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  • DDH - The Theater of War

    DDH - The Theater of War
    2026/02/03
    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.
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    36 分
  • WTF - Bending Tongues Like Bows

    WTF - Bending Tongues Like Bows
    2026/02/01
    Language is a fragile thing. It carries memory, meaning, and moral weight, and when it breaks, it rarely breaks quietly. Two thousand years ago, Cicero warned that a republic does not collapse all at once. It hollows out first, word by word, until the language of virtue remains but the substance is gone. The buildings still stand. The speeches still sound familiar. But something essential has already been lost. Today, we find ourselves in that same uneasy moment. Our political vocabulary has become a weapon. Labels replace arguments. Outrage substitutes for reason. When every opponent is called a Nazi, when every disagreement is treated as existential evil, persuasion dies and power takes its place. History tells us where that road leads, and it is never somewhere good. In this episode of *What the Frock*, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod dig into the corruption of public language and why it matters far more than most people want to admit. Drawing on Cicero, the prophet Jeremiah, and the hard lessons of history, they ask a simple but dangerous question. What happens to a society when words stop meaning what they say? This is not a partisan conversation. It is a moral one. A call for precision, courage, and restraint in a culture addicted to noise. Welcome to *What the Frock*.
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    1 時間 4 分
  • The trouble with Truth

    The trouble with Truth
    2026/01/29
    Thomas Paine did not arrive in history as a marble statue or a finished idea. He arrived tired, broke, and angry, with ink on his fingers and a habit of saying the quiet part out loud. When Americans remember the Revolution, they tend to remember generals on horseback and signatures on parchment. They forget the man hunched over scrap paper by candlelight, turning frustration into sentences that ordinary people could understand. Paine did not command armies. He did something far more dangerous. He told people that authority had to justify itself, that tradition was not an argument, and that liberty was not a favor granted by kings. He wrote for farmers, laborers, and soldiers who were cold, unpaid, and uncertain whether any of this was worth the cost. His words did not promise comfort. They demanded courage. This episode follows Paine from obscurity to influence and then into exile, tracing how the same clarity that helped ignite independence later made him unwelcome in polite company. He was celebrated when he was useful and discarded when he refused to stop asking questions. By the end of his 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 story of a necessary one. A man who believed that common sense was revolutionary, and who paid the price for proving it.
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    7 分
  • The Rocky Mountain Submarine

    The Rocky Mountain Submarine
    2026/01/28
    It sounds like a tall tale told too late at night. A submarine in the Rocky Mountains, sitting on a frozen lake nearly nine thousand feet 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 in secret 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.
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    6 分
  • DDH - March of the Mercenaries

    DDH - March of the Mercenaries
    2026/01/27
    When we talk about the Declaration of Independence, we tend to remember the poetry. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Big ideas, clean ideals, a nation imagining itself into being. But that is only half the document. The Declaration is also an indictment, and one of its most furious charges accuses King George the Third of doing something unforgivable by eighteenth century standards. Transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to make war on his own people. That line is not rhetorical flourish. It is a line in the sand. In this episode, we are going to unpack why that accusation mattered so much, how the soldier trade actually worked, and why the arrival of German troops transformed a political dispute into an irreversible break. We will look at fear, propaganda, theology, and cold hard contracts that priced human lives by the head. This is the moment when reconciliation died, and independence became inevitable.
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    36 分
  • WTF - Small Talk

    WTF - Small Talk
    2026/01/25
    Welcome to What The Frock?, the show that starts with the weather and somehow ends up questioning the collapse of modern thought. In this episode, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod do what polite society pretends to hate and secretly loves. They make small talk. About cold snaps, fog, snow, Florida apologies, and why everyone asks how you are without wanting an answer. But do not be fooled. The weather is just the doorway. Very quickly, the conversation turns to what has changed in us. Short attention spans. Endless scrolling. Movies that have to explain themselves every ten minutes. News cycles that replace thinking with reacting. Narratives that form before facts even show up. Along the way, Netflix gets blamed, Star Trek gets defended, gravity allegedly shuts off on August 12, 2026, and someone tries to sell you anti gravity supplements. It is funny. It is skeptical. It is unapologetically old school. Hold on to your hat. This is What The Frock?
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    53 分
  • Silence at Truk

    Silence at Truk
    2026/01/24
    On a January morning in nineteen forty four, a small town in Ohio learned how the war really worked. Not through headlines about victory, but through a quiet notice. A sailor was missing. No details. No explanation. Just absence. That sailor had been aboard USS Corvina. Corvina was new, capable, and sent on her first war patrol into some of the most dangerous water on earth. She never came back. Eighty two men went down with her in a single night south of Truk Lagoon. In the vast arithmetic of the Pacific War, Corvina occupies a narrow line. She was the only American submarine lost to an enemy submarine in World War Two. That fact matters, but it is not the heart of the story. This is not about rarity. It is about people, machinery, chance, and silence. About what the ocean takes, and what history remembers. This is the story of USS Corvina, and the crew that remains on Eternal Patrol.
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    4 分
  • History and the Supreme Court

    History and the Supreme Court
    2026/01/22
    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.
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    17 分