On Wednesday, June 15, 1904, a group of mostly German Immigrants from the St. Mark's Evangelical Church in New York boarded the PS General Slocum for their parish's yearly outing. Within hours, 1,100 of the 1,300 people on board would be dead. What happened? Join me as I find out about the General Slocum Disaster!

Sources:

O'Donnell, Edward T. Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum. NY, NY: Broadway Books, 2008.

https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/witness-to-tragedy-the-sinking-of-the-general-slocum

The case of Sacco and Vanzetti is famous in American history. But why? I decided to learn about the two men and their trial so I could figure out just what makes this case so fascinating. Join me as I discuss what he learned about Sacco and Vanzetti. Also, sorry for the voice.

This cold will not go away

Sources:

Avrich, Paul. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Tejada, Susan. In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti: Double Lives, Troubled Times, and the Massachusetts Murder Case That Shook the World. Boston, MA,: Northeastern University Press, 2012.

Temkin, Moshik. The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

Watson, Bruce. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind. New York, NY: Viking, 2007.

At its height in the 15th century, the Medici Bank could claim to be one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world. It was the bank of Pope! However, by the end of the century, it no longer existed. So what happened? How did the bank rise and how did it fall?

Join Ryan as he talks about what he learned about this once great bank that belonged to a legendary Italian family. Follow along as he covers what he learned.

Sources:

Tim Parks, Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (London: Profile, 2013), 39-40.

Raymond De Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397-1494. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 10-11.

Richard A. Goldthwaite, “The Medici Bank and the World of Florentine Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 114 (1987): 5, http://www.jstor.org/stable/650959.

Paul Strathern, The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance (New York, NY: Pegasus Books, 2016), 20.

Christopher Hibbert, “The Rise and Fall of the Medici Bank,” History Today, 1974 Aug 01, 1974, 526, https://www.proquest.com/magazines/rise-fall-medici-bank/docview/1299027156/se-2?accountid=12085.

Mary Hollingsworth, The Family Medici: The Hidden History of the Medici Dynasty (New York: Pegasus Books Ltd., 2018), 134.

R. A. Goldthwaite, “Local Banking in Renaissance Florence,” Journal of European Economic History 14, no. 1 (1985 1985): 43, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/local-banking-renaissance-florence/docview/1292866160/se-2?accountid=12085.

Juraj Kittler, “Too Big to Fail: The 1499-1500 Banking Crisis in Renaissance Venice,” Journal of cultural economy 5, no. 2 (2012): 165, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2012.660783.

Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici, Its Rise and Fall (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2003), 33.

Frederick E. Gaupp, “Cosimo De’ Medici’s Banishment — a Farce?,” The Mississippi Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1960): 14-19, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26473223.

Gene A. Brucker, Renaissance Florence, vol. Book, Whole (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 121-27.

Mark Jurdjevic, “Civic Humanism and the Rise of the Medici,” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 4 (1999): 999, https://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2901833.

C. W. Previte Orton, “The Medici,” History 32, no. 116 (1947): 81, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24402429.

F. W. Kent, Lorenzo De’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 84.

Eva Helfenstein, “Lorenzo De’ Medici’s Magnificent Cups: Precious Vessels as Status Symbols in Fifteenth-Century Europe,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16, no. 1/2 (2013): 415, https://dx.doi.org/10.1086/674434.

Fabrizio Antonio Ansani, “A ‘Magnificent’ Military Entrepreneur? The Involvement of the Medici Bank in the Arms Trade (1482-1494),” Business history (20, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1944112.

John F. Padgett, and Christopher K. Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (1993): 1302, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2781822.

A. Sapori, “The Medici Bank,” PSL quarterly review 2, no. 11 (2014): 205, https://dx.doi.org/10.13133/2037-3643/12855.