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  • 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
  • Small Talk

    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
  • DDH - An Instrument of Arbitrary Power

    DDH - An Instrument of Arbitrary Power
    2026/01/20
    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 onto commemorative 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 a shield, had started to feel like a weapon. We tend to remember rebellion when it looks dramatic. We forget 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 two maritime 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 as punishment. These events did not just provoke anger. They taught a lesson. When law becomes untethered from consent, resistance stops being radical and starts being rational. This is the story of how paperwork, procedure, and power pushed America toward independence.
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    29 分
  • WTF - Bat (CRAP) Crazy

    WTF - Bat (CRAP) Crazy
    2026/01/18
    Welcome back to *What the Frock?*, the show where a rabbi, a friar, and a strong cup of coffee try to make sense of a world that has clearly skipped a few maintenance checks. In this episode, we start where all serious analysis begins, with football heartbreak and bad bets. From there, we wander, cheerfully and with intent, into the strange new marketplace where people no longer wager on games but on governments, resignations, and the expiration dates of world leaders. Not *if*, mind you, but *when*. That alone should tell you something about the age we are living in. Along the way, we ask uncomfortable questions about media, madness, and why shouting has replaced persuasion. We talk about the economics of outrage, the difference between conviction and performance, and what happens when even the loudest voices start blinking at the craziness around them. We also notice something quieter and far more unsettling, the absence of celebration as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches with barely a whisper. There are no tidy answers here. Just history, skepticism, gallows humor, and a shared sense that silence often says more than noise ever could. Pull up a chair. Pour a drink if that is your custom. The frock is on, and the world is still strange.
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    56 分
  • 41 Cold War Sentinels - USS Benjamin Franklin SSBN-640

    41 Cold War Sentinels - USS Benjamin Franklin SSBN-640
    2026/01/17
    She was built to disappear. Not in the romantic sense, not like a magician’s flourish or a ship slipping into fog for the sake of poetry, but in the colder, more disciplined sense of Cold War necessity. USS Benjamin Franklin was designed to vanish into the acoustic shadows of the ocean, to become a rumor instead of a presence, a probability instead of a target. That was the deal struck between the Navy and history in the early 1960s. If the submarine could not be found, then war itself might be kept at bay.
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    6 分
  • Underway On Nuclear Power

    Underway On Nuclear Power
    2026/01/17
    On the morning of January 17, 1955, the Thames River at Groton looked much as it always had in winter. Gray water, cold air, men in heavy coats moving with the practiced economy of sailors who knew their business. Nothing in the scene warned the casual observer that the age of naval propulsion was about to change course. At 11:00 a.m., the submarine tied to the pier eased herself free, not with drama or spectacle, but with a kind of quiet confidence. A few minutes later, a short message blinked out by signal lamp to the tender alongside. “Underway on Nuclear Power.” It was ten words, plain and unsentimental, and it marked the first time in human history that a vehicle moved under the control of sustained nuclear fission. The boat was the USS Nautilus, and the world did not yet grasp what had just slipped its moorings.
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    8 分