Latest / History Unplugged Podcast
The Wunderkind George Forster: Voyaging with Captain Cook at 10 and Dining with Benjamin Franklin in Paris in his 20s
A ten-year-old boy gallops across the Russian steppe on a Kalmyk horse, collecting plants for his father while German settlers starve in earth dugouts along the Volga. Seven years later, that same boy is standing on the deck of Captain Cook's Resolution as it crosses the Antarctic Circle for the first time in history, sketching birds and icebergs in a cabin so small he can barely turn around. By twenty-two he has circumnavigated the globe, published a book that Christoph Martin Wieland called a masterpiece and Samuel Johnson praised for its prose, dined with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, and…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.