Second Decade

Latest Episodes:

15: The War of 1812, Part I Mar 06, 2017

Show notes

What was the War of 1812? Which countries were involved? What were the stakes? Why is it so obscure? Why does it have such a funny name? How come you were never taught much about it in school? These questions, and many more, lie at the heart of understanding the first military conflict fought by the United States since the founding of the Constitution. The causes of the war are surprisingly murky and confusing, everything from a mutual misunderstanding between the U.S. and Great Britain as to the meaning and scope of national citizenship, to a desire to cement political unity by a Congress and a Presidency drifting toward entropy. The picture involves more than just maritime issues and border tensions with British-held Canada. It also includes Native Americans, caught in the middle between two essentially hostile powers, and a broad roster of unfinished business left over from the American Revolution.

In this, the first of a series dealing with the broad issues of the War of 1812, historian Sean Munger will attempt to ground you in the issues and context surrounding this difficult period of American, British, Native American and world history. You’ll learn what “impressment” is and why speaking with a Cockney accent was dangerous on the high seas in 1811; you’ll meet the visionary Shawnee prophet, Tenskwatawa, who met his Waterloo (or Tippecanoe) in the Indiana wilderness; you’ll go into the halls of Congress and butt heads with the stubborn “War Hawks”; and you’ll cringe at the cosmic irony of the tragic miscommunication that eventually triggered the war. You’re in for a bumpy ride!

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14: Down & Out at Harvard Feb 20, 2017

Show notes

Harvard, America’s first college, is thought of as a bastion of privileged patricians, a place filled with old brick buildings, ivy-covered walls and inscrutable ancient traditions. But it’s also a real college where real young people live, learn, struggle and try to find themselves. In 1813 two boys, Stephen Salisbury and Aaron White, fifteen and sixteen, respectively, left their homes in Massachusetts to become freshmen in the Harvard College class of 1817. The remarkable personal day-to-day accounts both of them left behind illustrate in vivid and sometimes amusing detail what it was really like to go to college in the 1810s. Stephen engages in endless battles with his parents over pocket money and dirty laundry; Aaron in the meantime struggles against depression, feelings of guilt and unworthiness, and his own temptations. Both somehow manage to graduate, but one senses it wasn't easy!

Historian Sean Munger takes a personal and often humorous look at college in the 1810s, and tries to break down the ivory walls that separated 19th century Harvard from the real world. In this episode you’ll figure out why curtains are so essential in an 1810s dorm room, cross swords with Stephen’s insufferable nagging mother, endure Aaron’s seasonal affective disorder, and you’ll learn what a ‘Sulkey Bagg’ is. This could be the most fun episode of Second Decade yet.

Special permission was granted by, and thanks is given to, the Massachusetts Historical Society to quote from the unpublished Aaron White Diaries, 1815-1880.

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13: Kid Lincoln Feb 13, 2017

Show notes

Most of us were taught in school about Abraham Lincoln’s humble origins: the log cabin on the Kentucky frontier, his lack of formal education, and colorful tales of rail splitting and backwoods adventures. But the traditional American mythology leaves out a lot about Lincoln’s formative years. Lincoln was born at the beginning of the Second Decade into a complex and deeply contested environment, shaped by economic hardship, conflict with Native Americans, and simmering resentments over slavery and land ownership. Add to this the ravages of disease and environmental hazards, such as the dreaded “milk sickness” that almost wiped out his family, and a picture of Lincoln’s childhood emerges that you may not have thought about. Furthermore, only recent (21st century) scholarship has discovered a previously unknown aspect of Lincoln: the rare genetic disorder, called MEN2B, from which he suffered, and which may well have strongly influenced one of the most significant events in all of American history.

In this episode, historian Sean Munger pierces through the “log cabin mythology” surrounding Lincoln in an attempt to understand his origins and the challenges he faced while growing up. You’ll not only learn what life in a log cabin was really like, but you’ll also meet Lincoln’s colorful family (and step-family), discover why trembling cows are terrifying, and you’ll get a thought-provoking look at how genetics can affect history. This episode may cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about America’s 16th President.

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12: Napoleon in Russia, Part III Feb 05, 2017

Show notes

Why did Napoleon, with the largest army the world had ever seen up until that time, lose his war with Russia so badly and so tragically? You may have heard that it’s because he didn’t take the threat of the cold Russian climate seriously enough, and his army froze to death on the retreat from ruined, burnt-out Moscow. This is at best a half-truth. The French Army was already disintegrating even before Napoleon occupied Moscow, and despite the “alternative facts” that Bonaparte desperately spun as to why the retreat was so disastrous, the roots of his ultimate defeat had less to do with ice and snow than it did with Napoleon’s own willful blindness. But even this debate obscures the real story of the 1812 retreat from Moscow and the almost unfathomable suffering it inflicted on the hundreds of thousands of real people—not just soldiers—who lived through it. This episode presents that story, in graphic and sometimes unsettling detail.

Historian Sean Munger tries to cut through the veil of half-truths and misconceptions surrounding the greatest military disaster of the 19th century and get to the real on-the-ground story of what happened. In this episode you’ll definitely encounter a lot of hungry and freezing soldiers, but you’ll also learn what happens when horses have the wrong kind of shoes, how to season horse meat so it tastes less disgusting, and what not to do in –10 degree weather if you want to keep your toes. You’ll also gain a curious insight into Napoleon’s own self-deception, the conflicting stories he told different people about why he lost the Russian campaign, and how he finally sold himself on a lie he evidently continued to believe until the very end of his life—after perhaps as many as a million people paid the ultimate price for his errors of judgment.

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11: Napoleon in Russia, Part II Jan 23, 2017

Show notes

Despite being warned repeatedly—by his enemy, Tsar Alexander, and even by some of his own generals—Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-proclaimed Emperor of France, made one of the costliest and most lethal mistakes in the history of warfare by invading Russia in the summer of 1812. Though it’s usually the harsh Russian winter that’s credited with crushing the French Army, in reality Napoleon and his troops were in deep trouble long before that, from literally the moment they crossed the Niemen River in Poland. It almost didn’t matter that the Russian Army kept retreating and refusing, for the most part, to fight. The half-million men of the Grand Armée had to fight dusty roads, sticky marshes full of mud, freezing rain in June, blazing heat in July, mosquitoes, dysentery, starvation and dehydration without having to worry about tangling with the Russians in battle. When the inevitable clash did finally occur at a town called Borodino, it led to an even more epic disaster: a man-made firestorm that virtually wiped Moscow off the map.

Historian Sean Munger seeks to dispel the myths and misconceptions of Napoleon’s Russian boondoggle, and to get inside the heads of the people who made it happen. In this episode you’ll learn about the man who burned down Moscow (and why he did it), how Napoleon’s badly-timed cold and bladder infection affected the course of world history, and you’ll learn just how desperate a man has to be to willingly drink horse urine. You may have heard the story of the French invasion of Russia before, but you’ve probably never heard it told quite like this.

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10: Napoleon in Russia, Part I Jan 16, 2017

Show notes

In the summer of 1812 Napoleon’s France invaded Russia, ruled by Tsar Alexander I, with the largest army ever assembled in pre-modern times. Leo Tolstoy famously called this conflict “an event opposed to human reason and human nature.” How and why did it happen? In the first of three parts, the complicated political backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars comes into focus through an examination of the lives and personalities of the two men most responsible for it, Napoleon and Alexander. After becoming unlikely friends at an intimate summit meeting on a river raft in the summer of 1807, a series of missteps, misunderstandings and divergent destinies eventually brought these two fascinating people into direct conflict with each other—with millions of their citizens’ lives at stake. The result was world-shaking history with far-reaching consequences.

In this series, Sean Munger cuts through the usual historians’ clutter of maps and army formations with a close look at the actual people behind this incredible event. In this episode you’ll come to appreciate Napoleon’s humble origins, learn why he divorced the woman he still loved, and how and why his mind just wasn’t as sharp in 1812 as it had been at the height of his power. You’ll also become familiar with Alexander’s insecurities, his bold but unrequited dreams and his receding hairline. Sean will also take you on a rather unpleasant march with Napoleon’s Grand Armée, already sinking into a hopeless fiasco of bloated horses, hungry soldiers and broken wagon wheels even before they ever caught sight of a single Russian soldier. This is history as it should be: the real story of real people.

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9: Theodosia Jan 09, 2017

Show notes

On New Year’s Eve, 1812, Theodosia Burr Alston, First Lady of South Carolina and daughter of former U.S. Vice-President Aaron Burr, boarded a ship bound for New York City and was never seen alive again. More than 50 years later, in Nag’s Head, North Carolina, an old woman gave a doctor a painting, as payment for medical services, that the doctor came to believe was a portrait of Theodosia. But was it, and if so, how did it get there? These two unsolved mysteries bookend the unusual life and personality of Theodosia Burr Alston, an educated, talented woman, outspoken feminist, who was utterly devoted to her father Aaron Burr, the “gadfly” of the Early Republic, a controversial man accused of murder and treason, who ultimately lost both of the women he held most dear in his life.

In drilling down into the twin mysteries of Theodosia Burr, historian Sean Munger sets the stage with colorful examples from her life and her father’s. In this episode you’ll not only meet various members of the Burr family, but you’ll encounter coastal pirates and unscrupulous beachcombers, two unidentified women buried in different places along the Atlantic coast who may or may not have been the real Theodosia, and follow in the footsteps of New England maritime historian Edward Rowe Snow as he tries (not entirely successfully) to solve the mystery in the 1940s. You can be the judge of whether the woman in the “Nag’s Head Portrait”—she is pictured on the far right of the image collage header for Second Decade podcast—really is Theodosia Burr Alston.

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8: Christmas 1814 Dec 21, 2016

Show notes

Second Decade wishes you happy holidays with this Christmas-themed episode. Of all the Christmases of the 1810s, the year 1814 stands out as especially significant. The world was celebrating its first holiday season in over two decades in the midst of general peace, except for one last pesky war that wouldn’t quite die. While the crowned heads at the Congress of Vienna—supposedly working for world peace but in reality boozing and partying like there was no tomorrow—were exposed to the highly flammable new holiday tradition known as the Christmas tree, a team of diplomats including future U.S. President John Quincy Adams were actually putting the Yuletide greeting “peace on earth” into practice. A convoluted and sometimes disheartening round of negotiations between two unequally-matched teams of statesmen yielded the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812 despite consciously avoiding resolution of all the major issues that caused the war in the first place. Now that’s diplomacy!

Historian Sean Munger begins this episode with a colorful look at the Christmas traditions being practiced in 1814, from a special kind of Christmas meat made from some very uncomfortable pigs, to the horrifying pyromaniacal English drinking game known as “Snapdragon.” Then he segues into the fascinating story of the Treaty of Ghent, why it almost didn’t happen and how the chrome-domed, short-tempered John Quincy Adams earned his chops as one of America’s most gifted diplomats.

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7: Volcano Dec 12, 2016

Show notes

On the island of Sumbawa, in what is now Indonesia but was previously called the East Indies, there is a collapsed, sunken shell of a volcano that was once a mighty peak taller than Mt. Fuji in Japan. On a warm spring night in 1815 this mountain, Tambora, exploded with a force so powerful that it can scarcely be measured in terms intelligible to humans. In addition to being an environmental disaster of staggering proportions that killed over 100,000 people and changed the world’s climate, the eruption of Mt. Tambora occurred at an unusual moment of transition for the people of the East Indies. The British, having brieftly wrested the spice-rich Indies from the control of French-allied Holland during the Napoleonic Wars, were struggling to leave a permanent political and strategic mark on the islands before returning them to Dutch rule. Lost in the geopolitical shuffle for colonial possessions were the people of the islands themselves, at once opaque to history but who also left behind haunting clues of their lives that were cut short by this incredible disaster.

Armed with numerous eyewitness accounts of the Tambora disaster and its aftermath, Sean Munger tries to put you on the ground at the epicenter of one of the most dramatic and powerful events in environmental history. Additionally, you’ll get a taste of old-school European colonialism in Southeast Asia, a profile of British Java’s quirky governor Thomas Stamford Raffles, and a look at the hidden history that was buried ten feet under volcanic rock and only rediscovered in the 21st century.

Subscribers to Sean’s Patreon campaign will get access to a members-only video, a companion piece to this episode, that explains why Tambora is much less well-known than the similar 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, and how the two disasters are linked.

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6: Jefferson in Winter Dec 05, 2016

Show notes

When Thomas Jefferson retired from public life in 1809 after serving two terms as U.S. President, he thought his retirement years at Monticello, his Virginia plantation, would be peaceful, quiet and relaxing. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Utterly broke as a result of his out-of-control spending sprees while in the White House, Jefferson returned home to his farm just as a series of environmental disasters made it almost impossible to earn a living from his sole remaining source of income: farming. What was more, Jefferson suddenly had to support his grown daughter, her alcoholic husband and their eleven children as well as lay out the red carpet for the steady streams of visitors and well-wishers who descended on Monticello. And that’s to say nothing of Jefferson’s own unacknowledged children by his slave mistress Sally Hemings. Add to this a war, a crippling drought and a boneheaded financial move, the 1810s proved to be nothing less than the very long winter(s) of Jefferson’s discontent.

Sean Munger not only tells the story of Thomas Jefferson’s difficult retirement during the decade of the 1810s, but also provides some historical context for understanding one of the most contradictory and controversial figures of Early America. Unpacking Jefferson’s challenges at Monticello involves everything from volcanoes in Indonesia to the passionate desires that led him into one of history’s most famous and scandalous love affairs. While we cannot hope to “solve” the enigma of Thomas Jefferson, the story of how the vaunted Sage of Monticello descended into the tragedy of his twilight years might just help us understand some of the challenges and preoccupations that shaped the personality of this extraordinary man.

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