobody in the house had written. Most came from a man named Tomas Harden, who claimed to live in the same cottage in the 1540s, under Henry VIII. Then a group calling itself "2109" joined the conversation. In this episode, we look at one of the strangest paranormal stories of the computer age — and test it against the historical record, from Oxford college archives to the way people really spoke in Tudor England. 🎙️ History...
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Saint Brendan the Navigator
History Shorts
Sometime in the sixth century, according to legend, an Irish abbot named Brendan set out into the Atlantic in a boat of ox hides, searching for the Promised Land of the Saints. The story of his seven-year voyage — with a whale mistaken for an island, a pillar of crystal, and an island that hurled fire — became a medieval bestseller and put Saint Brendan's Island on European maps for centuries. In this episode, we separate the man from the legend, look at the evidence that Irish monks really did reach Iceland, and follow the explorer who sailed a leather boat to Newfoundland in 1977....
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THE HISTORIANS #3: History's Myth of the Lone Hero, w/ Hampton Sides & H.W. Brands
History Shorts
Welcome back to THE HISTORIANS — the series here on History Shorts where I sit down with two leading historians for an unscripted conversation about the questions that have shaped how we understand our past. We love turning history into a one-man show. One name on the cover. One figure on the horse. One genius who saw it all and did it alone. But look two inches to the left and there is almost always a crowd. In this episode of The Historians, H.W. Brands and Hampton Sides take up that tension. Brands has written the biographies we reach for when we want the man himself — Roosevelt, Grant,...
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Hayes’s Dry White House
History Shorts
From 1877 to 1881, the White House served no alcohol — not at state dinners, not at receptions. For more than a century, the credit and the blame went to First Lady Lucy Hayes, remembered as "Lemonade Lucy." But the decision belonged to her husband, Rutherford B. Hayes, fresh off one of the most disputed elections in American history and determined to hold on to temperance voters. In this episode, we explore the politics behind the dry White House, the rumor of rum-spiked punch at state dinners, and how Lucy Hayes ended up with a nickname nobody seems to have used while she was alive....
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Trailer: The Historians — America’s Lone Hero Myth (H.W. Brands & Hampton Sides)
History Shorts
One name on the cover. One figure on the horse. One genius who saw it all and did it alone. This Friday, H.W. Brands and Hampton Sides sit down for The Historians to ask whether that story still holds — or whether we keep giving one person credit for the crowd standing next to him. A short preview of the full conversation, dropping November 6 on History Shorts. Listen to the complete episode this Friday wherever you get your podcasts, or at historyshortspodcast.com.
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The Statue of Liberty Crowdfunding Hustle
History Shorts
We remember the Statue of Liberty as a gift from France. The reality was a decade-long scramble for money on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, ordinary citizens paid for the statue through banquets, concerts, and a national lottery. In America, nobody wanted to pay for the pedestal. Congress wouldn't help, New York's governor vetoed state funds, and the statue's arm spent years as a tourist attraction charging admission. In this episode, we tell the story of the 19th-century crowdfunding hustle — and how Joseph Pulitzer, his newspaper, and more than a hundred thousand small donors...
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The Unsinkable Violet Jessop
History Shorts
Violet Jessop was a stewardess for the White Star Line, and she was aboard for three of its worst days at sea. In 1911, the Olympic collided with a British warship. In 1912, she watched the Titanic go down from Lifeboat 16, holding a stranger's baby. In 1916, as a wartime nurse, she survived the sinking of the hospital ship Britannic by jumping from a lifeboat being dragged toward the propellers. In this episode, we meet the working woman behind the "Miss Unsinkable" legend — the toothbrush she refused to leave behind, a mysterious phone call years later, and the thirty more years she spent...
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How to Turn History into Emotion: The Apollo Story, with John Monsky
History Shorts
In this episode of History Shorts, I sit down with John Monsky, the creator, writer, and narrator of the American History Unbound series. Monsky has developed a distinctive way of telling American history. Rather than focusing on debate, his productions immerse audiences in the lives of the people who lived through major moments. He combines live orchestras, Broadway performers, archival film and photography, historic flags and artifacts, and personal stories into large-scale performances that have filled Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall, the Kennedy Center, and even the White House. On...
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The Battle of Grunwald
History Shorts
July 15, 1410. Before one of the largest battles of medieval Europe, the Teutonic Knights sent two naked swords to the King of Poland as an insult. By nightfall, their Grand Master was dead and their army destroyed. But the borders barely moved. In this episode, we tell the story of the Battle of Grunwald — and of the six-hundred-year fight over what it meant, from Matejko's canvas to a German victory named for revenge in 1914, to a postage stamp Nazi Germany refused to tolerate. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine...
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When Spain was the Richest Empire in Europe.
History Shorts
In 1545, the Spanish found a mountain in the Andes that seemed to be made of silver. For the next century, Spain pulled more precious metal out of the Americas than anyone in history. And yet its king went bankrupt four times. In this episode, we follow the silver from the mines of Potosí — where Indigenous workers paid the true price — through Seville, to the bankers of Genoa and the markets of China, and ask how the richest nation on earth ended up so poor. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki....
info_outlineWelcome back to THE HISTORIANS — the series here on History Shorts where I sit down with two leading historians for an unscripted conversation about the questions that have shaped how we understand our past.
We love turning history into a one-man show. One name on the cover. One figure on the horse. One genius who saw it all and did it alone.
But look two inches to the left and there is almost always a crowd.
In this episode of The Historians, H.W. Brands and Hampton Sides take up that tension. Brands has written the biographies we reach for when we want the man himself — Roosevelt, Grant, Franklin, Reagan. Sides has put us inside the moments that get remembered as one person’s story — Kit Carson, Captain Cook, the Marines at Chosin. Both of them know how a cover gets made, and both of them know what the cover leaves out.
The conversation asks whether the lone-hero story still mostly holds, or whether we keep giving one person credit for a sergeant, a translator, a wife, a ship’s crew, a supply line, a Native nation, a political machine. They talk about what is already waiting in the sources when you sit down to write, what you have to embrace or resist to make the story move, and why readers still buy the one-man version.
No script. No debate. No panel. Just two writers who have lived with these figures, talking about the myth and the crowd.
H.W. Brands is the author of biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, among many other books on American history.
Hampton Sides is the author of Blood and Thunder, Ghost Soldiers, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, On Desperate Ground, and The Wide Wide Sea.
🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian and author of Eight Days in August, Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day.
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