Dead People Talking

Catherine the Great: The Princess Who Became an Empress Dead People Talking: Kids Edition What if you were a princess who moved to a strange new country, learned a completely new language, and eventually became one of the most powerful rulers in the world? Meet Catherine the Great! But before she was Catherine, she was a little girl named Sophie, growing up in a small German principality with abso...

Catherine the Great, Part Two: From Princess to Empress A stolen child, a disastrous marriage, a dangerous conspiracy, and a throne that was never supposed to be hers. When Catherine gave birth to her son Paul in 1754, she might have expected her position at the Russian court to become more secure. Instead, her newborn was taken from her, her husband grew increasingly hostile, and Catherine found...

Hello my lovely listeners! I recently met a wonderful little girl at my day job who is a huge fan of history and history podcasts. It made me realize that our episodes sometimes are not the most kid friendly but that means I am leaving out some of the most important audience members. Because if we want history to be done right, to recover from its bad PR and make a real difference then we need kid...

Before she was Catherine the Great, she was Sophia Augusta Frederica, a fourteen-year-old princess from a minor German principality traveling through the frozen Russian winter toward a future she could scarcely have imagined. In this episode of Dead People Talking , we follow the young Catherine from her childhood in Prussia to the dazzling and dangerous court of Empress Elizabeth of Russia. We ex...

In Episode Two of our series on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, we follow Jackie into the White House and through the years that turned her into an international figure almost overnight. At just thirty-one, she became First Lady, bringing a sense of history, art, and quiet glamour to a role she never really sought. Her restoration of the White House drew widespread attention, her overseas trips made h...

In the first episode of this two-part series, we trace Jackie's remarkable journey from her privileged but complicated childhood through her education, early career as a journalist, whirlwind romance with a rising young senator named John F. Kennedy, and the triumphs and heartbreaks of their early marriage. Along the way, we'll explore the woman behind the carefully crafted public image: a gifted...

Imagine making decisions in your life which will not only change the course of the lives of everyone around you but will be so impactful, so inspiring, and so formative that people living 2000 years after you will still be telling your story. I think we often think of historical figures as being something almost super human, apart from us somehow, different from us, made of different molecules ent...

Today we explore the life of Blaze Starr, born Fannie Belle Fleming, the stripper and burlesque dancer who shot to fame in the 1950's. She was arrested for her performance in every state she toured in. She supported women's lib and was an active second wave feminist. She strode between the lines of sex symbol, sex worker, artist, performer, star, wife, and woman writing her own story and conformin...

Anne Neville, Queen of England, daughter of the Kingmaker, widow of the forgotten prince, tends to get reduced to a footnote as Richard III’s wife, but her story is far more complicated than that. She was the younger daughter of Richard Neville, the so-called “Kingmaker”, and grew up right in the middle of the chaos of the Wars of the Roses. By the time she was still very young, she had already se...

Today we dig into a nuanced and violent case the Angel Makers of Nagyrév. A community of women tired of their violent husbands and lives shadowed by violence, hunger and strife come together for support and find a toxic solution. Join us this week on Dead People Talking, Sources The Women Are Not Fine: The Dark History of a Poisonous Sisterhood by Hope Reese Music by Epidemic Sound

In 1860, a group of determined explorers set out to achieve one of the greatest geographical feats in Australian history: crossing the continent from south to north. What followed was a masterclass in poor planning, questionable leadership, baffling decision-making, and the stubborn refusal to learn from people who actually knew what they were doing. Join me this week as we follow Burke and Wills...

Todays episode does include descriptions od death and injury during war. Listener discretion advised. Today we are talking about Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart. An absolute machine of a man. I usually don't like military history, I am a people historian. And Adrian is one heck of a person and one heck of a soldier. So I thought his story should be told. Buckle up this story is crazy. Sources Happy Ody...

Welcome to Dead People Talking a weird history podcast about the strange and fascinating story of us a.k.a. history. History has been done dirty, you've been lied to if you think history is just names and dates on a whiteboard. History is context of everything we are and everything we have ever done. Everything you have ever done. So it's pretty cool. Join me every week as we combat the idea that...

From English castles to desert tents beneath the Syrian stars, this episode explores the remarkable final act of one of the nineteenth century’s most unconventional women, a woman who refused, again and again, to live the life society demanded of her.

In this first episode, we trace Jane’s early life from the rolling countryside of Dorset and Norfolk to the dazzling but deeply restrictive world of Britain’s upper classes. Married off at just seventeen to the much older and politically powerful Edward Law, 2nd Baron Ellenborough, Jane quickly discovers the brutal realities of marriage, reputation, and female dependence in the early nineteenth ce...

In this episode, I tell you the extraordinary and heartbreaking story of Elizabeth McCourt Tabor, better known as Baby Doe Tabor. From poverty to glittering wealth in Colorado’s silver boom, and back again to isolation and tragedy, her life reads like a frontier epic. Alongside her husband, Horace Tabor, she rose to become one of the most famous women of the American West. But when the silver mark...