Podcast Episodes
Back to Search
The Real "Wild West"
The Wild West most of us inherited is a marketing campaign. The cowboy in the lighter hat, the noble sheriff, the high-noon duel in a dusty street — …
2 months, 1 week ago
The Resurrection Men in America
For most of the nineteenth century, American medicine had a problem nobody wanted to talk about. The medical schools needed bodies. There was no lega…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
The Forgotten Horror of the Lake Shawnee
A man bought a piece of land in southern West Virginia in nineteen twenty-six and built an amusement park on it. He didn't know what was already ther…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
The Real Stranger Things?
What if Stranger Things wasn't science fiction? What if the show that became one of the biggest cultural phenomena of the last decade started as a r…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
Diamonds Are Forever
For most of human history, diamonds were genuinely rare. Then in 1867, on a sheep farm near the Orange River in South Africa, a fifteen-year-old boy …
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Who Found America First: Columbus or the Vikings?
A thousand years before Christopher Columbus saw a light on a Bahamian beach, a small band of Norse settlers stood on the northern tip of Newfoundlan…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
The American Gold Rush
Most of us learned a version of the Gold Rush that was cheerful, portable, and mostly wrong. In this episode we set that version aside and go looking…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
The 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre
In September 1857, a wagon train of roughly one hundred and forty men, women, and children from Arkansas made camp in a remote valley in southwestern…
3 months ago
The Aurora Texas Alien Crash
In this episode of Disturbing History, we step away from the dark corridors of government experiments and serial killers to explore one of the strang…
3 months ago
Eugenics in America
This episode traces the full history of eugenics in America from its origins in Francis Galton's Victorian-era theories through the establishment of …
3 months ago