エピソード

  • DDH - The Christmas Carol

    DDH - The Christmas Carol
    2025/12/23
    Every December we return to A Christmas Carol the way we return to familiar music. We know the notes. We know the ending. We know exactly how it is supposed to make us feel. And that is precisely the problem. In this episode of Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, we pull the story back out of its comfortable holiday wrapping and look at what Dickens was actually doing in 1843. This was not a bedtime story. It was a warning. Dickens was not trying to redeem one grumpy old man. He was indicting a society that had learned how to explain suffering away with respectable words and tidy laws. Scrooge is not a monster. He is lawful, rational, and catastrophically wrong. The ghosts are not magical fixes. They expose. They accuse. They do not excuse. This episode asks the question Dickens intended. Not whether Scrooge changed, but whether we ever do once the lights come up and the book is closed.
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    52 分
  • WTF - Merry Christmas, You Wankers

    WTF - Merry Christmas, You Wankers
    2025/12/21
    Welcome to *What the Frock*, where the holiday cheer comes with footnotes and the goodwill is thoroughly cross examined. In this episode, Dave and Rod wander straight into Victorian England, a place absolutely convinced it had solved humanity, morality, and the correct volume at which joy should be expressed. Spoiler alert, it had not. What starts as a simple question, why Americans say “Merry Christmas” while Brits insist on “Happy Christmas,” turns into a full scale rummage through moral panic, class anxiety, bad history, and the peculiar Victorian talent for turning joy into a character flaw. Along the way, Dickens gets his due, Malthus gets side eyed, and the idea that suffering builds character gets dragged into the light where it does not age well. If you like your Christmas thoughtful, argumentative, slightly irreverent, and allergic to smug certainty, you are in the right place. Say it however you like. Just understand why some people were afraid of the word “merry.”
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    59 分
  • The Rebpublic of Fredonia

    The Rebpublic of Fredonia
    2025/12/21
    On the morning of December 21, 1826, a flag went up over the Old Stone Fort at Nacogdoches. It was red over white, roughly made, stitched by hands more accustomed to frontier repairs than nation building. It did not rise to the sound of drums or cannon. It was hauled up on a wooden pole by men who looked over their shoulders as often as they looked at their handiwork. Beneath it stood a small crowd, some curious, some committed, most uncertain. The flag announced the birth of the Republic of Fredonia.
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    5 分
  • The Flying Tigers

    The Flying Tigers
    2025/12/19
    The image is familiar even if the story behind it is not. A fighter plane with shark teeth painted on its nose, a grin aimed straight at history. For decades that image has stood in for courage, swagger, and American defiance before Pearl Harbor. But the real story of the Flying Tigers is stranger, rougher, and far more human than the legend suggests. This episode of Dave Does History walks into that space carefully. Not to knock the myth down, and not to polish it brighter, but to understand what actually happened when a small group of American pilots resigned their commissions, signed civilian contracts, and flew into a war their country had not officially joined. These men were not mercenaries in the simple sense, and they were not knights of the air either. They were professionals caught in a moment when politics, necessity, and survival collided. What you are about to hear is the story of how the American Volunteer Group came together, how they fought, and why they mattered. It is about improvisation under pressure, hard lessons learned quickly, and the quiet understanding that war rarely waits for clean rules. The shark teeth are still there. This time, we look behind them.
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    5 分
  • Valley Forge

    Valley Forge
    2025/12/19
    The winter encampment that Americans reflexively call “Valley Forge” has become a kind of historical shorthand, a single frozen tableau where virtue shivers nobly and emerges purified. That picture is comforting, and like most comforting pictures, it is incomplete. The army that staggered into Valley Forge in December 1777 had been forming, failing, adapting, and nearly coming apart since the summer of 1775. Valley Forge was not the beginning of the story, and it was not even the worst chapter. It was the reckoning.
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    4 分
  • The Last Ditch effort

    The Last Ditch effort
    2025/12/18
    There are winters when history stands very still, almost as if the world is bracing for something it already knows it cannot avoid. The winter of 1860 felt like that. One can imagine the heavy December air in Washington settling over the capital like a thick blanket that even the most stubborn stove fires could not quite chase away. The legislators walked through the corridors with forced conversations and polite nods, but there was a hollow ring to every greeting. The nation had reached a point where its disagreements were no longer political quarrels but questions about the very structure of its future. Abraham Lincoln had been elected with a firm pledge that slavery would not expand into the territories. To the Deep South, this was something far beyond a routine policy dispute. It sounded like a warning bell. It sounded like a door closing. It sounded, to many, like the first quiet toll of a funeral.
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    4 分
  • Io Saturnalia!

    Io Saturnalia!
    2025/12/17
    Rome was not a civilization that believed in accidents. It believed in structure, ritual, and the careful management of human behavior. When Romans celebrated Saturnalia each December, they were not indulging in a lapse of discipline. They were engaging in something older, stranger, and far more deliberate. Saturnalia was not a party that got out of hand. It was a pressure release designed by people who understood that a society held too tightly eventually breaks.
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    6 分
  • DDH - An Early Note on an American Melody

    DDH - An Early Note on an American Melody
    2025/12/16
    This week on Dave Does History, we step backward before we move forward. Long before July of 1776, long before Jefferson put pen to parchment, there was another moment when ordinary people decided that silence was no longer an option. They wrote their grievances down and dared the system to listen. In this episode of Liberty 250, we travel to England in December of 1640, to the Root and Branch Petition, a document most Americans have never heard of but whose fingerprints are all over the Declaration of Independence. It is the story of what happens when institutions stop working, when courts enforce power instead of restraining it, and when people discover that gentle correction has failed. This is not a tale of riots or revolutions, at least not at first. It is about legitimacy, authority, and the dangerous moment when citizens conclude that the structure itself is broken. Understanding that moment helps us understand our own founding, and why Americans learned to list their grievances and demand change in writing.
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    34 分