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A podcast about offbeat, strange, and unknown history
Crystal King is a long-time friend of the program, and has appeared previously to talk about her debut novel Feast of Sorrow, and her follow...
A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War is the latest book from Portland journalist and author Bill Lascher. Bill joi...
By all reasonable metrics Shek Yeung, who raided the South China Sea in the early 1800s, is one of the most successful pirates of all time....
William Shakespeare seems to have hated hedgehogs. We don’t quite know why, but it could have something to do with how the tiny animal is de...
Before Valentine’s Day, ancient Romans celebrated a festival of fertility in the shadow of the Palatine Hill. Lupercalia was a popular holid...
During the Dust Bowl city officials in Los Angeles, fueled by anti-communist paranoia and xenophobia, were determined to keep migrants out o...
Eric Tagliacozzo is a professor of history at Cornell University, and his new book In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds From Yemen to Yokohama ou...
Archaeology has changed considerably over the past century. In this episode, we spoke with Ann R. Williams of National Geographic about the...
After his death in 1945, Mussolini’s corpse was autopsied and thrown into a pauper’s grave. But, that was just the beginning of the cadaver’...
The Marvel Universe is massive. Marvel comics go back well over half a century, and span thousands upon thousands of pages. Reading all of t...
In 1907 French waiters went on strike, and won the right to wear facial hair.
Nearly every English-language movie has a disclaimer in the credits that says something like “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to a...
A podcast about offbeat, strange, and unknown history
Covid-19 has killed and sickened hundreds of thousands of people, and transformed our economy, how we work, and how we relate to each other....
The Mexican-American War was not fought for good reasons. The war was one of imperial and expansionist ambition and territorial expansion, a...
Treason is the only crime specifically defined in the U.S. Constitution, and talk of treason has been in the air for the last four years. Ca...
It’s not enough to just talk about the history of the Grand Guignol. We also want to bring you a little bit of what it was like to take in a...
The Grand Guignol was a small Parisian theater which regularly produced original works of horror. The theater, which operated from 1897 unti...
Sasha Abramsky is a journalist and author whose new book Little Wonder tells the story of Lottie Dod, the modern world’s first female sporti...
Today’s show is a conversation with Michel Paradis, attorney and author of Last Mission to Tokyo. Early in WWII the U.S. launched the Doolit...
In 1987 journalist Randy Shilts chronicled the early years of AIDS in North America in his book And the Band Played On. Shilts’ reporting wa...
Slavery in the United States did not end all at once. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, the last enslaved...
Hello everyone. We’re all dealing with a lot right now. This is an update on how I’ve been doing, and the state of the show.
British impressment of American sailors and restrictions on maritime trade are only part of the story in the run-up to the War of 1812. Anot...
America doesn’t talk much about the War of 1812. In the historical narrative that the U.S. likes to construct for itself, its first official...
In 1970 Oregon governor Tom McCall had a problem: An American Legion convention was descending on Portland in August of that year, with a po...
The Poetic Edda is one of our main sources for Norse mythology, and the poems in it feature tales of gods, heroes, giants, and (of course) R...
Happy Holidays, everyone!
Santa Claus is the result of cultural crossover and exchange. Historical and folkloric figures like St. Nicholas, Sinterklaas, and Father Ch...
Saint Nicholas is not Santa Claus, but he’s now inescapably bound up with Santa’s story and identity. Nicholas was the bishop of Myra, a tow...
World monuments get replicated all the time. There are no shortage of Statues of Liberty or Eiffel Towers, for instance. However, the world...
In 1959 a Pepsi executive successfully showcased his product at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, an event created to foster cultu...
Alvin Schwartz is best known for traumatizing children with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. However, one of Schwartz’s most terrifying ta...
Today Dracula is one of the most ubiquitous public domain characters in popular media. However, in the 1920s German filmmakers had to get pe...
Les Klinger is an editor, Sherlock Holmes expert, and annotator of classic fiction. He joined us to talk about his newest book The New Annot...
Franz Joseph Hayden was a brilliant composer and one of the most important figures in European classical music. He inspired luminaries such...
Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most successful American artists of the 20th century, and the figure most associated with pop art after Andy...
In the first decade of the 1700s a visitor to London claimed to be from a far-off land: Formosa. He described it as being an idyllic paradis...
The Iran-Contra affair was a failure. It didn’t topple the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, nor did it improve U.S. relations with Iran. And...
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Most people remember Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but fewer remember Mic...
Duncan Ryuken Williams’s new book, American Sutra, explores Japanese Internment with a focus on Buddhism. Most Japanese immigrants and Japan...
We’ve hit two hundred episodes! To celebrate we’re taking your questions. Designer, photographer, and all-around superhero Sarah Giffrow joi...
Humans are the only animals to wear clothing, and much of that clothing is made out of other animals. In Putting on the Dog: The Animal Orig...
Congress had made its view clear with the Boland amendments: The United States government would not support the Contras in Nicaragua. Howeve...
Beef occupies a unique place in American culture. In his new book Red Meat Republic Joshua Specht examines the history of the American beef...
In the early 1980s the Reagan administration changed how the U.S. engaged with Communism abroad. Instead of following a policy of containmen...
The Cold War defined geopolitics for much of the 20th century, often turning local conflicts and regional politics into large, proxy battles...
Since the late 1800s numerous figures such as Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and Malcolm X have expressed doubt about the authorship of Shakespe...
Notre Dame Cathedral, the world’s best-known example of Gothic architecture, was partially destroyed in a fire. The church requires extensiv...
In 1983 a Soviet satellite system erroneously detected five incoming American nuclear missiles. Stanislav Petrov, the man tasked with report...