HISTORY This Week

May 22, 1856. Charles Sumner isn’t worried about making friends in the Senate. His rhetoric is inflammatory, almost intentionally. He’s an ardent abolitionist in a time when people are still enslaved throughout the South.

In his most recent speech, Sumner attacked his colleagues directly, especially pro-slavery Senator Andrew Butler. Butler’s cousin, Preston Brooks, is also in Congress, and as a southern gentleman, he decides he has to do something to retaliate.

What pushes Preston Brooks to assault Charles Sumner on the Senate floor? And how does this attack help drive Americans towards civil war?

Special thanks to Steve Puleo, author of The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union. 

Two other books we used to put this episode together: Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War by David Donald, and The Caning of Charles Sumner by Williamjames Hull Hoffer.

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May 16, 1920. Tens of thousands of people surround St. Peter’s Basilica to honor Joan of Arc, a French peasant girl who died nearly five hundred years before. Joan’s feats in battle—and her visions of God—have become legendary since her heyday during the Hundred Years' War. And today, the Catholic Church is making her a saint. But Joan was a real person – and while many supported her during her lifetime, many others wanted her dead. Who was this curious figure? And how did her faith turn the tides of a seemingly endless age of violence?

Special thanks to Nancy Goldstone, author of ⁠The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc⁠; and Charity Urbanski, associate history professor at the University of Washington.

** This episode originally aired May 15, 2023.

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May 15, 1940. It’s opening day. San Bernardino, California is a city on the rise, and to meet this new demand for cheap, good food, two brothers have created a restaurant: McDonald’s Famous Barbecue.

You can order a PB&J sandwich, barbecued pork, baked beans, and yes, a hamburger. It’s a work in progress, but Dick and Mac McDonald never stop innovating.

How did the McDonald brothers engineer a system that would be replicated in thousands of locations across the globe? And why don't they get the credit they deserve?

Special thanks to Adam Chandler, journalist and author of Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom; and Marcia Chatelain,  professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. 

Here are two other great books we used in putting this episode together: Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away by Lisa Napoli; and McDonald’s: Behind the Arches by John F. Love.

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May 5, 1862. The French have landed in Mexico. Napoleon III wants to conquer the country and assert France’s imperial dominance in the Americas. In his way? The Mexican army, held up in the city of Puebla.



The Battle of Puebla will come to define this struggle: a European monarch against a fledgling democracy, led by Benito Juárez. Mexico’s victory will be especially celebrated by Latinos in the United States, who are watching this struggle play out while their new country is embroiled in a Civil War. This first holiday, in 1862, would mark the beginning of a new tradition, unique to this new American community.



How is Cinco de Mayo connected to a broad struggle for freedom across the continent in the 1860s? And what does this holiday really mean?

Special thanks to David Hayes-Bautista,  distinguished professor of medicine and director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and author of El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition.

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April 27, 1951. The United States has been putting pressure on Denmark for a long time. Because the small European kingdom has something the Americans really, really want: Greenland. 

Today, they sign a treaty that will basically let the U.S. military build whatever it wants on this frozen island. They end up constructing an air base, but then turn to a much more ambitious project, underground.

How does this hidden Arctic outpost connect to a massive nuclear secret? And why do the Americans abandon this city beneath the ice?

Special thanks to Paul Bierman, professor at the University of Vermont’s School of the Environment and Natural Resources and author of When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth's Tumultuous History and Perilous Future; Kristian Nielsen, associate professor in science history at Aarhus University in Denmark and co-author of Camp Century: The Untold Story of America's Secret Arctic Military Base Under the Greenland Ice; and Robert Weiss, former US Army doctor and ​​Donald Guthrie Professor of Urology at Yale University’s School of Medicine.

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