Second Decade

Latest Episodes:

32: Dawn of the Zulu Apr 15, 2018

Show notes

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 complicated politics, feuding families, doomed love affairs and scorched-earth military tactics. You’ll find out what an ixwa is, how Zulu teenagers found a way to fool around despite the rigid sexual mores of their society, how the principal wealth of the Zulu nation chewed a cud and walked on four legs, and why it was dangerous to sneeze in Shaka’s presence. This episode will introduce you to one of the most brilliant, flamboyant and controversial personalities of the entire decade of the 1810s—Africa’s answer to Napoleon.

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31: The Great Iceland Road Trip Mar 26, 2018

Show notes

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 party hosted by Iceland’s former governor; you’ll savor the taste of Icelandic butter, which is to say, 15 years old and rancid; you’ll guzzle gallons of claret, rum and sour whey (which doubles as a liniment for lame horses); you’ll catch salmon with your bare hands; and you’ll rub shoulders with Iceland’s great unwashed, including particularly odorous women. And all this in a picturesque landscape of volcanic peaks, sharp lava rocks and natural springs hot enough to boil eggs. Welcome to the alien world that lurks between the pages of Hooker’s unique and interesting book.

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Second Decade Off Topic: The White House, Part II Mar 05, 2018

Show notes

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 executives who grow increasingly more intoxicated as the Civil War nears. The White House of the antebellum period not only proves to be a dangerous place with its toxic water and diseased mosquitoes, but also a sad and melancholy one, with personal and family tragedy stalking the halls of power.

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30: The White House, Part I Mar 05, 2018

Show notes

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 James and Dolley Madison on one of their Wednesday night soirees; you’ll learn why the famous story of how Dolley saved the portrait of George Washington from the British isn’t exactly as you may have heard it; and you’ll shiver along with workmen toiling in the drafty unfinished rooms of the mansion in the winter of 1816-17, hoping to rebuild the place as a symbol of American resilience. This is a story you don’t often hear about America’s most famous address, but it lies at the heart of the history that resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Part II of this miniseries on the White House continues in a Second Decade Off Topic episode.

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29: Australia, Part II Feb 12, 2018

Show notes

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 knew about the strange land down under. Find out what finally happened to Lachlan Macquarie, how and why he made all the wrong enemies, and how he gave the continent its official name. You’ll discover why ignorance of basic geography was sometimes fatal to escaping convicts; you’ll appreciate why the seal skin industry was a particularly gross and disgusting business; and you’ll ride along with three intrepid explorers and their mysteriously anonymous hangers-on as they try to push the boundaries of the colony across the fabled Blue Mountains into the true Australian outback. Prepare for a historical walkabout as Second Decade takes you to one of the strangest places on the planet at the time.

Additional materials about this episode on the website, here!

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28: Australia, Part I Jan 29, 2018

Show notes

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 was to transport British convicts to the other side of the world, and why it was such a sad, brutal and bizarre place at the beginning of the 19th century. In this episode you’ll see how a push by British politicians to get “tough on crime” boomeranged with unexpected results, you’ll learn why rum was literally more valuable than gold in Australia, and you’ll encounter strange characters including an army officer turned sheep magnate, and even Captain William Bligh (of HMS Bounty fame). Get ready for a series of strange adventures down under, in what was in the 1810s perhaps the oddest country on Earth.

Additional Materials About This Episode

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Second Decade Off Topic: Benihana Nights Dec 10, 2017

Show notes

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 during World War II, the postwar economic boom (and bust), and how cultural threads like anime, monster movies and TV miniseries forged an indelible but rapidly-changing bond between the United States and Japan. This episode moves fast and covers a lot of ground, but there’s never a dull moment, and you may find yourself hungry for sushi when it’s over!

Link to my World War II class (referenced in this episode)

Website for this episode.

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27: The Belle of Nagasaki Dec 10, 2017

Show notes

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 informal envoy to Japan, and he’ll narrate the strange turn of events that saw her arrive at Deshima Island, in Nagasaki harbor, in August 1817. You’ll learn how and why the Shoguns feared and loathed Westerners (especially Western women), what happened when Titia dared to challenge one of feudal Japan’s most sacred and tightly-enforced laws, and how her story would have been mostly lost to history except for the efforts of two contemporary Japanese artists as well as her long-lost descendant who revived her memory in this century, the 21st. This is the story of a collision of cultures, neither of which fully understood one another, and you’ll come to understand just how big the world was in 1817 and how alien certain parts of it were to each other.

Correction: at the beginning of this episode I refer to Titia Bergsma being 29 in 1817; actually she was 31.

Link to my World War II class (referenced in the podcast)

You can visit the website for this episode, and see additional materials about it, here.

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26: The Queenston Hostages Nov 20, 2017

Show notes

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 the entire war itself.

In this episode, Dr. Sean Munger takes you deep into a little-known episode of the War of 1812, but one that has profound implications for understanding the war as a whole. In the course of this episode you’ll learn exactly how sore the British were over losing the American Revolution, why it was particularly dangerous to one’s liberty to speak with an Irish accent, how young war hero Winfield Scott’s attendance at a White House reception proved especially fateful, and why the last battle of the War of 1812 was fought not on the battlefield, but in a British courtroom a decade later. This is a highly unusual look at America’s second war for independence, and highlights how ultimately the early struggles between the United States and Britain were really about identity: who “counted” as a citizen, and why that question was of such vital importance.

You can visit the website for this episode, and see additional materials about it, here.

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Second Decade Off Topic: The Sunn Also Rises Nov 05, 2017

Show notes

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 politically-active evangelical Christians who ultimately helped bring Ronald Reagan to power.

In this informal episode, historian Sean Munger relates the history of Sunn Classic Pictures and sketches out the context of the rapidly-changing America that eagerly gobbled up its historically questionable product. In this episode you’ll learn what “four-walling” is and why it was a revolutionary way to market movies; you’ll meet the Cajun-born (and born-again) mastermind behind Sunn’s strategy; you’ll go into the trenches and churches with the likes of Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant; and you’ll understand why Jimmy Carter, himself an evangelical Christian, was deemed less virtuous for America than a divorced ex-B movie actor. This is a bizarre story of faith, politics, UFOs, adventurous astronauts, New Agers and lots and lots of money.

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