In this gut-wrenching multi-part episode of Time Machine Diaries, Cullen dives into one of the darkest crimes of the 20th century: the Holodomor, the Ukrainian starvation of 1932–1933.

This was not a natural famine. It was engineered.

Through forced collectivization, impossible grain quotas, confiscation brigades, blacklisted villages, and sealed borders, Stalin’s Soviet state turned food into a weapon and transformed Ukraine, Europe’s breadbasket, into a graveyard.

This episode breaks down how the system worked step-by-step, what starvation looked like in real villages, how survival was criminalized, and how propaganda tried to bury the truth for decades. It also makes uncomfortable modern comparisons to how power still controls people through resources, media narratives, and bureaucracy.

This isn’t just history.

It’s a warning.

Books
Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. Doubleday, 2017.
Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford UP, 1986.
Davies, R. W., and Stephen G. Wheatcroft. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Oxford UP, 1994.
Graziosi, Andrea. The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917–1933. Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996.
Hosking, Geoffrey. Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union. Harvard UP, 2006.
Marples, David R. Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine. Central European UP, 2007.
Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010.
Viola, Lynne. The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements. Oxford UP, 2007.

Academic / Research Collections
Kulchytsky, Stanislav. “The Holodomor of 1932–33 as Genocide.” Nationalities Papers, Cambridge UP, various issues/chapters.
Plokhy, Serhii. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. Basic Books, 2015.
Subtelny, Orest. Ukraine: A History. U of Toronto P, 2009.

Primary Sources / Contemporary Reporting
The Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge famine reporting (1933) — published dispatches and archival reprints in various collections.
Soviet archival documents and grain procurement records (commonly cited in Davies & Wheatcroft; Applebaum).

Documentaries / Film
Holodomor: Ukraine’s Genocide of 1932–1933. (various versions; commonly distributed in educational releases).
The Soviet Story. Directed by Edvīns Šnore, 2008.
Harvest of Despair: The 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine. Directed by Slavko Nowytski, 1984.

Museums / Institutions (Great for show notes credibility)
Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC).
National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide (Kyiv).
U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine (Congressional commission report materials).

Every single person in the United States came from somewhere else, except Native Americans, who were here first, full stop.

Using the Irish Potato Famine as the backbone, this episode connects forced migration, racial hierarchy, and modern immigration panic into one continuous story. From famine ships to “No Irish Need Apply,” from becoming “white” to forgetting what that cost, this episode dismantles the myth of the “real American” and exposes how every generation rewrites its own arrival story to justify cruelty toward the next.

Kinealy, Christine. This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52. Gill & Macmillan, 1994.

Ó Gráda, Cormac. Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton University Press, 1999.

Mitchel, John. The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps). James McGlashan, 1861.

The Times (London). Various editorials on the Irish potato blight, 1846–1847. British Newspaper Archive.

Hickman, Mary J. “Racialized Boundaries: The Irish as an ‘Other’ in Britain and the United States.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 1998, pp. 288–312.

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. Routledge, 1995.

Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Library of Congress. “Immigration and American Expansion, 1800–1900.”
www.loc.gov.

Irish Central. O’Dowd, Niall. “Was It Genocide? What the British Ruling Class Really Said About the Irish Famine.” IrishCentral, 19 Apr. 2023.

Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum. “Population Loss and Emigration.” Quinnipiac University.

They were teenagers when the world collapsed around them. Not symbols. Not myths. Not side characters in someone else’s war.

Freddie Oversteegen, her sister Truus, and Hannie Schaft came of age inside a system designed to erase people quietly and efficiently. The Nazi occupation of the Netherlands did not begin with gunfire in the streets. It began with paperwork, compliance, neighbors staying silent, and children learning far too quickly that adulthood had arrived early.

This episode traces the slow suffocation of Dutch society under occupation, the mechanics of how resistance actually worked, and why teenage girls became some of its most effective weapons. It confronts the uncomfortable truth that child soldiers are not an anomaly of distant wars but a recurring outcome of systemic collapse, propaganda, and moral failure.

Freddie did not choose violence because she wanted to. She chose it because the alternatives disappeared one by one. Her story forces a modern reckoning with how radicalization happens, how children adapt to survive when adults fail, and why history keeps pretending this is someone else’s problem.

This is not a story about hero worship.
It is a story about pressure, necessity, and the cost of living through occupation.

Sources:

de Jong, Loe. The Netherlands and Nazi Germany. Harvard University Press, 1990.

Moore, Bob. Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940–1945. Arnold Publishers, 1997.

Warmbrunn, Werner. The Dutch under German Occupation 1940–1945. Stanford University Press, 1963.

Schaft, Hannie. In the Shadow of the Gallows. Translated editions, Dutch Resistance Archives, various printings.

Singer, P. W. Children at War. University of California Press, 2005.

Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD). Women in the Dutch Resistance. NIOD, archival research collections.

Dutch Resistance Museum. Freddie Oversteegen and Truus Oversteegen Oral Histories. Amsterdam, museum archival materials.

Anne Frank House. Dutch Resistance and Civilian Life Under Occupation. Anne Frank House Research Division, Amsterdam.

United Nations Office of the Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict. Children and Armed Conflict: Recruitment and Radicalization. United Nations, thematic reports.

Netherlands Public Broadcasting (NPO). Women of the Dutch Resistance. Documentary series, NPO Archives.

The Seminole Wars are not frontier skirmishes. They are one of the longest, most expensive, and most deliberately erased conflicts in United States history. This episode dismantles the myth of American invincibility by tracing how the United States spent decades fighting a people it could not defeat, negotiating treaties it did not honor, and redefining victory when exhaustion replaced conquest.

Moving beyond what's been taught, this episode follows the wars as systems failures. Logistics collapsing in hostile terrain. Guerrilla resistance is evolving faster than military doctrine. Black Seminole communities targeted for reenslavement. A government that chose removal, family capture, and invisibility over honest resolution.

This is not a story about battles alone.
It is a story about time, endurance, and what happens when an empire discovers that force cannot solve every problem it creates.

Mahon, John K. History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842. Audiobook, University Press of Florida, Audible edition.

Covington, James W. The Seminoles of Florida. Audiobook, University Press of Florida, Audible edition.

Porter, Kenneth W. The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People. Audiobook, Tantor Media, Audible.

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Seminole Resistance and Survival. YouTube, Smithsonian Channel.

PBS. The Seminole Wars. YouTube, PBS Florida Collection.

Kings and Generals. The Seminole Wars Explained. YouTube.

American Battlefield Trust. The Seminole Wars and Guerrilla Warfare in Florida. YouTube.

Timeline World History. How the Seminole Outsmarted the U.S. Army. YouTube.

History Hit. America’s Forgotten Wars: The Seminole Wars. YouTube.

Florida Humanities Council. Fort Mose, Black Seminoles, and Resistance. YouTube

This episode of Spotlight on Legends pulls two nearly forgotten Black women out of the footnotes of American history and puts them where they belong, front and center.

History often portrays the Mongol Empire as driven by blind brutality or personal ambition. That’s a lie.

In this episode, Cullen breaks down why Temüjin didn’t build the Mongols because he wanted power; he built them because the system he was born into was designed to kill him. The steppe was a failed state. Loyalty meant nothing. Food meant survival. Violence was constant and random. And kindness got you killed faster than weakness.

This episode dives into Temüjin’s early betrayals, the murder of his brother, enslavement, and the moment he realized alliances were useless without structure. It explains why Mongol violence was deliberate, conditional, and designed to end endless cycles of revenge, not glorify them. Through first-person perspectives, modern comparisons, and raw analysis, Cullen shows how fear, deterrence, and predictability replaced chaos.

This isn’t a hero story. It’s a system-failure story.

And it forces an uncomfortable question: if you were born into collapse, would you really choose differently?

Benjamin, Craig. The Mongol Empire. The Great Courses, 2021. Audible audiobook.

Dan Carlin. Hardcore History. “Wrath of the Khans.” Dan Carlin, 2012–2013. Podcast series.

Favereau, Marie. The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. Audible audiobook.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Written by Jack Weatherford, narrated by Jonathan Davis, Audible Studios, 2014. Audiobook.

May, Timothy. The Mongol Conquests in World History. Reaktion Books, 2012. Audible audiobook.

May, Timothy. The Mongol Empire. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Print and audiobook editions.

This episode draws a straight, uncomfortable line between Russia’s 18th-century war against the Chukchi people and its modern invasion of Ukraine. Strip away the flags, uniforms, and centuries, and the motive stays the same: territorial greed justified by propaganda. In Siberia, Russia claimed Indigenous land was empty, backward, and in need of control. In Ukraine, the language changes, but the entitlement does not. This episode breaks down how Russian expansion has always worked, how resistance has always been labeled criminal or extremist, and why the Chukchi War wasn’t ancient history but a rehearsal. Same empire. Same excuses. Same blood on the ground.

Forsyth, James. A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581–1990. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Wood, Alan. Russia’s Frozen Frontier: A History of Siberia and the Russian Far East 1581–1991. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.

Fisher, Raymond H. The Russian Fur Trade, 1550–1700. University of California Press, 1943.

Vakhtin, Nikolai. “Indigenous Peoples of the Russian North.” Cultural Survival Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2, 2002.

Krupnik, Igor. Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia. University Press of New England, 1993.

This episode follows the brutal closing days of the Siege of Acre and the seven-day death march that followed, when Richard the Lionheart’s exhausted army staggered south under nonstop harassment from Saladin’s cavalry. The story then explodes into the Battle of Arsuf, retold blow by blow with first-person perspectives from the ranks on both sides. No romance, no fairy tales, no knightly fantasy. This is hunger, disease, slaughter, panic, and momentum deciding who lives and who doesn’t. From prisoners executed at Acre to men collapsing in the sand on the road to Arsuf, this is the Crusade as it actually felt to the people bleeding through it.

Sources:

Asbridge, Thomas. The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land. Simon and Schuster, 2010.

Baha ad Din. The Life of Saladin. Translated by D. S. Richards, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Ibn al Athir. The Chronicle of Ibn al Athir for the Crusading Period. Translated by D. S. Richards, Ashgate, 2006.

Riley Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades: A History. Yale University Press, 2014.

Runciman, Steven. A History of the Crusades. Cambridge University Press, 1951.

Tyerman, Christopher. God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. Harvard University Press, 2006.

Folda, Jaroslav. The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Asbridge, Thomas. The Crusades. Audiobook, Tantor Audio, 2018.

BBC Radio 4. In Our Time: Saladin and Richard the Lionheart. British Broadcasting Corporation.

Robinson, Tony. The Crusades. Channel 4 Documentary Series.

History Hit. The Crusades Podcast Series.

Dan Carlin. Hardcore History. Context episodes on medieval warfare and siege warfare.