While addressing the Canadian Parliament early in World War II, Churchill famously quipped that Britain, despite being bombed almost into oblivion by the Luftwaffe, never had its neck wrung like a chicken, by responding "some chicken, some neck." We have the actual recording, but listen to this episode to hear the rest of the story!

We hear this all the time in the US: “George Patton should have been unleashed and taken care of the Soviets in 1945 when we had the chance.” And from the movie, Patton: “We're gonna have to fight them sooner or later anyway. Why not do it now, when we got the army here to do it with?” If we had let Patton have his way, the Soviet Union would have been eliminated, there would have been no Cold War, and no threat of a nuclear WWIII. True? Professor Nash from Penn State explains all! One of our best episodes!

Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted so much more from the US government and US elite, than most people realize. Popular history has airbrushed out far too much about his life and work. Professor Phil Nash reminds us of the importance of King’s work, especially during the forgotten period between his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and his assassination in 1968. Listen and learn.

When announcing the beginning of impeachment proceedings, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, brought up a Ben Franklin “quotation.” Franklin supposedly said this after the Founding Fathers had agreed on the broad nature of the new U.S. government in 1787. But is the quote genuine? We explain it all, and the wider context of Franklin’s political and social world.

We explain the complicated and much-mythologized history of the Pentagon Papers, which is shorthand for the government-funded study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Once leaked by Daniel Ellsberg and others, American newspapers, led by the New York Times, printed significant extracts from the Papers. This led to a major freedom of the press controversy, and Supreme Court ruling.

You often hear that "the real heroes" of the Nixon Impeachment Crisis were the Republicans in Congress. They put country ahead of party, so the story goes, and facts ahead of friendship, and urged Nixon to resign rather than be impeached and removed from office. But is that what really happened? Were the 70s Republicans heroic? And exactly when did they take their heroic stand? Professor Buzzkill explains all the complexities!

Lots of people take comfort from the quote “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” and it’s usually credited to Martin Luther King. He said it, but was it an original MLK thought? The long history of this famous quote is fascinating and uplifting. Listen and learn!