History's A Disaster
Bloody history and bloodier crimes. Andrew takes a weekly look at all things bloody. From natural disasters to man made atrocities
Episodes
You trust a stranger with your life every time you board a plane, but you almost never see the person in the left seat. That uneasy truth sits at the center of our deep dive into US-Bangla Flight 211, a Dhaka to Kathmandu route that should have been routine and instead ended with 51 lives lost after a chaotic, unstable approach and a post-crash fire.
We walk through the setup: a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 head...
A passenger ship the size of a city block leaves port, gets seen one last time off the South African coast, and then seems to erase itself from the ocean. That’s the SS Waratah, a Blue Anchor Line liner marketed as virtually unsinkable and later nicknamed Australia’s Titanic, disappearing in 1909 with no confirmed wreckage, no verified bodies, and just enough sightings to keep hope alive for decades.
We wal...
A hike sounds harmless until the weather stops cooperating and the person in charge refuses to admit they’re wrong. We’re telling the true story of the 1936 Black Forest Tragedy, when English teacher Kenneth Keist leads 27 schoolboys into Germany’s mountains during a building snowstorm and turns a spring break trek into a deadly historical disaster.
We walk step by step through the decisions that matter in any h...
A champagne cruise, a gleaming warship, and a crowd of Washington power brokers waiting for the thunder of a new supergun. Moments later, the deck of the USS Princeton lay shattered, and five leading figures were dead. We take you from the political stakes of John Tyler’s embattled presidency to the engineering choices that made the Peacemaker cannon a ticking bomb, revealing how spectacle outran science and left a lasti...
A clear signal, a crowded morning, and a single stretch of track set the stage for one of America’s deadliest rail disasters. We take you inside the 1918 Dutchman’s Curve wreck in Nashville—where missed checks, wartime confusion, and the cruel logic of Jim Crow turned routine into catastrophe—then follow the people who tried to heal the damage and the reforms that followed.
We start with the world that built the...
A window shatters at 32,000 feet, oxygen masks fall, and a 737 lurches into a violent roll. We walk through the harrowing chain of events aboard Southwest Flight 1380, from the first metallic thud to a high-speed single‑engine landing, unpacking how a tiny fatigue crack and a vulnerable cowling latch combined to break the cabin and the hearts of everyone on board. Along the way, we spotlight the calm precision of Captain...
A storm can break more than a ship; it can test a town’s faith and rewrite a company’s story. We take you from the birth of the Carl D. Bradley as the pride of the Great Lakes limestone trade to a November night when the “Queen of the Lakes” snapped in two and sent an entire community into mourning. With vivid scene-setting and clear-eyed analysis, we explore how an aging flagship, quiet cracks, and a last-minute order t...
A glowing wheel rim, a wisp of smoke, and then a blast that shook windows miles away. We tell the full story of the 1973 Roseville Yard explosions—how a routine munitions run became a 32-hour chain reaction that turned a vital rail hub into a field of craters and twisted steel. From the Sierra Nevada descent to the first plume of smoke in Antelope, we walk through the missed hotbox detection, the frantic minutes before t...
A safe home, a quiet town, and a split-second encounter behind a school bus ignite one of the most harrowing survival stories in recent memory. We follow how a young girl became the target of a stranger’s obsession, how a meticulously planned home invasion left two parents dead, and how their daughter endured 88 days in a makeshift prison before engineering her own escape.
We unpack the anatomy of the crime: the...
A clear spring afternoon. Hundreds of paratroopers prepping for routine jumps. Then a midair collision ignites 55,000 gallons of jet fuel and turns a quiet staging area into a battlefield. We walk through the Green Ramp disaster step by step, from the moment an F-16 on a simulated flameout approach clipped a C-130 on final to the fireball that struck the 82nd Airborne and 18th Airborne Corps at Pope Air Force Base in 199...
The air turned against its own city. We follow the chain that made it possible: a reactive chemical never meant for storage in bulk, a series of safety systems taken offline or ignored, and a community living within walking distance of tanks that required perfection to stay safe. When water slipped into Tank 610, pressure soared, alarms were silenced by habit, and the last defenses failed. What spilled over the factory w...
A quiet hamlet at dawn. No return fire. Smoke, screams, and a ditch that won’t leave your mind. We walk through how an ordinary American unit, raised on heroic war stories and trained to chase “body count,” entered My Lai expecting a firefight and left a graveyard behind. From the briefing that erased the idea of civilians to the moment a single killing unlocked a flood, we examine how culture, orders, and fear converged...
The ocean doesn’t announce its plans. One wave hit, a tugboat rolled, and a ship’s cook found himself sealed in a bathroom-sized air pocket on the seafloor for 62 hours, listening to distant engines and his own breath. What happened next is a sharp study in fear, ingenuity, and the thin margin between life and loss.
We trace the Jascon 4’s final minutes off the coast of Nigeria, the chaos of inverted corridors, ...
A night train full of families, gifts, and holiday plans sped toward a bridge that wasn’t there anymore. We follow that chilling arc—from a crater lake’s quiet failure on Mount Ruapehu to a lahar roaring down the Whangaehu River, shredding concrete piers and erasing the Tangiwai bridge in darkness—then step into the locomotive cab as the crew sees a frantic flashlight beam and fights physics with brakes and sand, seconds...
A headlining tour, a hit record, and a tired airplane came together over Mississippi—and the result reshaped rock history. We trace Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1977 crash from the first red flags to the last radio call, clarifying what went wrong and why the loss was avoidable. The story starts with a band at full speed after releasing Street Survivors, then zooms into the logistics that carried the risk: a 1948 Convair 240 with a ...
A silent ship in open water, a missing crew, and a century of wild theories—this is the story that made “ghost ship” part of our vocabulary. We pull the lens wide, starting with the Mary Celeste’s earlier life as the Amazon, a fast, carvel-built brigantine whose career seemed shadowed by bad luck: a captain’s sudden death, collisions, a grounding, and a salvage. When Benjamin Briggs steps aboard as owner-captain, he brin...
Two scenic helicopters crossed paths over the Gold Coast and collided in clear daylight, exposing weak links in see-and-avoid, radio reliability, and ground procedures. We trace the timeline, the emergency response, and the investigation, then lay out practical fixes for safer sightseeing flights.
• operator expansion without matched safety assessment
• aircraft, pilot backgrounds, and flight setup
• tim...
A perfectly ordinary Tuesday morning turned into a wall of white and the worst commute of many people’s lives. We dive into the 99-car pileup on I-75 near Calhoun, Tennessee—how a fog-prone valley, river-backed reservoirs, and nearby industrial ponds set the stage for sudden zero visibility, and how human reactions at different speeds amplified a single impact into a chain of catastrophe. It’s a forensic tour through wea...
A winter storm, rushed decisions, and weak training collided as Air Florida Flight 90 lifted into bad data and iced wings, then fell into the Potomac. We trace the chain of errors, the rescue that followed, and the reforms that reshaped winter flying.
• deregulation pressures and rapid growth at Air Florida
• crew backgrounds and cockpit culture under stress
• storm delays, flawed de‑icing, and holdove...
Joy filled a crowded Jerusalem wedding until the third-floor dance hall collapsed, triggering a deadly progressive failure that exposed years of shortcuts and ignored warnings. We trace the engineering decisions, the human stories, and the slow path to accountability and reform.
• PAL-KAL method and rapid-build culture
• design change from roof to occupied floor
• added then removed supports and load pat...
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Saskia Inwood woke up one morning, knowing her life would never be the same. The night before, she learned the unimaginable – that the husband she knew in the light of day was a different person after dark. This season unpacks Saskia’s discovery of her husband’s secret life and her fight to bring him to justice. Along the way, we expose a crime that is just coming to light. This is also a story about the myth of the “perfect victim:” who gets believed, who gets doubted, and why. We follow Saskia as she works to reclaim her body, her voice, and her life. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!