History Fix

In keeping with the nautical theme I accidentally adopted this month, I'll be exploring the rather misleading story of sixteen century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan this week. Magellan's claim to fame is being the first person to circumnavigate the globe, to sail all the way around the Earth, a full circle. That really is Magellan’s only claim to fame. Except for one thing. He never even did that. Did you know th...

I'm back this week with four more shipwreck stories. We'll start with the horrific explosion of the Mississippi river steamboat, the Sultana in 1865. Next, we'll tackle the Titanic which famously sank in 1912, killing around 1,500 passengers. On to another famous ship, the Endeavor. The Endeavor was the British naval ship used by explorer Captain James Cook during his first voyage of discovery which landed him in Aus...

This week, we'll uncover the stories of four different shipwrecks. I'll start with an ancient Roman ship found near the Greek island of Antikythera which sank around 60 to 70 BC with mind blowing treasures on board. Next, I'll talk about the sinking of King Henry VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose, in 1545 and it's rediscovery twice in the 400 years since. Then we'll move on to my personal favorite, the Qu...

This week I teamed up with fellow podcaster and prolific world traveler, Gary Arndt, from the "Everything Everywhere Daily" podcast to talk about UNESCO, an organization with a mission to save natural wonders and cultural heritage sites around the world. You'll hear the story of how UNESCO got it's start, specifically the painstaking dismantling, transport, and reconstruction of one some ancient Egypt's gre...

This week we're talking about the Vietnam War, one of the most unpopular wars in US history. Tomorrow is Memorial Day and while I very much want to honor and remember the over 58,000 Americans who lost their lives fighting for their country in Vietnam, around one third of them drafted, that’s not exactly the focus of this episode. Instead, I want to explore a side to the war we don’t often think about. I want to explore what h...

This week I’m very excited to share with you some recent developments in the story of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke. I’m joined by Scott Dawson, who runs the Lost Colony Museum in the town of Buxton, on Hatteras Island. For a long time, Scott has been working with British archaeologist Dr. Mark Horton to excavate sites of old Native American villages in Buxton, left by a group known as the Croatoan. What they have discovered recentl...

This episode is all about the history of feeding babies which has been necessary and yet surprisingly difficult since the beginning of mankind. In fact, it's so necessary that to forgo it, up until very recently, the last hundred years or so, was a death sentence for the infant. We don’t often think about feeding babies. It’s something mothers take care of behind the scenes, part of the invisible load. We certainly don’t pause...

This week, we'll continue digging into the story of infamous Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, beginning where we left off last week with the Reichstag Fire, a suspicious incident that led to the destruction of democracy and withdrawal of civil liberties in Germany. As you'll see, once those civil liberties were gone, Hitler was free to do as he pleased and what "he pleased" happened to include a world war and the mas...

Throughout all of history there is one name that rises above all the others possibly as the most depraved, heinous, vile human being ever to have walked the planet. Humans worldwide almost unanimously agree, some from the start but most in hindsight, that this man was pure evil. Yes, I am talking of course about the infamous dictator Adolf Hitler. BBC writes quote “Few names from history inspire such immediate and emphatic revulsio...

In April of 1722 Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen and his crew stumbled upon a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They sailed for the Dutch West India Company in search of Terra Australis Incognita, a hypothetical undiscovered continent that doesn’t actually exist. The land they found instead was just a 64 square mile speck some 1,200 miles from the nearest island and over 2,000 miles from the nearest continent. This isl...

In the 1950s, a strange story emerged about a ship called the USS Eldridge docked at a naval shipyard in Philadelphia. According to a man aboard another ship docked nearby, in October of 1948 the hull of the Eldridge suddenly glowed an eery blueish green and then the entire ship disappeared, became invisible. But that's not all. After it turned invisible, it then suddenly teleported 300 miles away to another naval shipyard in ...

This week we're exploring what is, quite possibly, the weirdest and most mysterious of all the holidays: April Fools' Day. The real trick? No one even knows where this holiday came from or why we celebrate it. We'll dive in to some of the origin theories, from ancient Rome to medieval fables to Renaissance poetry. We'll also take a look how the holiday has evolved throughout time, including some of the greatest ...

I have danced around the story of Mary Tudor, oldest daughter of Henry VIII, for far too long. It's finally time to recognize Mary with her own episode, the perfect story to wrap up Women's History Month. This is a tragic story. The lot cast upon Mary was often cruel and unjust, her life marred by trauma and heartache. But it's also a story of triumph, an underdog rising up, overcoming insurmountable challenges to cl...

Amidst the chaos of 19th century New York City, one poor immigrant woman named Ann Lohman managed to climb her way out of the slums and into a brownstone mansion on 5th avenue. But her means of doing this rubbed some people the wrong way. Ann, alias Madame Restell, was a notorious abortionist operating in the city with satellite offices in Philadelphia and Boston. She built an empire selling married women birth control and performi...

We're going medieval this week to rectify some misconceptions about castles. Despite what many believe and what's put out there in fairy tales, castles are a very specific thing built in a specific time and place for a specific purpose. We'll examine the medieval period (AKA the middle ages or the dark ages) in Europe to better understand why and how castles were built and what they were used for. We'll also unp...

This week, we're going all the way back to ancient Greece. We'll examine the story of Aspasia of Miletus, a woman who came to Athens around 450 BC and quickly became the talk of the town. Her name appears over and over again in writing from the time, Socrates wrote about her, Plato, Plutarch, Cicero the orator, Xenophon the historian, Athenaeus the writer, Aristophanes the comic playwright, Pericles the leader of the city...

This week, we'll delve into a cautionary tale: the "Radium Girls." These women were employed to paint glow in the dark numbers on watch faces and dials in the 1920s and 30s using radium paint. Assured that the paint was safe, the girls were instructed to shape their paintbrushes into sharp points with their own lips. But, turns out, ingesting radioactive radium paint isn’t safe at all, and as the women became sick an...

This week, Joan Collins from the Pea Island Preservation Society joins me again to discuss Richard Etheridge, the first Black man to serve as keeper in the US Life Saving Service. Born into slavery, Etheridge fought for the Union army during the Civil War. Afterwards, he returned home to the Outer Banks of North Carolina where he re-entered service as a life saver, more specifically, surfman number 6, the lowest ranking position. J...

Between mainland North Carolina and the narrow stretch of barrier islands we call the Outer Banks, sits a tiny island, just 12 miles long and around 3 miles wide. Dotted with rich maritime forest and bordered by brackish salt marsh on all sides, it’s home to two sleepy towns aptly named Manteo and Wanchese. This is Roanoke Island of course, of Lost Colony fame. But some 300 years later, in the mid 1800s, it was home to another colo...