Brian Balogh

The History Guys look at who has had access to guns in the U.S., and what those guns have meant to the people who have owned them.

A conversation with the lead designer of the 1985 version of the Oregon Trail video game.

The extremes to which Puerto Rican national Pedro Albizu Campos and his followers fought for independence.

The founder of the Olympic Project for Human Rights talks about the iconic protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the winners’ podium in 1968.

On this episode of BackStory, Brian sits down with Ed to talk about a project of his that’s been twenty-five years in the making.

On the Oneida Community, a radical religious organization practicing “Bible communism,” and eventually, manufacturing silverware.

In the 1930s, 16 African-American families from the South rejected the American experiment and looked to Communist Uzbekistan for a chance to build a new world.

Looking for an easy buck, con artists in the early 1900s infamously "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge to immigrants fresh off the boat.

The story of America's oldest counterfeiters and why the Civil War spurred the Secret Service into hunting them down.

The story of the thousands of free-range pigs who managed New York’s waste in the 1800s.

How big business lies behind early efforts to encourage Americans to recycle.

A discussion of the booming 19th-century trade in scrap metal.

Historian David Herzberg discusses how feminists transformed Valium from a wonder drug to a symbol of medical sexism.

Historian Isaac Campos traces the origins of the idea that marijuana causes violent madness…and finds the trail leads south, to Mexico.

How nativism and racism shaped the national movement towards Prohibition.

A perusal of Benjamin Franklin’s "Drinker’s Dictionary," and a chat about how the drink of choice in revolutionary America switched from cider to rum.

American Indians and the tumult in their cultures precipitated by the arrival of alcohol.

The legacy of Operation Pedro Pan, a plan to save Cuban children from communist indoctrination by leaving their families and resettling in the United States.

A brief discussion of the fierce 19th century debates over beards, and how booming American cities created the perfect climate for all that facial hair to grow.

A discussion of the patriotic attempt to spurn European fashion and spin cloth at home in the time leading up to the Revolutionary War.