Episodes

After two seasons, we have a lot to reflect on! We wanted you to hear the voices of the team, working mostly behind the scenes for the past two seasons, and hear about their experiences working on Consolation Prize.

In our final episode of Consolation Prize, we return to 1844 Hawai'i, where we look at another case involving vice consul William Hooper.

In this episode, we meet two Americans in 1860s Thailand. Reverend Dan Beach Bradley was a Christian missionary and a newspaper publisher, and Captain James Madison Hood was the US consul to the Kingdom of Siam.

In this mini episode of Consolation Prize, we complete our tour of the world by going to the last continent where the United States had consuls: Australia.

In this episode of Consolation Prize, we investigate the role of consuls in dealing with wartime disasters and the toll they took on them.

Irena Wiley was a diplomat's wife. But she was also an artist who used her art to reflect the humanity of the many people she encountered all around the world.

We explore the long and complicated relationship between the United States and the Papal States, the political-religious home of the Roman Catholic Church.

In this episode of Consolation Prize, we are exploring a consul’s involvement in a coup and a revolution.

In this special bonus episode, we talk with a scholar who studies the history of the US consular service. We answer your questions like, What is a consul? What do they do? What makes them so interesting? Why should we care about consuls?

In this bonus holiday episode, a re-release from 2020, we explore the consular life of Joel Roberts Poinsett, everyone’s favorite holiday historical figure.

Consolation Prize is going true crime! In today's episode, we're going to hear about a murder case that a consul had to do some investigation of.

Today we’re going to a domestic destination–but it wasn’t always domestic. The history of Monterey goes back hundreds of years, and it shows how empires and commerce come together in one prime location.

As Americans moved into California, the U.S. government wanted to provide them with an official representative. But the government also wanted California for the United States.

In our first Beyond the Consul episode, we're talking to Patty O'Brien about Tahiti.

When the United States began to establish official commercial relations with Tahiti, the government and the sailors who visited there thought that the U.S. consuls would be able to help them get the most out of their visit.

Manifest Destiny is a term you hear a lot when you're learning about the history of the United States in the nineteenth century. But what is it, really?

We're under "new" management! Not really, we're just joining a new division of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, R2 Studios.

In this second installment of our summer series on food and consuls, we shift our gaze to look at food ways from the bottom-up.

In this bonus episode, we look back on the stories from season one with an eye for food.

We've been to Mexico a few times this season, but we promised in the first episode that we'd return one last time, to talk about the relationship between Black Americans and the consuls in Mexico.

In Episode 11, we explore the complicated, and sometimes tragic, life of Richard Greener, the first Black consul to a predominantly white post.

In this bonus episode, we learn about the much more recent history of women in the consular service, as Abby interviews Maura Harty, a career Foreign Service officer.

In today’s episode, we take a look at some people connected to the consular service who are worthy of notice: the women.

James Leander Cathcart and Richard O'Brien were uniquely suited to their jobs, from one point of view: they had spent a lot of time in the region they were consuls to--as captives of the ruler during the previous decade.