History Unplugged Podcast

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5,000 Years of Punctuation: Why It Terrified Roman Scholars and Started a Russian Revolution

September 22, 2026

The first punctuation mark was a triangular symbol pressed into clay somewhere in Mesopotamia. Spaces between words were unknown for millennia, until a group of Irish monks pioneered them in the eighth century.  Flash forward 1200 years, and in 1905, Moscow's typesetters went on strike because a new regulation said they would be paid by alphabetical letter only, excluding commas, full stops, and the spaces between words. Half the work of setting a page is punctuation. The printers refuse...

Charlemagne Dreamed of a Sword With Four Words on It and They Predicted Exactly How His Dynasty Would Fall

September 17, 2026

Late at night in his palace at Aachen, Charlemagne had a dream. A mysterious figure approached him carrying a sword engraved with four Germanic words: raht, radoleiba, nasg, and enti. The meaning seemed immediately clear to the emperor, who fancied himself a philosopher as well as a conqueror. There would be four ages of his dynasty: one of abundance, one of sudden failure, one of great disorder, and then the end. The dream is almost certainly a fiction, composed as a warning to a later gener...

Cicero—Rome’s Greatest Orator—Saved the Capital From Insurrection, But Couldn’t Save the Republic From Collapse

September 15, 2026

On December 7, 43 BCE, a sixty-three-year-old man was carried in a litter down a woodland path near the Italian coast, fleeing soldiers who had been sent to kill him. When they caught up, he ordered his attendants to set down the litter, put his head out, and offered them his neck. They cut it off, along with the hand that had written the fourteen speeches attacking Mark Antony. The head and hand were nailed to the rostra in the Roman Forum, the speaker's platform from which that same voice h...