The Weird History Podcast
By Joe Streckert
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Description
The Weird History Podcast explores the out-of-the-way, obscure, weird, and overlooked corners of history. New episodes appear every Thursday.
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Clean160 North Korea Part Ten, “Meanwhile, in South Korea!” | For years South Korea was a dysfunctional military dictatorship under leaders like Rhee Syngman and Park Chun Hee. Assassination, martial law, and political repression were the order of the day. North Korean propaganda was able to exploit the militaris. | 12 4 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean159 Spaghetti Trees | On April 1st, 1957 a BBC One news program ran a straight-faced and ostensibly real report on Switerzerland’s spring spaghetti crop, and convinced some of their viewers that spaghetti grew on trees. | 1 4 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean158 North Korea Part Nine, The DMZ, Assassinations, and the USS Pueblo | During the Cold War, North Korea primarily interacted with South Korea and the United States via building the DMZ, several assassination attempts on South Korean presidents, and the taking of the USS Pueblo, the crew of which are pictured below. […] | 28 3 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean157 North Korea Part Eight, Juche | Juche is the animating principal of North Korea. It’s usually translated as “self-reliance,” but in fact it means whatever is good for the regime. Juche is the ideology that North Korea uses to convince it’s people, the outside world, and […] | 19 3 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean156 North Korea Part Seven, The Good Old Days | The Cold War was a good time for North Korea. For much of the mid 20th century it was relatively better off than South Korea, and North Korean citizens recognized that the new regime was worlds better than what they […] | 6 3 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean155 North Korea Part Six: War and No Peace | The Korean War was supposed to be over quickly. However, due to intervention from the United Nations, China, and the Soviet Union, what would have been a quick regional conflict turned into a years-long war that involved over twenty countries […] | 26 2 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean154 North Korea Part Five, The Spark of War | Prior to the Korean War, both North and South saw themselves as the legitimate government for the entire peninsula. At the time, the North was considered the more advanced, industrialized part of the peninsula, and Kim Il Sung believed that […] | 12 2 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean153 North Korea, Part Four: Red(ish) Dawn | After WWII, the Korean peninsula was briefly united again as The People’s Republic of Korea. However, the unification wouldn’t last. American and Soviet forces divided the peninsula along the 38th parallel, and in the north the Soviet Union set abou | 6 2 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean152 North Korea, Part Three: Collaborators, Resistors, and Kim Il Sung | Japanese occupation changed North Korea, with various citizens either collaborating with or actively resisting it. One of those resistors was a guerrilla fighter named Kim Song Ju, who would later be known as Kim Il Sung. If you believe North […] | 29 1 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean151 North Korea, Part Two: Japanese Occupation | Japan’s occupation of Korea was a gradual process. As far back as 1876 Japan approached Korea with unequal treaties that attempted to economically exploit the peninsula. In 1895 Japanese officials assassinated Korea’s Queen Min, | 22 1 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean150 North Korea, Part One: The Peaceful Peninsula | This year, we’re doing a long-form series on North Korea. We’ll get into the history, culture, and ideology of the isolated, totalitarian country. In order to get proper context, we’re starting with a (very) brief overview of Korean history. In [ | 15 1 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean149 Sarah Fraser on The Last Highlander | Sarah Fraser is the author of The Last Highlander, which details the life of Simon Fraser, the 11th Lord Lovat. Fraser’s life was one of political intrigue, feuds, international deal making, and rebellion. He was eventually beheaded in 1747, the […] | 8 1 2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanNew Series Announcement | We’re on break for the holidays. The podcast will return on January 8th with an interview episode, and on January 15th with the launch of a new long-form series! | 25 12 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean148 In Which Your Christmas Decorations Are Wrong and Spain is Into Some Weird Stuff | The Nativity scene is an iconic Christmas decoration, but it only has a tenuous biblical foundation. Christmas traditions are often varied and strange, and representations of the Nativity can vary from region to region. In Spain, one element of the [… | 18 12 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean147 David Goldfield on The Gifted Generation | David Goldfield is an American historian and the author of almost twenty books. His latest, The Gifted Generation, chronicles the benefits that his peers received from the US federal government, and goes into detail about how the Truman, Eisenhower, | 11 12 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean146 The Lost City of Vanport | This episode is a little different. It’s about a topic that I’ve previously written and spoken about, though not on the podcast. Vanport was one of the largest federal housing projects in the United States during WWII. It went up […] | 5 12 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean145 Bonnie MacBird on Unquiet Spirits | Bonnie MacBird (the co-writer of Tron) is writing new, novel-length Sherlock Holmes adventures. We talked about her experience with Conan Doyle’s stories, how she adapted the author’s voice for a modern work, and other Sherlock media. | 27 11 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThankful | Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I couldn’t do this without you. | 23 11 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean144 The Immovable Ladder of Jerusalem | Maybe the most famous part of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a ladder that’s been propped onto the side of the building since at least the 1750s. The church is sacred to six different Christian sects, all of […] | 19 11 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean143 Brandon Seifert on Werewolves | Brandon Seifert has written horror comics such as Witch Doctor, Hellraiser, and The Fly. Lately, he’s been studying werewolf folklore. We talked about the history of werewolf stories, werewolf witch trials, why people believed in werewolves, | 11 11 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean142 Icelandic Dracula | Icelandic Dracula, also known as Makt Myrkranna or Powers of Darkness, is amazing. The translator/author Valdimar Asmundsson made significant deviations to Bram Stoker’s text. There’s more sexy moonlight vampire temptation, | 30 10 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean141 How Dracula Was Dracula? | Dracula, anymore, is as much of a character type and a trope as he is a single character. Different takes on Dracula abound, from Bela Lugosi to Sesame Street’s Count to numerous other media. There was also, though, a historical […] | 24 10 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean140 The Adventures of Oliver Cromwell’s Severed Head | When he died, Oliver Cromwell was embalmed and given a funeral befitting a head of state. However, upon restoration of the British monarchy, Cromwell was exhumed and given a postmortem execution. His severed head was placed on a spike over […] | 15 10 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean139 Rosenstrasse | In February of 1943 the Nazi regime arrested between 1500-2000 Jewish men in Berlin, and imprisoned them in a former Jewish community center with the address of Rosenstrasse 2-4. These men had, up until this point, avoided deportation to death […] | 6 10 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanSeptember | Find out why I’m taking September (mostly) off. | 4 9 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean138 Confederate Statues | Confederate statues have been in the news lately. Memorials always reflect the time they were built in moreso than the time they commemorate, and the vast majority of confederate statues were built in the Jim Crow era, in the early […] | 22 8 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean137 Isaac Newton and the Cat Door | Popular legend holds that Isaac Newton invented not only calculus, but also the cat door. Unfortunately, this colorful legend is not supported by good evidence. Cats have been domesticated for thousands of years, | 7 8 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean136 Durer’s Rhinoceros | For almost three hundred years Europeans were not entirely sure what rhinos looked like. The most popular image of the beast was a print made by Albrecht Durer in 1515, which shows an Indian rhinoceros as a plated, scaled, animal […] | 31 7 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean135 Pad Thai, Nationalism, and Mandatory Hats | Pad Thai is now heavily associated with Thai cuisine, but it’s a relatively modern invention. Noodles were probably imported to Thailand via either China or Vietnam, and the style of cooking of the noodles seems to indicate that it stems […] | 17 7 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean134 The Imaginary Islands of Benjamin Morrell | There’s no shortage of things on old maps that turned out to be fictional. Regions such as the Mountains of Kong or the continent of Lemuria dot antiquated maps, and the obviousness of their fictional nature seems quaint today. However, […] | 10 7 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean133 Hachiko | A statue of a dog sits outside Shibuya station in downtown Tokyo. The statue commemorates Hachiko, an Akita who walked to and from the train station every day with his owner, Hidesaburo Ueno, a professor of agricultural science at Tokyo […] | 5 7 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean132 Crystal King on Feast of Sorrow | Crystal King is the author of Feast of Sorrow, a novel about ancient Roman cooking that takes the first known cookbook as its inspiration. We talked about what it would have been like to go to a Roman dinner party, […] | 19 6 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean131 Polyamory, Polygraphs, and Wonder Woman | Wonder Woman’s origin story is a fascinating one. Diana of Themyscira was created in 1940 by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who helped invent the lie detector, worked for Universal Studios, and who lived in a menage-a-trois with his wife, [ | 12 6 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean130 Human Mail | Sending human beings through the mail is not generally allowed, but plenty of people have tried it. The most notable person in US history to mail themselves is Henry “Box” Brown who escaped slavery in Virginia via a shipping company, […] | 5 6 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean129 Phantom Time, the Dumbest Conspiracy Theory Ever | One of the most dramatic (and dumbest) conspiracy theories of all time is the Phantom Time Hypothesis, put forward by the conspiracy theorist Heriber Illig. They hypothesis states that almost three centurires of the Middle Ages, AD 614 to 911, […] | 30 5 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean128 Quest For Thundercows | In 1910 the United States almost imported hippos as a meat animal. Had it done so, the US would have imported the single most dangerous large land animal on Earth and treated it like a cow. HR2361 also known as […] | 22 5 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean127 Bummer and Lazarus, the San Francisco Superdogs | Bummer and Lazarus were a pair of stray dogs beloved of San Francisco in the 1860s. The two dogs were known for their exceptional rat-catching ability, and were a favorite topic of newspapers of the day. Nowadays the two dogs […] | 15 5 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean126 Jenni L. Walsh on Becoming Bonnie | Jenni L. Walsh is the author of Becoming Bonnie, a historical fiction novel about how Bonnie met Clyde, and what happened afterward. We talked about the real history of the outlaws, the 1967 movie, and what it’s like to craft […] | 8 5 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean125 Italian Fascism Part Fourteen, The Fall of Fascism | After the Kingdom of Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943, Mussolini was a prisoner. But, during a German invasion of Northern Italy, he was sprung from his cell by German commandos and put in charge of the Italian Social […] | 3 5 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean124 Italian Fascism Part Thirteen, Italy in WWII | Italy did not perform well in WWII. The Italian economy was not able to support an effective industrial war machine, and Italy saw defeat in Greece, Ethiopia, and in North Africa. In 1943 Allied forces invaded Sicily, and with the […] | 24 4 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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41 |
Clean75 Redux, About Mussolini and Those Trains… | There’s no new episode this week. instead, we’re re-running episode 75 which debunks the persistent myth that Mussolini made trains run on time. | 17 4 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean123 Italian Fascism Part Twelve, Eve of Destruction | Italy was not well-positioned going into World War II. The Italian economy was still largely agricultural, and its industrial output was small compared with every other European great power. Also, Mussolini felt himself more and more unable to control . | 10 4 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean122 Italian Fascism Part Eleven, Race and Racism in Mussolini’s Italy | Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany certainly influenced the adoption of racist and anti-Semitic policies by Mussolini’s government. In a 1938 document called the Manifesto of Race, the fascist regime declared Italians to be Aryans, | 3 4 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean121 Italian Fascism Part Ten, Mussolini and Hitler | Hitler and Mussolini never had a great relationship. The German dictator modeled his career on the Italian fascist, imitating Mussolini’s speech and mannerisms, and unsuccessfully tried to replicate the March on Rome with the Beerhall Putsch. | 27 3 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean120 Italian Fascism Part Nine, War With Ethiopia | It wasn’t enough for fascist Italy to adopt the rhetoric and imagery of ancient Rome, it also hoped to have a present-day empire. To do that Mussolini launched an invasion of a country that had defeated Italy in 1896: Ethiopia. […] | 20 3 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean119 Italian Fascism Part Eight, Illusions of Empire | Italy’s fascist regime sought legitimacy by packaging itself as an extension of past Italian glory. Under Mussolini Italy “restored” numerous Roman, Renaissance, and medieval sites, and sought to tie in the glories of the present with those of the | 13 3 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanMonday is the New Thursday | Hello all! My schedule has changed dramatically. The podcast will now update every Monday. Talk to you then! | 8 3 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean118 Italian Fascism Part Seven, Meagan Zurn on Antonio Gramsci | This week’s episode is an interview with Meagan Zurn (or “Zee,” co-producer of The British History Podcast) about Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a socialist, journalist, and briefly a member of the Italian parliament before getting thrown in jail by | 2 3 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean117 Italian Fascism Part Six, Church and State | Italian fascism came to power (and solidified power) by co-opting existing political organizations and interests in Italy. That included the Catholic Church. Since Italian Unification the Church had been at odds with liberal Italy, | 23 2 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanPlague Has Taken Me | I’m sick. The harrowing tale of Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI will have to wait until next week. | 16 2 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean116 Italian Fascism Part Five, “All Within the State” | After Mussolini proclaimed dictatorship in January of 1925 fascist Italy became the first modern totalitarian state. The regime extended its power and influence to everything from the national and local government, to the press, to unions, | 9 2 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean115 Italian Fascism Part Four, Voter Suppression and Murder | Following the March on Rome Mussolini and the fascists cemented their grasp on power via an electoral reform known as the Acerbo Law, voter suppression and intimidation in the 1924 election, and (possibly) by killing one of their biggest opponents, [… | 2 2 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean114 Italian Fascism Part Three, The March on Rome | The March on Rome is often cited as the beginning of Italian fascism. However, there was a fair amount of a run-up to the actual blackshirt invasion of the capital. Right-wing violence ravaged the Italian provinces for years before the […] | 26 1 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean113 Italian Fascism Part Two, What is Fascism, Anyway? | In this episode we try to answer (or at least clarify) one of the most vexing questions of political science, history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship: What, exactly, is fascism? | 19 1 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean112 Italian Fascism Part One: The Idea of Italy | Fascism is the most malignant of the major political ideologies, and one of the least understood. For fascism, the nation (and therefore state) are paramount. Considerations for the needs of social classes or individuals are subordinate to the state, | 12 1 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean111 Heather Arndt Anderson on Chilies | This week’s show is an interview with Heather Arndt Anderson, author of Chilies: A Global History. We talk about the origins of chilies, their spread around the globe, how they were perceived and used by the people who found them, […] | 5 1 2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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57 |
CleanMystery Series Announcement! | We’re still on break, but we’ll be back with an interview episode on January 5th, and the start of a long-form series on January 12th. | 29 12 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean110 Years of the Reaper | 2016 has been a year marked by death. In this episode we get into a few other years notable for being especially deadly, and why this past year has felt so particularly lethal. | 15 12 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean109 Moose Cavalry | In this episode we tackled one of the major issues of our time: Why haven’t more countries used moose as Cavalry? Sweden tried it. The Soviet Union also tried it. But, the mighty moose has consistently resisted being turned into […] | 8 12 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean108 How Not to Kill Fidel Castro | Fidel Castro, after being in power in Cuba since the 1950s, is finally dead. Castro was known for his long reign as Cuba’s dictator, but he was also known for surviving a large amount of assassination attempts. The most common […] | 1 12 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean107 Squanto, Tisquantum | Squanto and other Native Americans are a fixture of popular depictions of what has retroactively been termed the First Thanksgiving, such as in the fanciful, inaccurate 1914 painting pictured below, by Jennie Brownscombe. That popular image, | 24 11 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean106 Live at the Jack London, the Portland Vice Scandal | In 1950s Portland, police and racketeers worked hand-in-hand to provide the city with gambling, protitution, and other in-demand vices such as pinball. The man in charge of all of this was Jim Elkins who, for a brief period, was Portland’s […] | 17 11 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean105 The Giants of Patagonia | For about 250 years, Europeans thought that giants lived in Patagonia. The inventor of this myth was Antonio Pigafetta, a member of the Magellan expedition who, in his memoir of the circumnavigation, reported seeing a huge man approximately ten feet [ | 10 11 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean104 Thomas Jefferson, Mastodon Hunter | Thomas Jefferson loved mastodons, in part because he wanted to prove that American animals were not degenerate. In the late 1700s a French naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, published a massive, multi-volume natural history called, | 3 11 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean103 How Gothic Got Goth | “Gothic” has described a lot of things: Mustachioed barbarians just outside the Roman empire, grand cathedrals such as Notre Dame and Chartres, eerie literature like Dracula and Frankenstein, and music by bands such as Joy Division and The Cure. Thi | 27 10 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean102 Five Scary Clowns | Anymore it seems like scary clowns outnumber standard, whimsical clowns. Clowns are monsters, figures of fear, and they seem more likely to laugh with homicidal mania than laugh with joy. How did that happen? How did a figure of fun […] | 20 10 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean101 Kara Helgren on Witches, Puritans, and the Salem Tourist Experience | Kara Helgren has previously worked for the city of Salem, Massachusetts as a tour guide, leading visitors through the ominously-named Witch House. According to Helgren tourist expectations veered toward the lurid and macabre. | 13 10 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean100 Q & A | We made it to 100 episodes! For the occasion we’ve a new name, a new logo, and your questions and my answers. | 6 10 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean99 Live Your Life Like You’re Examining a Platypus | The platypus appears to be some kind of melding or mashup between a duck and a beaver. It is not, though the first Western scientist to examine a specimen thought that it was exactly that: A taxidermy hoax made of […] | 29 9 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean98 Blood and Types | Belief that one’s blood type affects personality is common in Japan. Dating sites, celebrity profiles, and vital statistics for fictional characters often include blood type, and belief that it affects personal attitude or character is somewhat akin t | 22 9 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean97 American Exiles | Immigration from Mexico to the US is not new. Workers have been deciding to immigrate to the US, legally or not, for over a century. However, legal channels for immigration have often not been forthcoming. In the early twentieth century […] | 15 9 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanI’m Not Dead | It was bound to happen eventually. There’s no new episode this week. | 7 9 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean96 Funeral on the Moon, the Story of Fallen Astronaut | There is a statue on the moon. In 1971 the crew of Apollo 15 placed a small figurine and a plaque on the lunar surface to memorialize American and Soviet astronauts who had died in the pursuit of space exploration. […] | 1 9 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean95 Live at the Jack London Bar: Teddy Roosevelt and the Mystery of the Missing Time Capsule | Teddy Roosevelt buried a time capsule in Portland in 1903. One hundred years later, Roosevelt’s time capsule was nowhere to be found. The box laid by the president that was meant to preserve history for 100 years could not be […] | 25 8 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean94 The Know-Nothings, Part Two | In 1854 the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings made their debut into American politics. They ran candidates in 76 of the 82 available House of Representatives races, and won 35 of those seats. At the same time, they also became a force to […] | 18 8 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean93 The Know-Nothings, Part One | Decades before the modern versions of the Democratic and Republican parties formed, the US also had a few other major political parties. One was the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Another was the Whigs, who had intermittent […] | 11 8 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean92 We Don’t Know Things About the Mesoamerican Ball Game | The ancient Mesoamerican ball game is very probably the oldest ball game in the world. We know that it was played with a rubber ball on a stone court, and that players would try to hit the ball with their […] | 4 8 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean91 Kory Bing on Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Megafauna | This week’s episode is an interview with artist and cartoonist Kory Bing about dinosaurs and other extinct megafauna. We talked about drawing dinosaurs, what dinosaurs are, and how dinosaurs and other extinct animals are portrayed in popular culture. | 28 7 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean90 The Fiji Mermaid | Today PT Barnum is remembered as one of the founders of modern advertising and one of America’s greatest hucksters. His first successful hoax was to successfully promote a taxidermy monkey sewn to a fish as the corpse of a mermaid. […] | 21 7 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean89 Live at the Jack London, Robertson V Baldwin | In 1897 the US Supreme Court carved out an exception the 13th Amendment, which bans slavery and involuntary servitude. Robertson v. Baldwin held that merchant marine sailors could be arrested by law enforcement, imprisoned, | 14 7 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean88 The Unknown Origins of Pasta, A Wonder of the World | As far as your humble podcaster is concerned, pasta is a wonder of the world right up there with the Pyramids and the Internet. We don’t exactly know where it came from, though. In the United States Pasta is often […] | 7 7 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean87 Stalin’s Nonexistent Human/Chimp Hybrid Supersoldiers | One of the most bizarre myths about the Soviet Union is that Joseph Stalin attempted to create human/chimp hybrid supersoldiers. This bit of pseudohistory has become especially prevalent in the alternate universe of fundamentalist Christianity. Often, | 30 6 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean86 Mandeville, Part Three | No one knows who wrote The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. There is no record of an English knight alive at the right time with that name who could have written it. One oft-repeated theory is that Mandeville retired to […] | 23 6 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean85 Mandeville, Part Two | As the Travels of Sire John Mandeville move away from the familiar and the Holy Land, they get progressively more bizarre. The laws of convention and even reality seem to break down as Mandeville encounters cannibals, dog people, weaponized elephants, [ | 16 6 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean84 Mandeville, Part One | Supposedly, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is about an English knight who sets out for the Holy Land in the 1330s. However, the journey to Jerusalem and the surrounding environs are only a small part of a larger narrative […] | 9 6 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean83 Bill Lascher on Eve of a Hundred Midnights | This week’s episode is an interview with author Bill Lascher about his upcoming book Eve of a Hundred Midnights, about two American war correspondents covering the East Asian theater of WWII. In it, Lascher details how they got into journalism, [… | 2 6 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean82 For Amusement Only | Anymore, pinball is an archaic amusement found in the corners of old arcades and bars, but in the mid twentieth century it was the center of a moral panic. Cities across the country banned pinball for its associations with gambling. […] | 26 5 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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88 |
Clean81 Dancing Goats and Other Coffee Legends | The origins of coffee are encircled by myth and legend, sometimes involving goats. It’s one of the most popular beverages on Earth, and for many people (including your humble podcaster) one of the most important. Drinking coffee is a daily […] | 19 5 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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89 |
Clean80 Live at the Jack London, the Rise and Fall of Claymation | Claymation was a dominant force in American popular culture during the late 1980s, which characters such as the California Raisins and the Noid achieving a sort of pre-Internet media ubiquity. The creative force behind Claymation was Will Vinton Studio. | 12 5 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean79 Cecelia Otto on the Music of the Lincoln Highway | Before the interstate highway system spread over the US, the country was knit together through a network of railroads and auto trails. One of the longest of these was the Lincoln Highway, a coast-to-coast collection of roads that linked New […] | 5 5 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean78 A Statue of Crazy Horse | If it’s ever completed, South Dakota’s Crazy Horse Memorial will be the largest statue in the world. The gigantic structure will feature the Lakota leader’s face, upper body, and mount, and will dwarf every other monument and memorial on Earth. [ | 28 4 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean77 Molly Newman on Crafting Good Trivia Questions | This week’s episode is an interview with Quizmistress and Jeopardy! contestant Molly Newman. Molly runs multiple successful trivia nights in Portland, Oregon, hosts private trivia events, and knows what makes questions good, bad, boring, easy, hard, | 21 4 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean76 The Yellow Kid | Nowadays, comic books are mainstream. Movies about superheroes dominate the box office, and you can’t go ten feet in a major retail outlet without seeing something related to popular comics culture. This is not new. Comics and comic books have […] | 14 4 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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94 |
Clean75 About Mussolini and Those Trains… | “Sure, Mussolini was bad, but at least he made the trains run on time.” You’ve probably said it. Or, you’ve been in a conversation and you heard somebody say it. Or you’ve seen it written somewhere. This cliche has been repeated […] | 7 4 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean74 The Wizard of Oz, Populism, and Dubious Fan Theories | You can be forgiven for thinking that L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz is all about monetary policy and populism. More than a few scholars, critics, academics, and teachers, have reiterated that line, and found parallels in the narrative […] | 31 3 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean73 Jamie Jeffers on the Dating of Easter | Easter jumps around. Sure, it’s always on a Sunday, but unlike, say, the U.S.’s Labor Day (which always falls on the first Monday in September) Easter jumps around. It could be on the third Sunday in March. Or the fifth. […] | 24 3 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean72 There’s No Such Thing As Lemuria | You’ve probably heard to Atlantis, but that’s not the hypothetical lost continent out there. There’s a whole subgenre of supposed submerged continents, with Atlantis being only the most prominent example. Other mythical lands include Mu and Lemuri | 17 3 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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98 |
Clean71 Live at the Jack London, The Story of Oregon Trail | Oregon Trail is arguably the most successful education video game of all time. Created in 1971 by student teacher Don Rawitsch, the popular simulation began its life as a game played on paper with dice and cards. Eventually Rawitsch, along with […] | 9 3 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean70 Shirtless Zeus-Like George Washington Versus Alexander Hamilton | Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton is an antidote to the traditional (and boring) way that America’s founding fathers have often been portrayed. The Founders are often shown as almost godly (like in the statue of Washington pictured below), | 2 3 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean69 Kingdom of the Mahdi, Part Three | Mahdist Sudan died violently. The religious state persisted for approximately a decade and a half but after that the British, eager to solidify their influence and control in the region, brought the country to heel. Egypt had never recognized Sudanese [ | 24 2 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean68 Kingdom of the Mahdi, Part Two | After successfully defeating the Ottoman-Egyptian and British forces at Khartoum, Sudan formed an independent government based around Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi or “expected one.” Unfortunately for Sudan, though, | 17 2 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean67 Kingdom of the Mahdi, Part One | In the early 1880s Sudan suffered under the heel of the Ottoman empire. Military occupation and heavy taxes led to widespread discontent that eventually led to a religiously-infused rebellion. Muhammad Ahmad styled himself as the Mahdi or “expected on | 10 2 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean66 Longest War Ever | Depending on how you measure and define things, the longest war in human history may very well have been between the Netherlands and a tiny collection of islands 28 miles off the coast of Britain known as the Isles of Scilly […] | 3 2 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean65 The Amazing Oceanic Adventure of 28,800 Adorable Rubber Duckies | In January of 1992 international trade routes, bad weather, and a shipping container full of bath toys all collided to form an amazing natural experiment in oceanography. 28,800 bath toys known as Friendly Floatees spilled into the Pacific Ocean, | 27 1 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean64 Yesterday’s Tomorrows | It’s always fun to look back on predictions about the future that were wrong. For instance, Victorian portrayals of the 20th and 21st century had everyone flying around in blimps and ornithopters, which did not exactly come to pass. Looking […] | 20 1 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean63 The Forty-Seven Ronin, Part Two | Last week Asano, Lord of Ako was ordered to commit seppuku, and his newly unemployed samurai were plotting revenge on Kira, the noble whom they blamed for their lord’s death. This week, the 47 ronin extract their revenge on Kira, […] | 13 1 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean62 The Forty-Seven Ronin, Part One | One of the most famous and bloody incidents in samurai history is the story of the 47 ronin, a group of masterless samurai who extracted bloody revenge on behalf of their dead lord. The actual events of the incident are […] | 6 1 2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Future! | Happy New Year! There are some changes in store for 2016. | 30 12 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRemasters and an eBook | No new episode today, I’m taking a break for the holiday. But, I’m happy to announce that I’ve re-recorded episode one and episode two, and the sound quality is much improved. Also, I wrote an ebook. The Legend of Polybius […] | 23 12 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean61 Puritans Versus Christmas | There is no war on Christmas. But there was. Contemporary political commentators have, in the past, complained and ranted about a supposed secular war on Christmas, a crusade to erase spirituality and religion from late December, a campaign to turn [… | 16 12 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean60 The Goose’s Crusade | At the end of the eleventh century, a group of would-be conquerors followed a goose on crusade. The standard (and almost certainly overly simplistic) narrative of the First Crusade is that, in 1095 Pope Urban II rallied religious leaders at […] | 9 12 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean59 Man of Flames | The Wicker Man is one of the most creative and fearsome execution devices of all time. A figure of a giant, made of bent wood and reeds, looms up over a desolate Celtic moor, and hapless captives write inside of […] | 2 12 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean58 Malthus, Borlaug, and Feeding the World | The planet Earth holds over seven billion humans. Somehow, against all manner of predictions to the contrary, we feed all of them. This would have astounded Thomas Malthus who, in 1798, predicted that humanity was careening toward a demographic catastr. | 25 11 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean57 The Mysterious Affair of the Irish Crown Jewels | The Irish crown jewels were stolen in 1907. To this day, no one knows who absconded with the regalia. While known as the “Irish crown jewels” today, they were not referred to as such until after their theft. In fact, […] | 18 11 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean56 Live at the Jack London, Lewis and Clark Through History | Nowadays, Lewis and Clark are lionized and mythologized as American heroes, but their reputation was not always so grandiose. The expedition was initially considered a failure after their return, they were virtually un-talked about in the 1800s. | 11 11 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean55 The Pig War | Nowadays the US-Canada border is one of the most peaceful international boundaries in the world, but in 1859 the US almost went to war with British North America in what is now Washington State. A war sparked by a pig. […] | 4 11 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean54 The Uses and Abuses of Mummies | For years, mummies were a commodity. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Europeans used mummy dust (as in real, actual, ground-up human corpse) as a medication to cure just about everything, and the pigment mummy brown was the color of dry, […] | 29 10 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanOne Year Later | Weird History launched one year ago today on October 27th, 2014. Thank you, all of you, for listening, and here’s to many more years to come. | 27 10 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean53 Bathory | Elizabeth Bathory is one of history’s most notorious killers. Supposedly, the Bloody Countess (as she is sometimes called) murdered an unknown number of young girls in a variety of way, ranging from stabbing, to burning, to exposure to cold. One […] | 22 10 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean52 Little Kill House on the Prairie | It’s October. For the next three weeks, we’ll be focusing on bloody, violent, and generally horrifying historical episodes. This week: The Bloody Benders, America’s first ever documented serial killers. The Benders operated an on the Osage Trail ( | 15 10 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean51 The Ultimate Palindrome | The Sator Square is a level of palindromic perfection untouched by other palindromes. It reads perfectly backward, forward, up, and down. The inconsequential sentence (something like “The farmer Arepo works the plow”) is not not profound, | 8 10 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean50 The Rise and Fall of Nauru | The tiny island nation of Nauru once had one of the highest GDPs per capita on Earth. Today, the country has been stripped of resources and impoverished. Nauru’s booming economy during the 20th century was based on strip mining away […] | 1 10 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean49 Destroy All Emus! | 1932 was a bad year for farmers in Australia. Hot weather withered grain, because of the Great Depression, promised agricultural subsidies were not forthcoming and, worst of all, there were emus. The large flightless bird devoured Australian grain, | 24 9 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean48 The Swedish Titanic | The story of the the Titanic is usually one of human hubris, and then nature putting humanity back in their place. Implicit in any Titanic narrative is a critique of technology in general, of human arrogance, and of the supposed […] | 17 9 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean47 Live at the Jack London Bar, The Postmodern Icon | This episode was part of Stumptown Stories, a Portland history lecture collective. Stumptown Stories meets on the second Tuesday of every month at downtown Portland’s Jack London Bar, and various authors, journalists, podcasters, | 10 9 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean46 Paper Theater, Golden Bat | Before Batman, before Superman, before even the Phantom, there was the Golden Bat. “Ogon Batto” (as he’s known in Japanese) is, arguably, the world’s first costumed superhero. The skull-headed, ruff-wearing, | 3 9 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean45 The White City of the Monkey God | In September of 1940 an American Explorer named Theodore Morde proclaimed in the Milwaukee Sentinel that he had found “the Lost City of Ancient America’s Monkey God.” Morde described a city of white stone Is there a ruined city deep […] | 27 8 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean44 Live at the Steep and Thorny Way to Heaven, Thoughts on Richard III | Richard III is one of Shakespeare’s most compelling villains. Unlike other tragic figures who do terrible things (Macbeth, Othello, Brutus) Richard does not fall. He does not have some kind of tragic flaw that drives him to perform an evil […] | 20 8 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean43 Medusa | One of the most high-profile maritime disasters in French history also inspired a famous, and gigantic work of art. In 1816 the French frigate Medusa ran aground in the Bay of Arguin. The captain and several officers escaped on life […] | 13 8 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean42 An Invention of Writing! Maybe. | Humans have invented writing not once, not twice, but three times. Ancient Sumeria, China, and Mesoamerica all invented the written word independent of each other. In the case of Mesoamerican writing, there’s some ambiguity about when and who made it. | 6 8 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean41 His Majesty Gregor MacGregor, King of Con-Men and Cacique of Poyais | In 1820 a Scotsman named Gregor MacGregor pulled off one of the most audacious cons of all time. MacGregor claimed to be descendant of Rob Roy and ancient kings of Scotland, and also claimed to have been granted a certain […] | 30 7 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean40 Prison of the Mind | “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated instruction diffused – public burthens lightened – Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied – all by a simple […] | 23 7 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean39 How to Steal the Mona Lisa | The Mona Lisa wasn’t always an icon. Before 1911 Leonardo’s painting was certainly known and respected, but it wasn’t yet the most famous, most adored, most duplicated, and most parodied piece of art in the world. It was not yet […] | 16 7 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean38 The Secret Plan to Nuke the Moon | In 1959 the United States had a secret plan to explode a nuclear weapon either on or near the surface of the moon. The plan was known as Project A119 and the hope was that a nuclear explosion on the […] | 9 7 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean37 Roberts Versus Boswell | Last week the US Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. It was an amazing victory for equality and a long time coming. There were, however, dissents. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: [T]he Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the […] | 2 7 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean36 Thirteen Ships | In the 1590s Japan invaded Korea. The Imjin War lasted from 1592-1598, and it included all manner of land battles, guerilla skirmishes, sieges, spying, and everything else that you would expect to find in a full-on conflict. The entire war would […] | 25 6 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean35 Clairvoyance and Free Love on Campaign Trail ’72 | It’s very likely that Hillary Clinton will become the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. When/if she does, some talking head will likely call her “the first women to run for president.” That talking head will be wrong. Women have […] | 18 6 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean34 Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico | If you were out and about in San Francisco between 1860 and 1880, you might have seen a curious figure on the streets. Joshua Abraham Norton wore a uniform reminiscent of European nobility, made proclamations, and styled himself as “Norton […] | 11 6 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean33 Live at Velo Cult, the Legend of Polybius | This episode is a little different. About a year ago I was approached by a team of documentary film makers who were making a movie about Polybius, Portland’s mythical video game of doom. I’d previously spoken about Polybius at the […] | 2 6 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean32 There’s No Such Thing as an Iron Maiden | Imagine a medieval dungeon. You probably imagine prisoners chained to the wall, a torturer in a black mask tormenting the occupants, several machines of torture such as the rack or the Catherine wheel, and, most imposingly, the dreaded iron maiden, [… | 28 5 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean31 The Kingdom of North Sudan | The British Empire and other colonial powers did a lot of things wrong, and they famously ignored actual human patterns when drawing borders of Africa. In 1899, the British drew a border between Egypt and Sudan that simply ran in […] | 21 5 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean30 The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, Part Two | Hong Xiuquan and his Taiping rebels successfully founded a new kingdom in southern China. The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace sought to overthrow the Manchurian Qing Dynasty and form a new, radically different China. Hong, | 14 5 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean29 The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, Part One | In the 1850s a man who styled himself as the younger brother of Jesus Christ led China into a bloody rebellion. China in the early 1800s was ravaged by famine, natural disasters, and British meddling that introduced opium (and the […] | 7 5 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean28 Attack the Rock | The foreboding form of Alcatraz Island looms just beyond San Francisco, an obvious symbol of isolation and punishment. Alcatraz was never the biggest, or worst, or longest-lived prison in American history, but it’s definitely the most iconic. | 30 4 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean27 King of Jewels and Centaurs | One of the most persistent myths of the Middle Ages was that of Prester John, a mythical Christian king whose supposed domain was located beyond the eastern Muslim regions. Probably the most vivid portion of the myth is a letter […] | 23 4 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean26 Joseph Barker on Artificial Intelligence, Strategy, and Games | Today’s episode is slightly different than our other entries. We have another interview episode, this time with Joseph Barker, who has a PhD in artifical intelligence, and whom I quoted in the last episode about the mechanical Turk. Instead of talkin | 16 4 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean25 Clockwork Genius | Humans have pursued artificial intelligence, in one form or another, for generations. One of the most potent signifiers of intelligence has, historically, been chess. Even though the ability to play the game does not actually require as much cognition . | 9 4 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean24 The Raider, the Playboy, the Sultan, and Roosevelt | In 1904 a Greek-American playboy, Ion Perdicaris was, along with his stepson Cromwell, kidnapped in Morocco by a man who would later be called “The last of the Barbary pirates.” The incident sparked a degree of outrage in the US, […] | 2 4 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean23 A Dinosaur Named Sue | The most complete tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the world, nicknamed “Sue,” in honor of the paleontologist who discovered her, stands over adoring crowds at Chicago’s Field Museum. However, Sue’s journey the field museum was not an easy one, tho | 26 3 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean22 Live at the Clinton Street Theater: How Arthurian Legend is Like Comic Books | On Sunday, March 15th I had the privilege of introducing one of my favorite movies of all time at the historic Clinton Street Theater, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The organizers of the event asked me to talk about […] | 19 3 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean21 Shanghaied! | In the late 1800s countless men were exploited by a system that used debt and indentured servitude to keep them tied to the shipping industry. The process of getting sailors into debt was called “crimping,” and it was practiced throughout […] | 12 3 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean20 The Lost Empire of Scotland | In the late 1600s Scotland, in an attempt to start an international trade empire, founded a small settlement in what is now modern Panama. The venture was frustrated at every turn by the English, who did not want their northern […] | 5 3 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean19 Hey Big Spender | You can do a lot of things with wealth. You can buy stuff, make things happen, bribe officials, give to the poor… Or, if you’re Mansa Musa of Mali (one of the richest people in the history of the world) […] | 26 2 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean18 The Tulsa Race Riot | Probably the most violent singular example of post-slavery racial violence in the US happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. Mobs of armed whites burned buildings, killed African-Americans, and utterly destroyed what had been known as Tulsa’s “Black Wa | 19 2 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean17 Jaime Kirk on Piratical History | This week we interviewed a pirate! Kind of. Jaime Kirk is the current captain of PDX Yar, a Portland organization dedicated to all things piratical. The crew does, indeed, dress up like pirates for the purposes of revelry carousing, but […] | 13 2 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean16 The Siege of the Grand Mosque | In 1979 a group of religious extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and began a siege that would last over two weeks. The bloody event shook the Muslim world, and prompted reactions in Saudi Arabia that affect that country […] | 5 2 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanAnnouncement! | I’m committed to keeping this podcast ad-free, and to that end I’ve started a Patreon campaign. Patreon is a service that allows you to support creators you like on an ongoing basis. If you feel like you’ve been getting five […] | 2 2 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean15 Heather Arndt Anderson on the History of Breakfast | This week’s episode has a slightly different format from previous entries. We sat down with food historian Heather Arndt Anderson, author of Breakfast: A History, and talked about this history of breakfast. Topics ranged from how orange juice became a | 29 1 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean14 Nellie Bly Versus Phileas Fogg | Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is not strictly science fiction, but it is a book that speculates about technology (specifically steamships and railroads) and what it’s capable of. Verne’s 1973 novel made the eighty day time look [ | 22 1 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean13 Nellie Bly and the Asylum | In 1880s New York Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Jane Chochrane)reported on the conditions inside an insane asylum by pretending to be mentally ill and getting herself checked into one. Bly’s account of Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum caused a sensatio | 15 1 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean12 Shortest War Ever | The Anglo-Zanzibar war comes up all the time on lists of curiosities, records, weird things, etc., as the shortest war in recorded history. It certainly is a historical curiosity, but it was still an actual, real war, with stakes and […] | 8 1 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean11 Maps of Time | Happy New Year! It’s January First, 2015, and you probably have a new calendar. Calendars tend to be irregular, weird, and uneven, but some folks have attempted to smooth that out throughout history. Below is the Soviet Calendar. Workers were […] | 2 1 2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean10 The Habsburg and Juarez, Part Two | Maximilian’s rule over Mexico was never truly solidified or legitimized, and the would-be emperor faced relentless resistance from liberal Mexican forces led by reformist president Benito Juarez. Eventually the emperor (always just a puppet of the Fre | 24 12 2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean09 The Habsburg and Juarez, Part One | One of the most definitive and dramatic struggles against European monarchy happened in Mexico. France attempted to install Maximilian, a member of Austrian royal family as a puppet emperor of Mexico in the 1860s. The would-be emperor, though, | 18 12 2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean08 Sealand | Defining what is and is not a country, state, or nation can sometimes be sort of difficult. China, obviously, is a country. So are Brazil and Morocco. Some states, like Kosovo, East Timor, and Vatican City, are independent and sovereign […] | 11 12 2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean07 The Mountain Range That Wasn’t There | Maps used to have blank spots. California used to be drawn as an island. The Mercator projection makes Greenland look fat. One of the biggest and strangest cartographic errors of all time, though, has to be the Mountains of Kong, […] | 4 12 2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean06 Franksgiving | The United States has been a divided nation plenty of times. It’s been divided about slavery, about politics, about culture and, very importantly, about when to celebrate Thanksgiving. Related Links: Holiday Highlights, a 1940 Merrie Melodies cartoon | 26 11 2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean05 The Puppet Kingdom | Before and during World War II Japan (just like Britain, France, and the United States) had a considerable empire. The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere encompassed the Korean peninsula, several Pacific Islands, and holdings in China. | 20 11 2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean04 BONE WARS! | Scientists are motivated by curiosity, by the desire to help their fellow humans, by compulsion and, sometimes, by irrational personal vendettas. Edward Drinker Cope and Othneil Charles Marsh were two leading paleontologists during the late 1800s, | 13 11 2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean03 Incorrect Ideas About Olmecs | The Olmecs are the oldest known Mesoamerican civilization, and we know little about them compared to, say, the Mayans or Aztec. Several people, though, have made a few outlandish claims about who the Olmecs were, and where they came from. […] | 6 11 2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean02 Axe Murder | The Korean Demilitarized Zone is a strange place. In 2008 I was a tourist visiting the peninsula, and I learned about one of the strangest incidents in the DMZ’s history. It was something straight out of a slasher movie, and […] | 30 10 2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean01 Ancient Propaganda | A famed artifact, the Cyrus Cylinder, has often been cited as an early proclamation of human rights. The Shah of Iran, the UN, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and an American president all hailed Cyrus the Great as an early […] | 27 10 2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
| 172 Items |
Customer Reviews
Rev
Love Interesting Tiems with Joe Streckert. Always fun and informative. I binged listended and enjoyed every episode heaps.
FAscinating, entertaining, great for binging at work
The live episodes are very funny, and the studio episodes are well researched and entertaining. Topics are outside the mainstream, which keeps things interesting.
Highly Recommend!
I am an avid podcast listener & am always looking for new & interesting programs. I came across 'Interesting Times' while searching for podcasts on the subject of 'The Bone Wars' (if you haven't heard of this episode in history you really should look it up!). I find this podcast to be very informative & enjoyable (even though it seems to deal only with US history, & I am from Australia & not familiar with all these events), & I recommend you give it a go. I have come across one episode so far with a few f-words which was a bit shocking to hear, hopefully that was a one-off. Otherwise definitely worth listening to!
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