Plausibly Live! - The Official Podcast Of The Dave Bowman Show

We tend to remember the American Revolution as a clean fight. Patriots in homespun. Redcoats in formation. Muskets cracking across open fields. But that is not how it felt in North Carolina in 1776. Before there was Saratoga. Before there was Yorktown. Before Jefferson put ink to parchment and accused the king of stirring up “domestic insurrections among us,” there was a swamp. A narrow bridge. And neighbors marching against neighbors. Royal Governor Josiah Martin believed he could crush the rebellion from the inside. Ten thousand loyalists would rise. Seven thousand British troops would land. The Carolinas would fall. The Revolution would choke before it ever reached full flame. Instead, in the cold darkness before dawn on February 27, 1776, Highland Scots charged across a greased bridge shouting “King George and broadswords!” What followed lasted three minutes. Three minutes that shattered a royal strategy. Three minutes that hardened a colony. Three minutes that pushed North Carolina to become the fir

Good morning, America, and welcome to the only show reckless enough to record live during a playoff-intensity hockey game before most of the country has located its coffee. This week, we hit the microphones at dawn because somewhere in Milan, the schedule makers decided that U.S. versus Canada should be settled at an hour normally reserved for bakers and dairy cows. So yes, the game is on in the background. Yes, it’s chippy. And yes, you may hear spontaneous reactions that are either patriotic or deeply unhealthy. Possibly both. From Olympic controversy and curling drama to tainted gold medals and athletic oversharing, we begin on the ice and then glide straight into the strange modern obsession with identification. Birth certificates. Real ID. The SAVE Act. Politicians who somehow travel internationally while claiming documents are impossible to find. If that sounds improbable, buckle up. Then we detour through Seattle sports economics, millionaire taxes, the ghost of the SuperSonics, and why professional

Before there was a telegraph wire humming across the plains, before railroads stitched steel across the continent, before the internet convinced us that information travels at the speed of light, there was a rider on a muddy road with a leather satchel and a republic in his saddlebag. In this episode, we are talking about the Postal Act of 1792. It sounds bureaucratic. It sounds dry. It sounds like something best left to archivists and footnotes. But here is the truth. This law built the nervous system of the United States. It answered a question that haunted the Founders after the Revolution: how do you keep a large republic from drifting apart? Washington signed it. Madison believed in it. Franklin helped lay the groundwork for it. And Congress embedded within it a bold idea that still shapes us today. Information should circulate freely. News should be affordable. Private correspondence should be protected. The government should connect its people, not spy on them. This was not about delivering parcels

We love to talk about the giants of the American Revolution. Washington in command. Jefferson at his desk. Adams on his feet. But revolutions are not won by speeches alone. They are won by men who move iron in the dark. This week on Dave Does History, we step back into the winter of 1775 and meet a 25 year old Boston bookseller who understood something most armies still struggle to grasp. Strategy means nothing without logistics. Henry Knox had no formal military education. He left school at nine. He taught himself Greek, Latin, and the science of artillery by candlelight in his bookstore. When George Washington needed cannons to break the British grip on Boston, Knox offered a solution that sounded almost insane. Drag sixty tons of artillery three hundred miles through snow, mountains, and frozen rivers. What followed was one of the most daring logistical feats in American history, a “noble train of artillery” that changed the course of the war without firing a single decisive shot. In this episode, we ex

This week on What The Frock?, the world proves once again that it cannot be left unattended for five minutes. Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod lace up their skates and wade into a week that includes American cricket triumph, Olympic scandal, auto-tuned halftime theatrics, AI paranoia, and a voter ID debate that somehow manages to be both deadly serious and deeply ridiculous. The United States T20 team pulls off wins that have us technically sitting near the top of a brutal group, which in sports terms means we are thrilled and cautiously bracing for reality at the same time. Meanwhile, the Winter Olympics serve up enough controversy to make even curling dramatic. A French judge’s scoring raises eyebrows. Canadian curlers are caught touching stones they absolutely should not be touching. Ice dancing becomes less about artistry and more about arithmetic. It is sport, politics, and human nature sliding across the same sheet of ice. From there, the conversation turns to the Superb Owl halftime show, engineered music,

A random encounter while reading a book has Dave contemplating the reason why books remain so important...

Independence did not begin with a vote. It did not begin with Jefferson’s pen scratching across parchment. It began earlier, colder, louder, and far less polite. In the winter of 1776, Americans were not celebrating. They were arguing. In taverns where the ale was thin. In churches where the sermons bled into politics. In parlors where fear sat quietly beside the fire. Blood had already been spilled. Boston was occupied. Trade was strangled. And yet most Americans still clung to the King, not out of loyalty, but out of habit. Monarchy was flawed, but it was familiar. Then Common Sense arrived. Not as a book to be studied in silence, but as noise. Read aloud. Debated. Challenged. Answered. It did not give Americans facts they did not know. It gave them permission to ask questions they had avoided. Dangerous questions. Impolite ones. Questions that refused to stay inside the relationship. What follows is not the story of sudden revolution. It is the story of exhaustion. Of anxiety hardening into accusation.

This week on What the Frock?, the world shows up all at once, loudly, brightly, and with absolutely no regard for your attention span. Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod take their usual seats at the intersection of faith, culture, and mild incredulity, only to discover that the universe has decided to pile on the Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl, T20 cricket, modern politics, and medical bureaucracy before breakfast. It starts innocently enough with Olympic wonder, Italian mountains, music, and the simple joy of watching human beings do impossible things on snow. Then it veers, as it always does, into questions no one asked but everyone now has to live with, including how far elite athletes will go for a competitive edge and why you can never look at ski jumping the same way again. Along the way there is laughter, skepticism, and a deeply personal detour through an emergency room experience that feels uncomfortably familiar in the modern age. Politics makes its entrance, spectacle does what spectacle always does, and

This week on Dave Does History, the American Revolution is stripped of its romance and examined where wars are actually won or lost: logistics. Picking up in the brutal winter of 1775–1776, Dave Bowman walks listeners into British-occupied Boston, a city encircled, frozen, and starving. What emerges is not a tale of grand ideology or battlefield heroics, but of an empire choking on distance, delay, and bureaucratic blindness. British troops, unable to be properly supplied or housed, turn to distraction, staging plays in the heart of a Puritan city while hunger and resentment close in around them. That misplaced confidence collapses spectacularly on January 8, 1776, when American forces exploit the moment to strike, not for victory, but for humiliation and message. From there, the story widens. Boston becomes a case study in imperial failure, revealing how the Atlantic Ocean, slow communication, and fractured governance undermine Britain’s ability to rule from afar. Through the lens of Jefferson’s grievances a

Language is a fragile thing. It carries memory, meaning, and moral weight, and when it breaks, it rarely breaks quietly. Two thousand years ago, Cicero warned that a republic does not collapse all at once. It hollows out first, word by word, until the language of virtue remains but the substance is gone. The buildings still stand. The speeches still sound familiar. But something essential has already been lost. Today, we find ourselves in that same uneasy moment. Our political vocabulary has become a weapon. Labels replace arguments. Outrage substitutes for reason. When every opponent is called a Nazi, when every disagreement is treated as existential evil, persuasion dies and power takes its place. History tells us where that road leads, and it is never somewhere good. In this episode of *What the Frock*, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod dig into the corruption of public language and why it matters far more than most people want to admit. Drawing on Cicero, the prophet Jeremiah, and the hard lessons of history,

Thomas Paine did not arrive in history as a marble statue or a finished idea. He arrived tired, broke, and angry, with ink on his fingers and a habit of saying the quiet part out loud. When Americans remember the Revolution, they tend to remember generals on horseback and signatures on parchment. They forget the man hunched over scrap paper by candlelight, turning frustration into sentences that ordinary people could understand. Paine did not command armies. He did something far more dangerous. He told people that authority had to justify itself, that tradition was not an argument, and that liberty was not a favor granted by kings. He wrote for farmers, laborers, and soldiers who were cold, unpaid, and uncertain whether any of this was worth the cost. His words did not promise comfort. They demanded courage. This episode follows Paine from obscurity to influence and then into exile, tracing how the same clarity that helped ignite independence later made him unwelcome in polite company. He was celebrated when

It sounds like a tall tale told too late at night. A submarine in the Rocky Mountains, sitting on a frozen lake nearly nine thousand feet above sea level, more than a thousand miles from the nearest ocean. But this story is not folklore. It is documented, photographed, and quietly stubborn in its facts. In the winter of 1944, residents of Central City, Colorado watched a rusted, cigar shaped vessel rise from the ice of Missouri Lake after forty-five years underwater. The band played a patriotic tune better suited to a harbor than a mining camp, and someone cracked a joke about the longest crash dive in history. They were not wrong. This is the story of the Rocky Mountain submarine, built in secret in 1898 by a skilled and eccentric engineer named Rufus T. Owens. It is a story about ambition, miscalculation, and the peculiar American habit of attempting the impossible simply because no one has proven it cannot be done.

When we talk about the Declaration of Independence, we tend to remember the poetry. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Big ideas, clean ideals, a nation imagining itself into being. But that is only half the document. The Declaration is also an indictment, and one of its most furious charges accuses King George the Third of doing something unforgivable by eighteenth century standards. Transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to make war on his own people. That line is not rhetorical flourish. It is a line in the sand. In this episode, we are going to unpack why that accusation mattered so much, how the soldier trade actually worked, and why the arrival of German troops transformed a political dispute into an irreversible break. We will look at fear, propaganda, theology, and cold hard contracts that priced human lives by the head. This is the moment when reconciliation died, and independence became inevitable.

Welcome to What The Frock?, the show that starts with the weather and somehow ends up questioning the collapse of modern thought. In this episode, Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod do what polite society pretends to hate and secretly loves. They make small talk. About cold snaps, fog, snow, Florida apologies, and why everyone asks how you are without wanting an answer. But do not be fooled. The weather is just the doorway. Very quickly, the conversation turns to what has changed in us. Short attention spans. Endless scrolling. Movies that have to explain themselves every ten minutes. News cycles that replace thinking with reacting. Narratives that form before facts even show up. Along the way, Netflix gets blamed, Star Trek gets defended, gravity allegedly shuts off on August 12, 2026, and someone tries to sell you anti gravity supplements. It is funny. It is skeptical. It is unapologetically old school. Hold on to your hat. This is What The Frock?

On a January morning in nineteen forty four, a small town in Ohio learned how the war really worked. Not through headlines about victory, but through a quiet notice. A sailor was missing. No details. No explanation. Just absence. That sailor had been aboard USS Corvina. Corvina was new, capable, and sent on her first war patrol into some of the most dangerous water on earth. She never came back. Eighty two men went down with her in a single night south of Truk Lagoon. In the vast arithmetic of the Pacific War, Corvina occupies a narrow line. She was the only American submarine lost to an enemy submarine in World War Two. That fact matters, but it is not the heart of the story. This is not about rarity. It is about people, machinery, chance, and silence. About what the ocean takes, and what history remembers. This is the story of USS Corvina, and the crew that remains on Eternal Patrol.

I do not usually stop what I am doing to listen to Supreme Court oral arguments. That is lawyer country. Necessary work, important work, but not usually where historians spend their time. But this week, something in one of those arguments stopped me cold. Not because of the outcome, which we do not yet know. Not because of the modern policy question involved. But because of how history was used. Or more precisely, how it was handled. During arguments over a Hawaii firearms law, attorneys defending the statute reached back into the Reconstruction era and cited the post Civil War Black Codes as historical precedent. Laws written in 1865 and 1866 to control, restrict, and terrorize newly freed Black Americans. Laws so abusive that they triggered the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment itself. Those laws were presented, in the Supreme Court of the United States, as examples of acceptable historical regulation. If you are not a historian of Reconstruction, that might sound odd. If you are,

Before the first shots were fired, before tea hit the water, the American Revolution was already underway, quietly, methodically, and with paperwork. This episode begins in places that do not make it onto commemorative mugs. Courtrooms. Docks. Ledger books. It begins with a simple realization that spread through the colonies like a winter chill. British authority was no longer bound by its own rules. The law, once assumed to be a shield, had started to feel like a weapon. We tend to remember rebellion when it looks dramatic. We forget it when it looks procedural. But long before muskets cracked at Lexington, colonists were watching ships seized under cannon, neighbors dragged into courts without juries, and legal rights evaporate behind polite language and official seals. These were not accidents. They were patterns. Today on Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, we look at two maritime flashpoints that forced that truth into the open. The seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty. The burning of HMS Gaspee. On t

Welcome back to *What the Frock?*, the show where a rabbi, a friar, and a strong cup of coffee try to make sense of a world that has clearly skipped a few maintenance checks. In this episode, we start where all serious analysis begins, with football heartbreak and bad bets. From there, we wander, cheerfully and with intent, into the strange new marketplace where people no longer wager on games but on governments, resignations, and the expiration dates of world leaders. Not *if*, mind you, but *when*. That alone should tell you something about the age we are living in. Along the way, we ask uncomfortable questions about media, madness, and why shouting has replaced persuasion. We talk about the economics of outrage, the difference between conviction and performance, and what happens when even the loudest voices start blinking at the craziness around them. We also notice something quieter and far more unsettling, the absence of celebration as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches

She was built to disappear. Not in the romantic sense, not like a magician’s flourish or a ship slipping into fog for the sake of poetry, but in the colder, more disciplined sense of Cold War necessity. USS Benjamin Franklin was designed to vanish into the acoustic shadows of the ocean, to become a rumor instead of a presence, a probability instead of a target. That was the deal struck between the Navy and history in the early 1960s. If the submarine could not be found, then war itself might be kept at bay.

On the morning of January 17, 1955, the Thames River at Groton looked much as it always had in winter. Gray water, cold air, men in heavy coats moving with the practiced economy of sailors who knew their business. Nothing in the scene warned the casual observer that the age of naval propulsion was about to change course. At 11:00 a.m., the submarine tied to the pier eased herself free, not with drama or spectacle, but with a kind of quiet confidence. A few minutes later, a short message blinked out by signal lamp to the tender alongside. “Underway on Nuclear Power.” It was ten words, plain and unsentimental, and it marked the first time in human history that a vehicle moved under the control of sustained nuclear fission. The boat was the USS Nautilus, and the world did not yet grasp what had just slipped its moorings.