Napoleon was the kind of guy who didn’t know when the party was over. Following his disastrous defeat in Russia in 1812 (chronicled in Episodes 10-12 of this podcast) and yet another war in Europe, Napoleon’s enemies invaded France and forced him off the throne in the spring of 1814. Bonaparte was given the paltry consolation prize of the island of Elba, which proved stifling, and he had little hope that his enemies, particularly Britain, Austria and the restored monarchy of France, would...

This is a bonus episode which goes outside the parameters of the main Second Decade show. Astoria, Oregon was founded in 1811 as an outpost for fur trapping and trading on the Northwest coast, and was intended to be a crucial part of a global empire of commerce envisioned by German-born New York City millionaire John Jacob Astor. It didn’t quite work out that way, but the long history of Astoria has involved a number of fascinating people, encounters and accidents that have shaped this small...

This is a bonus episode which goes outside the parameters of the main Second Decade show. Sometime in the middle of the 19th century, somebody got it in their head that there was a cache of fabulous treasure buried on a remote island in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia called Oak Island. Said to have begun with an impromptu expedition to the island in 1795 by some local kids, the legend of the famed “Money Pit” has grown over the centuries to amass a mythology of self-referential books, occult and New...

At the end of the Second Decade, after many tumultuous years of war and revolution, Spain’s colonial empire in the New World began to collapse at a rapid rate. It was due in no small part to Simón Bolívar and his daring military conquests, which were crowned by an audacious and harrowing trek through swamps and mountains which led to the pivotal Battle of Boyaca in 1819. But how did Bolivar, who had suffered at least as many failures and setbacks as he had clear successes, come to this point?...

The process of detaching Latin America from three centuries of colonial Spanish rule was hardly a linear one. Simón Bolívar, the most important but hardly the only revolutionary in Venezuela and New Granada (Colombia), came in and out of exile several times, was often defeated (sometimes by his own mistakes), and continually forced to try to “reboot” the revolution after another failed start. In the meantime, warfare and violence continued unremittingly within the contested areas, usually...

Simón Bolívar is one of the giants of Latin American history, with statutes, portraits and monuments to him everywhere from Panama to Tierra del Fuego, and even an entire country—Bolivia—bears his name. But how much do you really know about him? Where did he come from, what was Spanish America like at the time he arose, and how did he begin his incredible journey to liberate three-quarters of a hemisphere from one of the world’s oldest colonial powers? Although Bolívar clearly was the right...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

You’ve probably heard of Daniel Boone and “Grizzly” Adams, the quintessential frontier mountain men who helped forge America’s frontier identity in the 19th century. But you’ve probably never heard of Estwick Evans. An eccentric New Hampshire lawyer, something compelled to Evans put on a skin-tight suit made of buffalo fur, hoist a 6-foot rifle across his shoulders and take off into the snowy wilderness of New England on a frigid day in February 1818. Evans’s epic journey covered over 4,000...

Church steeples, horse-drawn sleighs, picket fences, snow-covered fields...is this what you think of when you picture an old-time winter in New England? The cultural and historical roots of these images go back to Colonial times, but the historical reality isn’t always so idyllic. On January 19, 1810, a strange and sudden cold snap, accompanied by violent winds, plunged the region into a sudden deep freeze that nearly everyone who lived through it remembered vividly for the rest of their...

You may not have heard of David Ramsay, but if you lived in Charleston, South Carolina in the second decade, you would probably know him—if you were part of the city’s rich white elite, that is. Ramsay, born in Pennsylvania, Princeton-educated, served in the South Carolina State Legislature and the Confederation Congress, was a protegé of revolutionary doctor Benjamin Rush—a signer of the Declaration of Independence—and tried to rid Charleston’s steamy streets of yellow fever by predicting...

The early months of the War of 1812 served up a relentless drumbeat of bad news for the United States: our untrained and ill-equipped forces, fighting a war they were unprepared for in the first place, suffered reverse after reverse on the battlefield. But on the high seas, the exploits of one remarkable ship, the USS Constitution, provided the only bright spot in the gloom and demonstrated that the new republic could, when circumstances called for it, compete militarily even with the...

The image and concept of Frankenstein’s monster—most notably personified by Boris Karloff in the 1931 Universal horror film—are indelible in literature, cinema and popular culture. Far more than just an 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein is a philosophical journey as well as a cultural phenomenon. But how did it come about? The idea for the novel was famously hatched at a lakeside chateau in Switzerland, the Villa Diodati, in the late spring and early summer of 1816 by...

Since the beginning of film as a narrative and artistic medium, historical events and eras have been popular subjects for filmmakers. The decade of the 1810s, however, has not tended to show up in movies or on TV as frequently or consistently as other eras—but there are still plenty of examples of the second decade on film. Beginning in the 1920s with French filmmaker Abel Gance, depictions of the 1810s, many involving Napoleon or adaptations of popular and classic novels, have woven their...

Despite being one of the longest-reigning British monarchs as well as wildly popular among his own people, King George III gets a bad rap as the “mad king who lost America.” In truth the story of George’s life is touching and sad. After dealing with not one but two world wars that occurred on his watch, as well as two world-shaking revolutions in America and France, George was ultimately felled by a mysterious illness that affected his body as well as his mind. Signs of his recurring malady...

Despite seeming to the West as if it was “sleeping,” China in the 1810s was in fact experiencing the crucial transition of the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty from its cultural and political zenith under the Qianlong Emperor to the ruin and chaos that would ramp up in the later 19th century. Ruled at this time by Aisin Gioro Yongyan, also known as the Jiaqing Emperor, China rebuffed not one but two British diplomatic missions and continued its policy of isolation and indifference to the West. But at...

The year 1814 was one of the bleakest in American history. It opened with the country embroiled in war, with most of its coast blockaded by the British Navy, the economy collapsing, the frontiers aflame with violence, and the government teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. And now that Britain’s war with Napoleon was effectively over, things were bound to get even worse for the United States. American troops scored a few victories in the field, some of them surprising, but the capture and...