Gladio Free Europe

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The Dune series has gone through a revival of late thanks to the film adaptations of Denis Villeneuve, but what are we to make of it? In this episode we explore Dune through the lens of its author, Frank Herbert. His beliefs defy easy political classification according to today's preconceived notions, making him difficult to situate...

Since the 17th century, nearly 10 million Irish people left their homes for an uncertain life abroad. While stories of Irish settlement in the United States and Canada are well-known, the lives of tens of thousands of Irish people who settled in Latin America are much more obscure.

In the first Gladio Free Europe solo episode, Liam runs through the long history of the Irish presence in Latin America...

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In 1675, the Puritan colonies in North America were fighting for their lives. A brilliant young commander named Metacomet assembled a Native American coalition that upended a half-century of colonialism, pushed the English back to the coast, and would come very close to obliterating settler life in New England...

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In November 1622, the great diplomat Squanto died while leading a trade expedition with his English allies. Only a year had passed since he formed a treaty between the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the indigenous Wampanoag people...

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In 1615, just days before the New Year, famed astronomer Johannes Kepler received the news that would change his life. His mother Katharina had been accused as a witch. Over the next 6 years, the Keplers would battle these charges with every means at their disposal, just as the world around them began to collapse into the carnage of the Thirty Years' War...

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Each Christmas season, the mountain peoples of Europe are beset by monsters. Fearsome figures like Krampus, Perchta, and the Kuker descend into quaint hilltop villages, sometimes to spread holiday cheer, sometimes to hasten the coming of spring, and sometimes just to sew chaos and discord...

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This week, friend of the pod John Bellamy Poster commandeered a gunship and made his way onto Gladio Free Europe to discuss 19th century Japanese history in the backdrop of the unique historical manga Golden Kamuy...

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We return to the dark foothills of the Carpathians in our continuing history of Transylvania. This episode focuses on Europe's most infamous countess, Elizabeth Bathory, accused of torturing and killing up to 600 hundred young girls gathered from across Central Europe...

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Americans are known for many things. Geographic insight of Eastern Europe is not one of them. Yet every American over age six can tell you which Romanian region is the home of Count Dracula. Thanks to the incredible popularity of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Transylvania has a unique place in the American and British popular consciousness, totally beyond that of any other province in this part of the world...

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In 1869, the Meiji Emperor declared the northern island of Hokkaido to be sovereign territory of Japan. In a process direclty inspired by American colonization, Japanese settlers were brought in to "civilize" the territory, a process which would have terrible consequences for the indigenous inhabitants -- a non-Japanese people known as the Ainu...