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Taken in war as a child and raised among the Crow, the woman remembered as Woman Chief built a life few nineteenth-century observers knew how to explain.

She became a skilled hunter, a warrior, a leader of raids, a keeper of horses and wealth, and a woman whose influence forced even an outsider like trader Edwin Thompson Denig to stop and take notice.

But Woman Chief's history is not a clean legend. The surviving dates conflict. The sources were written largely by outsiders. Her possible identification with the Crow woman known as Pine Leaf remains disputed.

And then there is the final journey.

Late in the fullest surviving account of her life, Woman Chief rode toward the people she had been born among. Their first meeting was peaceful. Soon afterward, Woman Chief and the four Crow traveling with her were killed.

In Episode 7 of History Was Human, Brian R. Smith follows the evidence through capture, survival, power, identity, and a final attempt to cross the boundary that war had drawn through Woman Chief's life.

Woman Chief: A Daughter of Two Enemies.

Because before history became history, it was human.

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• Original podcast music composed and performed by Ken Burns.
• Hosted by author Brian R. Smith.
• Learn more: authorbrianrsmith.com
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Gertrude Bell was an archaeologist, traveler, writer, intelligence officer, and colonial administrator who became one of the most influential British officials in Baghdad after the First World War.

She knew Winston Churchill. She worked alongside T. E. Lawrence. She helped support Faisal as the first king of Iraq, advised on the country's emerging political structure, worked on frontier questions, and later helped build what became the Iraq Museum.

But the familiar claim that Gertrude Bell "drew Iraq" leaves out much of the story.

In this episode of History Was Human, Brian R. Smith explores Bell's remarkable and contradictory life: the privileged Victorian woman who broke barriers while opposing women's suffrage, the traveler whose regional knowledge became British intelligence, the archaeologist who helped preserve Iraq's ancient past, and the colonial official who believed Britain had the right to shape the country's political future.

Gertrude Bell was neither simply hero nor villain. She was a complicated human being standing close to power at a moment when empires were collapsing and new nations were being created.

This is Gertrude Bell: The Woman at the Birth of Iraq.

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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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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.

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