Second Decade

 In the summer of 1817, residents of the coastal town of Gloucester, Massachusetts suddenly began seeing a mysterious creature swimming around in their harbor. Though reports differed as to exactly what the monster looked like, how long it was and how fast it could move, the similarities between the reports and the trustworthiness of the witnesses seemed too substantial to ignore. A scientific association quickly convened a committee to investigate the creature. But the Gloucester sea monster was much more than just a strange anomaly that wagged tongues and sold newspapers: it was part and parcel of a much larger and more serious debate about the relative merits of the New World versus the Old, a debate in which prominent Americans like Thomas Jefferson had a significant political stake. In this quirky and unusual episode of Second Decade, historian Sean Munger not only presents contemporary accounts of the Gloucester monster—compiled in a nifty pamphlet rushed into print in Boston before the news cycle

This bonus episode, released in conjunction with Sean Munger’s upcoming novel Jake’s 88 (which is set in the 80s), examines the political, cultural and social history of the 1980s and why, far from being simply a grab-bag of pop culture tropes, this decade stands at the very heart of modern history. Beginning with an almost incredible snap decision made in a Detroit hotel room that completely changes the next 40 years of history, this roving spotlight on various aspects of the decade also tackles how John Hughes got ‘80s teens terribly wrong, The Day After and the specter of nuclear annihilation, Bill Cosby and the complex question of race in the ‘80s, and the almost surreal spectacle of the issue-free 1988 Presidential campaign between George H.W. Bush and his aggressively underwhelming nemesis, Michael Dukakis.Jake’s 88 is a coming-of-age romance set in the year 1988. It’s deeply steeped in the curious head space of the decade and loaded with pop culture references. It’s available for preorder here on Amazo

“Waterloo” is a name so historic and iconic that it’s taken on more than its literal meaning—when we speak of someone “meeting their Waterloo,” we’re talking about their final epic defeat. Napoleon Bonaparte certainly did meet that end on the farm fields of Belgium in June 1815, but the story of how his brief restoration as France’s Emperor came crashing down is more than just the story of a single battle. Historians since 1815 have been more guilty than anyone else at distorting and sanitizing the story of this event, turning a tragic occurrence with real human consequences into little more than a tabletop strategy game with a lot of maps and symbols that obscure what really happened on that field. What was Waterloo really about? What were the stakes? Why are we so reluctant to remember it as anything more than a textbook military exercise? These are the questions that underlie this episode.In this, the final installment in a three-part series on Napoleon’s Hundred Days, Dr. Sean Munger will throw away the m

In retellings of history, Napoleon’s brief return to power in the spring of 1815 is often portrayed as an audacious surprise, the ultimate comeback from an indefatigable historical personality. Actually it wasn’t. Having returned to Paris and run off the rickety reboot of the Bourbon monarchy, Napoleon immediately found himself faced with a dizzying array of insoluble problems. Chief among them was the fact that all the other powers of Europe had suddenly banded together and declared war on him. He would obviously have to fight to remain in power, but with France’s treasury empty and her manpower already drained from previous years of Napoleon’s wars, this time Bonaparte really didn’t have a second act. That raises the question: did he really think he was going to get away with it this time? In this, the second of a three-part series on Napoleon’s final play on the world stage, Dr. Sean Munger counts the dwindling francs left in the French treasury, chronicles the treachery of Napoleon’s disloyal ministers wh

Napoleon was the kind of guy who didn’t know when the party was over. Following his disastrous defeat in Russia in 1812 (chronicled in Episodes 10-12 of this podcast) and yet another war in Europe, Napoleon’s enemies invaded France and forced him off the throne in the spring of 1814. Bonaparte was given the paltry consolation prize of the island of Elba, which proved stifling, and he had little hope that his enemies, particularly Britain, Austria and the restored monarchy of France, would abide by their word not to bother him. Within nine months of exile Napoleon had returned to France for another bid at power—an adventure that would ultimately lead to the Battle of Waterloo. Was Napoleon just desperate, stroking his ego, or was there really a chance that his return could have worked?In this episode, the first in season three, Dr. Sean Munger delves into the back-story of Napoleon’s audacious comeback, including the circumstances of how and why he ended up on Elba and why he thought he had to leave. We’ll exp

This is a bonus episode which goes outside the parameters of the main Second Decade show. Astoria, Oregon was founded in 1811 as an outpost for fur trapping and trading on the Northwest coast, and was intended to be a crucial part of a global empire of commerce envisioned by German-born New York City millionaire John Jacob Astor. It didn’t quite work out that way, but the long history of Astoria has involved a number of fascinating people, encounters and accidents that have shaped this small Oregon city throughout the two centuries of its existence. There’s no way the entire history of Astoria can be crammed into a single podcast episode, but a few colorful anecdotes from its past will give you a sense of what this place is like and how it came to be what it is. In this Off Topic episode, recorded partially on location in Astoria and neighboring areas, Dr. Munger will give a brief history of the town as a whole, focusing on its establishment in the Second Decade, and then you’ll journey through three stories

This is a bonus episode which goes outside the parameters of the main Second Decade show. Sometime in the middle of the 19th century, somebody got it in their head that there was a cache of fabulous treasure buried on a remote island in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia called Oak Island. Said to have begun with an impromptu expedition to the island in 1795 by some local kids, the legend of the famed “Money Pit” has grown over the centuries to amass a mythology of self-referential books, occult and New Age theories and a gonzo reality show on the History Channel. But is there any historical substance behind the legend? What do we really know about what happened on Oak Island in the middle 1800s, and how do we avoid being carried away by 150 years of hucksters’ hype? In this informal episode, historian Sean Munger, who was originally entranced by the Oak Island legend more than 25 years ago, drills into the facts, the historical record and the logical analysis of the story. In this episode, you’ll learn why th

At the end of the Second Decade, after many tumultuous years of war and revolution, Spain’s colonial empire in the New World began to collapse at a rapid rate. It was due in no small part to Simón Bolívar and his daring military conquests, which were crowned by an audacious and harrowing trek through swamps and mountains which led to the pivotal Battle of Boyaca in 1819. But how did Bolivar, who had suffered at least as many failures and setbacks as he had clear successes, come to this point? His prowess as a commander—questioned by some—was not the whole story. As a political leader fighting for democracy and self-determination, he could never quite conquer his dictatorial tendencies. The result was a successful revolution against Spanish rule, but also an imperfect one. In the conclusion of the three-part series on Simón Bolivar—and the season finale of Second Decade—Dr. Sean Munger takes you into the forbidding jungles and frozen mountains of South America, onto the battlefields of the wars for independenc

The process of detaching Latin America from three centuries of colonial Spanish rule was hardly a linear one. Simón Bolívar, the most important but hardly the only revolutionary in Venezuela and New Granada (Colombia), came in and out of exile several times, was often defeated (sometimes by his own mistakes), and continually forced to try to “reboot” the revolution after another failed start. In the meantime, warfare and violence continued unremittingly within the contested areas, usually fueled by racial and class resentment. Despite all the challenges and reverses, Bolívar managed to advance his cause in a “three steps forward, two steps back” kind of way, and his mistakes tell us as much about him as his successes. In this episode, Dr. Sean Munger continues the story of the Latin American revolution begun in the previous episode, and carries the story of Bolívar from his first exile in 1812 to his rocky consolidation of leadership of the revolutionary movement in late 1817. Here you’ll meet more of Bolívar

Simón Bolívar is one of the giants of Latin American history, with statutes, portraits and monuments to him everywhere from Panama to Tierra del Fuego, and even an entire country—Bolivia—bears his name. But how much do you really know about him? Where did he come from, what was Spanish America like at the time he arose, and how did he begin his incredible journey to liberate three-quarters of a hemisphere from one of the world’s oldest colonial powers? Although Bolívar clearly was the right man at the right time, the Spanish empire in the Americas was moribund and brittle by the beginning of the 19th century, with political, economic, social and racial tensions running deep. Into this complicated world came Bolívar, a man of wealth and privilege who claimed to speak for the forgotten man. He was also a passionate man, scarred forever by the premature death of his wife, and prone to flamboyant excess in both his personal and professional life.In this episode, the first of a three-part series on Bolívar’s life

Pressured by environmental change and the coming of European colonizers along the coasts, southern Africa in the 1810s was a complicated and dangerous place. Numerous small interrelated clans were competing for dwindling resources in increasingly marginal lands. Out of this turmoil rose the almost incredible personality of Shaka, an illegitimate child raised by a single mother who found his calling in the military and rose to the unlikely pinnacle of power in the Zulu clan. Shaka, who became chieftain of the Zulus in 1816, used familial relationships, trickery, deception and war—mainly war—to absorb the rival clans and forge a unified nation that would, later in the 19th century, prove a formidable adversary to the mighty British Empire. How did Shaka do it? What were the obstacles he faced? Why is he so pivotal in African history? Find out in this unusual and illuminating episode.In this installment of Second Decade, Dr. Sean Munger will take you deep into the African savanna, to a land riven with complicate

Iceland was, in 1809, a very different place than we think of it today. It was still a picturesque, craggy island belching steam and lava from its many geysers and volcanic vents, but far from being a progressive society of generally wealthy people who speak an incomprehensible language and like to eat fermented shark meat, 200 years ago Iceland was one of the poorest and most inhospitable countries in Europe. At the beginning of the Second Decade, William Jackson Hooker, a young English botanist questing for adventure, made a voyage to Iceland to do the imperial gentleman-naturalist thing that passed for “science” at the time. As it turned out, his trip across Iceland brought him face-to-face with the weirdest customs and smelliest people on the island at that time, and ended in a blaze of glory, literally—with the ship that was supposed to take him home burning to the waterline. Now that’s a party!In this episode, based primarily on Hooker’s travelogue, you’ll gorge yourself at an utterly insane dinner part

What was the White House really like in the early part of the 19th century? Always under construction, reconstruction, redecoration or renovation, the President’s house was like a child that could never sit still, or like a living organism changing constantly over time. In addition to logistical and domestic details like how the chandeliers worked and when the first toilet flushed within the walls of the Executive Mansion, the story of the White House in these years goes hand-in-hand with political and personal events of the first families that lived there. This special bonus episode continues the story of the White House begun in Episode 30 of the main podcast. In this “Off Topic” riff, you’ll encounter the first Presidential mummy, surging mobs of Andrew Jackson supporters ripping pieces out of the drapes, a Presidential hairstyle 140 years ahead of its time, a 1400 pound wheel of stinky cheese, an epidemic of diarrhea with a grim body count, and a succession of feckless, hard-drinking, hard-luck chief

Originally built in the 1790s largely with slave labor, from the very beginning the White House was an eerie mirror of American society, including its original sin of slavery. But the house as it was originally constructed stood for only a few years. During the War of 1812, a British strike team sailed up the Potomac and burned the U.S. Capitol and the White House to the ground. This might have been the end of the house’s illustrious history, but it wasn’t. Reconstructed from the ashes under the supervision of two Presidents, Madison and Monroe, the executive mansion again stood proudly at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue, which in the 1810s was a muddy pathway full of ruts and stumps. What was it really like to live in the White House in this era? This episode, first of two parts, will show you.In this installment of Second Decade, historian Sean Munger will take you into the hallways and bedrooms of the President’s house, in war and peace, both before and after its destruction by the British. You’ll join Jame

Though it started as a convenient dumping ground for Britain’s human refuse, the colony of Australia was not destined to remain a prison forever. Despite the grandiose plans of some of its visionaries, however—like Lachlan Macquarie, Colonial Governor—it would take a great deal of labor, money and innovation if it was ever to rise above its convict roots. Macquarie began with an ambitious program of building and urban design, in the process cheating the British government and Australia’s free settlers out of the cheap labor they felt they were entitled to. Meanwhile whalers and sealers were wreaking havoc on the continent’s south coast, and settlers were pushing up against the geographic seal that walled off Sydney from the unknown interior of Australia. How did the utter mess that was Australia in the early 19th century eventually become anything like a real country, much less a cohesive society?In this, the second part of a series on the formative years of Australia, you’ll find out a lot of what you never

In the 1810s, the British penal colony of Australia, known then as New South Wales, was barely 20 years old. Already it had sunk into a morass of drunkenness, corruption and hopelessness, even suffering a military coup by the soldiers tasked to keep the unruly convicts in line. There were deep social divisions between the “Emancipists,” freed convicts who hoped to own their own land, and “Exclusives,” white settlers who came voluntarily. This is to say nothing of the tragic effects that European settlement had on the continent’s aboriginal population. But as much of a mess as Australia was in the Second Decade, there were seeds of hope that it could become something a little less depressing. When Lachlan Macquarie, an enterprising Scotsman, took over as the colony’s governor in 1810, he began transforming Australia into something more than a human refuse dump—but it was by no means an easy road.In this first part of a projected two-part series, Dr. Sean Munger explains where Australia came from, whose idea it

This is an Off Topic episode, involving historical topics outside the scope of the main podcast. This episode spins off Episode 27 of the main podcast (“The Belle of Nagasaki”). Japan and the United States face each other across the largest, most contested space in the world: the Pacific Ocean. From American attempts to cash in on the China trade in the 1780s, right after the Revolution, to complicated geopolitics and open warfare in the 1940s, these two countries have loomed large in each other’s history, consciousness and popular culture. But how did this volatile relationship develop? It’s a complicated story and covers a lot of ground, more than 200 years of history with many ups, downs, triumphs and tragedies. In this episode, presented with a little more off-the-cuff style than Second Decade proper, Dr. Sean Munger expounds on topics like Matthew Perry’s 1853 attempt to pry open Japan’s padlocks with paddle-wheel steam warships, the tragedy of the U.S. government’s internment of Japanese-Americans durin

In the Second Decade, Japan was the most exotic, unknown and isolated country in the world. Since the early 17th century the Tokugawa Shoguns had deliberately closed the country to trade and cultural exchange with the rest of the globe, wanting especially to avoid the religious influences of European countries. Japan’s only outlet to Western trade was a trading post on a tiny island in Nagasaki harbor. In 1817, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Holland sent a new director-general to Nagasaki, who did a daring thing that had never been done before: he brought his family with him. This was how Titia Bergsma Blomhoff, a frail woman in ill health with a young baby clinging to her, wound up in Japan, together with her nurse, Petronella Munts. Their presence triggered a diplomatic incident and perhaps hammered a crack in Japan’s façade of isolation that was to break wide open later in the 19th century. In this episode, Dr. Sean Munger explains who Titia Bergsma was, how she came to be married to Holland’s informa

In October 1812, over 900 American troops surrendered to the British after the disastrous defeat at the Battle of Queenston Heights. Most of these P.O.W.s were exchanged immediately, but the British singled out 23 specific men among them and refused to return them, claiming they were actually British citizens. Against the vociferous protests of the American government, the British shipped the “Queenston 23” to England, intending that they would be tried for treason and, if found guilty, executed. In response, President Madison ordered 23 British P.O.W.s to be held as hostages to answer for anything that happened to the Queenston 23. As the situation escalated, ultimately hundreds of men, Americans and Britons, on both sides of the Atlantic were taken hostage, some remaining in captivity for nearly the entirety of the war. But why were these particular prisoners so important? It has to do with the different views that Britain and America had about what it meant to be a citizen—and ultimately, the meaning of th

This is the first in a projected series of bonus episodes called Second Decade: Off Topic, which examine historical topics outside the scope of the main podcast. This episode spins off a matter mentioned in Episode 25 of the main podcast (“The Man in the Buffalo Fur Suit”). Unless you’re a movie nerd, chances are the name “Sunn Classic Pictures” doesn’t mean anything to you. But in the 1970s, the Utah-based studio, owned by a company that made shaving razors, had a string of bizarre hits in the form of G-rated documentaries that seriously distorted historical events. While their first hit, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, was relatively benign, Sunn later rose to prominence schlepping stories about ancient aliens, a shadowy and completely impossible plot to replace Abraham Lincoln’s assassin with a look-alike, and faith-fired quests to find Noah’s Ark and follow in the footsteps of “Historic Jesus.” Sunn’s rise coincided with cultural and political shifts in the late 1970s, including the rise of political