From Burnsides to Sideburns

At Thermopylae and Salamis, Sparta and Athens fought side by side and beat the largest empire on earth. Fifty years later, they spent twenty-seven years trying to destroy each other. One was a seafaring democracy that built the Parthenon partly with other Greeks' money. The other was a warrior state built on fear of its own enslaved population. In this episode, we explore the original superpower rivalry — how Sparta finally won with Persian gold, and why the real winners were the powers watching from the sidelines. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

William Howard Taft is the only person who has been both president and chief justice, and he is still usually filed under mediocre. He called his own administration humdrum. Theodore Roosevelt made him president, then ran against him and helped drive him from office. Walter Stahr thinks that verdict is too small. The New York Times bestselling biographer of Seward, Stanton, and John Jay joins the show to talk about William Howard Taft: A Great American Life (Simon & Schuster). Five decades of public service: judge, governor of the Philippines, Roosevelt's secretary of war, president from 1909 to 1913, and then chief justice from 1921 to 1930, when Taft helped give the Supreme Court the power to choose its own cases. We get into the charge that Taft had no political skill, the 1904 campaign speeches Roosevelt asked him to give, the 1912 split and a two-state defeat, Payne-Aldrich and the tariff, the Philippines, and the White House bathtub that was never the stuck-president story the children's books tell. William Howard Taft: A Great American Life is out November 10, 2026. Walter Stahr: https://walterstahr.com

In January 1920, Franklin Roosevelt wrote that Herbert Hoover was "certainly a wonder" — and that he wished "we could make him President." Before the Depression, Hoover was a global hero: the man who fed occupied Belgium and whose name became a verb. Nobody even knew his party. In this episode, we follow how two friends became the most bitter rivals in twentieth-century American politics, why the qualities that made Hoover a hero later sank him, and what happened after their icy ride to the 1933 inauguration. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

Socrates never wrote a word. Most of Aristotle's polished writing is lost forever. And for six hundred years after Rome fell, Western Europe had barely any Aristotle at all. In this episode, we trace how the Greek philosophers invented the questions that still shape how we think — and the improbable relay race that saved their answers, from Athens to Baghdad, Córdoba, Toledo, and finally Paris. The story of Western thought turns out to be less an inheritance than a rescue, carried out by people who mostly never thought of themselves as Western. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com

Look up from the stage of a big-city American theater in the 1830s and you'd see three levels of seats. The pit. The family boxes. And the third tier — with its own staircase, its own street entrance, and its own bar. It was set aside for prostitutes, and many of them got in free. In this episode, we explore the "guilty third tier," why theater managers saw it as a business plan rather than a scandal, and how its disappearance quietly invented the family-friendly entertainment we take for granted today. 🎙️ History Shorts is a daily history podcast hosted by historian, author, and Smithsonian Magazine contributor Peter Zablocki. New episodes every day. ⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-shorts/id1717345209?action=write-review 🎵 Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4CnKo8pKZNR63aMyNuRz4D ☕ Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast ▶️ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryShortsPodcast 🔗 Website: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com