Naked History

Everybody wants to know who Jack the Ripper was. Unfortunately, wanting an answer and having evidence are two very different things. In this Naked History: Debrief , we return to Victorian Whitechapel and finally dive into the suspect rabbit hole deliberately left out of Jack the Ripper: The Monster We Made . Montague John Druitt died suspiciously close to the end of the canonical murders. Aaron K...

This episode discusses the Jack the Ripper murders and includes descriptions of murder, violence against women, poverty, sex work, alcohol addiction, and postmortem mutilation. While I’ve deliberately avoided unnecessary graphic detail, some descriptions of the victims’ injuries and crime scenes are necessary to understand the history and the investigation. More importantly, these were real women—...

Titanic sank in 1912. The myths surrounding her have somehow remained extremely buoyant. In this Naked History: Debrief , we return to RMS Carpathia: All Possible Speed to separate some of the history from the legend. We revisit the claim that Carpathia pushed her engines so hard during the rescue that they were permanently affected, dig deeper into Captain Arthur Rostron’s belief that divine inte...

Everyone knows the story of RMS Titanic . This time, we’re telling it from the deck of the ship that came looking for her. When Carpathia received Titanic’s distress call in the early hours of April 15, 1912, Captain Arthur Rostron was nearly sixty miles away. He didn’t know how badly Titanic was damaged, how long she had left, or whether anyone would still be alive when they arrived. He knew only...

The paintings are familiar: the Declaration signed on July 4, a united group of elderly Founders, Betsy Ross sewing the first flag, and the Liberty Bell ringing out the birth of a nation. The trouble is, much of that story never happened quite the way we remember it. In this Debrief to The American Experiment Is Haunted, Dyllan examines six of the most deeply embedded myths surrounding the America...

In the final episode of Naked History’s 250th special, we descend into the basement of the American Experiment — the place where the house keeps its machinery. After independence, the Revolution had to become a government. That meant debt, unpaid soldiers, postwar unrest, constitutional arguments, and the uneasy question of whether the new republic could survive itself. From there, we follow the l...

In Episode 2 of Naked History’s 250th special, we move deeper into the haunted house of the American Experiment and open the locked rooms of the Revolution. The Declaration promised liberty, but not everyone was invited into that promise. This episode looks at the people whose stories complicate the clean patriotic version of 1776: enslaved people who used revolutionary language to pursue freedom,...

America’s birthday starts at the front door. In the first episode of the Naked History 250th Special , we step inside the American Experiment and ask what was actually being born in 1776: a nation, a rebellion, a political argument, or a very expensive group project with muskets? This episode looks at the Revolution before it became marble statues and schoolhouse mythology. The colonies were not o...

America’s birthday has a footnote. This week on Naked History , we’re warming up for the big July 4th special with a short episode about why the Fourth of July was not always destined to be the Fourth of July. The vote for independence happened on July 2nd, 1776. The Declaration was adopted on July 4th. And somehow, because history loves branding almost as much as it loves paperwork, the press rel...

The Radium Girls story is already horrifying: young women told to paint glow-in-the-dark watch dials with radioactive paint, sharpen their brushes with their lips, and trust the companies that swore everything was safe. But the main episode only scratches the glowing surface. In this Naked History: Debrief , we’re opening the drawer of radioactive footnotes: what got left out, how corporate denial...

Podcast Description In this episode of Naked History , we’re turning off the lights and following the glow straight into one of the most horrifying workplace scandals of the twentieth century. The Radium Girls were young women hired to paint glow-in-the-dark watch and instrument dials with radium-laced paint. They were told the work was safe. They were taught to sharpen their brushes with their li...

One year. Dozens of stories. Far too many historical red flags. This week, Naked History celebrates its first anniversary with the official, deeply unserious, emotionally sincere Naked History Yearbook . Dyllan looks back at a year of weird little doors and big human messes. From the Paris Catacombs to the Emu War, the Great Molasses Flood, the Year Without a Summer, D.B. Cooper, Laika, and more....

Amelia Earhart didn’t vanish alone. In this Naked History: Debrief , we pull Fred Noonan out of the historical overhead bin and give Amelia’s navigator the spotlight he deserves. We dig into who Noonan was, why his role mattered, what details from Earhart’s final flight often get flattened into legend, and why the disappearance still grips us nearly a century later. We also look at the radio confu...

Before Amelia Earhart became one of history’s most famous mysteries, she was a person: restless, ambitious, media-savvy, stubborn, and very much done with a world that wanted women to stay decorative and grounded. In this episode of Naked History , we look past the question mark and into the life behind the legend. From homemade childhood roller coasters to early aviation death machines, from tran...

After the Bonus Army marched on Washington, the story did not just end in smoke, tear gas, and Douglas MacArthur aggressively failing the vibe check. In this Naked History: Debrief , we go back to the camp at Anacostia to ask what the Bonus Army really exposed: the gap between patriotic speeches and actual support, the government’s Olympic-level talent for turning promises into paperwork, and the...

In the summer of 1932, thousands of World War I veterans marched on Washington, D.C., not to overthrow the government, but to ask it to keep a promise. They were hungry, unemployed, and desperate in the middle of the Great Depression. Years earlier, Congress had approved bonus payments for their wartime service, but the money was not scheduled to arrive until 1945. So the veterans came to the capi...

In this Naked History: Debrief , we head back behind the barricades of the Paris Commune for the strange, messy, and politically flammable leftovers from the main episode. Dyllan digs into the pieces that didn’t quite fit the first time around: why the cannons of Montmartre were more than just cannons, how Louise Michel became one of the Commune’s most defiant icons, why the myth of the pétroleuse...

In 1871, after war, siege, starvation, and political collapse, the people of Paris tried something extraordinary: they took over their own city. In this episode of Naked History , Dyllan Gasaway dives into the story of the Paris Commune — the seventy-two-day uprising that terrified Europe and became one of the most powerful symbols of revolution in modern history. What began as anger at government...

After the jump comes the fallout. In this week’s Naked History: Debrief , Dyllan Gasaway digs into the details, oddities, and lingering questions that make the D. B. Cooper case so hard to shake. From the ransom demands and parachutes to the tie left behind on the plane, this companion episode explores the strange little pieces that kept the mystery alive long after the hijacker vanished into the...

In 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a plane, asked for $200,000, strapped on a parachute, and vanished into the night. No body. No confirmed identity. No clear ending. Just a briefcase, a bourbon and soda, a clip-on tie, and one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in American history. In this episode of Naked History , Dyllan Gasaway dives into the story of D. B. Cooper, the quiet...

What makes a con actually work? In this week’s Naked History: Debrief , Dyllan Gasaway follows up the Victor Lustig episode by digging into the psychology behind the scam. Why do people fall for frauds that seem so absurd in hindsight? Why does status, secrecy, and the promise of insider access override common sense so easily? And why does Victor Lustig still feel so strangely modern? From the per...

What kind of man looks at the Eiffel Tower and thinks, I could sell that ? In this episode of Naked History , Dyllan Gasaway dives into the unbelievable true story of Victor Lustig , the polished con artist who didn’t just scam people out of money — he sold them status, secrecy, and the illusion of power. With forged documents, a tailored suit, and an almost supernatural understanding of human ego...

The main episode told the street-level nightmare. This Debrief goes under the floorboards. In 1518 Strasbourg, people didn’t “party themselves to death.” They moved—compulsively—inside a pressure-cooker world of plague memory, famine cycles, religious dread, and institutions trying to keep order with the wrong map. In this Debrief, Naked History: Debrief tightens the bolts on what we can and can’t...

In the summer of 1518, the streets of Strasbourg didn’t erupt in celebration. They erupted in compulsion . One person began to dance. Then another. Then dozens. Accounts describe bodies moving past exhaustion, past reason, past choice, until the city faced an impossible question: How do you stop an outbreak that looks like joy from far away… but up close is suffering? In this episode of Naked Hist...

Courtly Love Myths vs. Lived Medieval Marriage (Valentine’s Debrief) Valentine’s Day sells us a medieval love story: longing, poetry, destiny… and maybe a tasteful lute in the background. But medieval marriage? That was often a household institution—built for property, kin networks, labor, inheritance, and survival —with romance as a sometimes-guest, not the foundation. In this Debrief, we rip the...