Hey folks! Episode 100 is coming up, and I’m going to make it a Q&A episode. Send me your questions! Ask about past episodes, ask about things that I didn’t talk about or maybe missed and (if you like) ask […]

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 […]

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 hips, knees,

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.

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. To do this,

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,

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 erroneously identified with Marco Polo...

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,

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 Belgium,

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,