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Current Schedule:  The Inca Empire --> Angkor --> Policing London --> Your Vote!

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas: Hero of the Revolution

Born in Saint-Domingue to an enslaved mother and a French aristocrat, life did not look like it had much in store for Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. But when his father brought him to Paris, Dumas found a new world—one where, with old barriers falling due to the revolution, he could rise. In a series of daring military escapades, he became a general by age 29, surviving both the Terror and Austrian bullets. He led his men, wearing crampons, to capture vital passes in the glacier-covered Alps, and once turned back an Austrian squadron with only a small force. He campaigned—and quarreled with—Napoleon in Italy and Egypt, and would spend years imprisoned in a Naples castle. A life so incredible his son—Alexandre Dumas—would go on to fictionalize parts of it in his classic novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.

African Americans in the Civil War: Fighting For the Union, Fighting for the Law

In 1863, the War Department issued an order establishing the United States Colored Troops. But in reality, black Americans had been fighting as militias and Pinkerton spies since before the war even began. Service in the USCT, however, was not easy. Experiencing casualty rates 35% higher than other units, paid lower wages, and facing execution or massacre if captured, the USCT nonetheless persevered—even carrying out special operations to liberate plantations deep in Confederate territory. But this struggle for victory was also a struggle for civil rights, a fight that moved forward, slower even than the grinding battle lines.

The Haitian Revolution: Listen to the Voice of Liberty

They all attended a secret Vodou ceremony, conducted during a tropical storm. And when the enslaved people returned home, the rising began. Though free people of color were already pushing for greater rights, the dynamic had just changed—St. Domingue was now witness to the largest slave revolt since Spartacus. The conflict would continue 13 years and become a proxy war for colonial powers—but against all odds, the rebels of Haiti would emerge with their own nation.

Split Mini-Series: Bass Reeves, and Yasuke

Bass Reeves: According to one story, Bass Reeves gained his freedom when he and the Confederate officer who "owned" him argued over a card game—Reeves beat him unconscious and lit out for Oklahoma. Becoming the first black U.S. Marshal west of the Mississippi, Reeves went to work bringing law to America's wildest places. Arresting 3,000 men in a 32-year career, and killing 14 in self-defense, Reeves would become a living legend in Indian Territory and one of the most famous lawmen of the Old West.

Yasuke: The African man known only as Yasuke came to Japan in the service of a Portuguese missionary—and, in a way that's not entirely clear, came to be a weapon-bearer for Oda Nobunaga. Present at some of Nobunaga's later battles and his suicide, Yasuke's story reminds us that, even in the 1500s, the world was already global.