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Nancy Wake became one of the Gestapo’s most wanted women in occupied France—and earned the nickname “The White Mouse” because she repeatedly slipped through their grasp.

Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Wake was living in France when World War II changed the course of her life. She worked with the French Resistance, helped people escape Nazi-occupied territory, fled across the Pyrenees herself, trained with Britain’s Special Operations Executive, and eventually parachuted back into France to help organize and supply resistance fighters before D-Day.

In Episode 5 of History Was Human, Brian R. Smith follows Nancy Wake from her early years through the dangerous work that made her one of the most decorated Allied women of the war. Her story is one of nerve, loss, survival, and a refusal to remain on the sidelines while Europe was being consumed by war.

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• Original podcast music composed and performed by Ken Burns.
• Hosted by author Brian R. Smith.
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Jeff Ake lived long enough to remember an American West that was already disappearing into legend.

Born in the nineteenth century, he moved through Arkansas, California mining country, southern Arizona, Confederate Texas, ranching country, and some of the most violent corners of the frontier. His life intersected with Apache conflict, the deadly Ake Party ambush in Cooke’s Canyon, and even a Texas jail where John Wesley Hardin and John Ringo were part of the same world.

In Episode 4 of History Was Human, Brian R. Smith follows Jeff Ake’s remarkable life and the memories he carried into old age. In 1934, writer James B. O’Neil sat down to record Ake’s recollections after novelist Eugene Manlove Rhodes urged him to "get him talking."

The result is part history, part memory, and part legend—and a rare chance to hear how one man remembered the Old West after most of the people who had lived it were gone.

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• Original podcast music composed and performed by Ken Burns.
• Hosted by author Brian R. Smith.
• Learn more: authorbrianrsmith.com
• https://www.facebook.com/AuthorBrianRSmith

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Rain-in-the-Face became one of the most famous Lakota warriors associated with the Battle of the Little Bighorn—but much of what Americans thought they knew about him came from a story that may never have happened.

Years before the battle, Rain-in-the-Face was arrested by Tom Custer and imprisoned at Fort Abraham Lincoln. After his escape, stories spread that he had sworn revenge. When Tom Custer was later killed at the Little Bighorn, legend transformed Rain-in-the-Face into the warrior who hunted him down and cut out his heart.

In Episode 3 of History Was Human, Brian R. Smith follows the man behind that legend: his early life as a Hunkpapa Lakota warrior, his arrest and escape, his experience at the Little Bighorn, and the conflicting accounts he gave later in life about what actually happened.

Brian later wrote the historical novel Rain-in-the-Face because the distance between the legendary avenger and the complicated human being behind the story proved far more fascinating than the legend itself.

Support the show

• Original podcast music composed and performed by Ken Burns.
• Hosted by author Brian R. Smith.
• Learn more: authorbrianrsmith.com
• https://www.facebook.com/AuthorBrianRSmith