History Fix

In April of 1722 Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen and his crew stumbled upon a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They sailed for the Dutch West India Company in search of Terra Australis Incognita, a hypothetical undiscovered continent that doesn’t actually exist. The land they found instead was just a 64 square mile speck some 1,200 miles from the nearest island and over 2,000 miles f...

In the 1950s, a strange story emerged about a ship called the USS Eldridge docked at a naval shipyard in Philadelphia. According to a man aboard another ship docked nearby, in October of 1948 the hull of the Eldridge suddenly glowed an eery blueish green and then the entire ship disappeared, became invisible. But that's not all. After it turned invisible, it then suddenly teleported 300 miles...

This week we're exploring what is, quite possibly, the weirdest and most mysterious of all the holidays: April Fools' Day. The real trick? No one even knows where this holiday came from or why we celebrate it. We'll dive in to some of the origin theories, from ancient Rome to medieval fables to Renaissance poetry. We'll also take a look how the holiday has evolved throughout ti...

I have danced around the story of Mary Tudor, oldest daughter of Henry VIII, for far too long. It's finally time to recognize Mary with her own episode, the perfect story to wrap up Women's History Month. This is a tragic story. The lot cast upon Mary was often cruel and unjust, her life marred by trauma and heartache. But it's also a story of triumph, an underdog rising up, overcom...

Amidst the chaos of 19th century New York City, one poor immigrant woman named Ann Lohman managed to climb her way out of the slums and into a brownstone mansion on 5th avenue. But her means of doing this rubbed some people the wrong way. Ann, alias Madame Restell, was a notorious abortionist operating in the city with satellite offices in Philadelphia and Boston. She built an empire selling marri...

We're going medieval this week to rectify some misconceptions about castles. Despite what many believe and what's put out there in fairy tales, castles are a very specific thing built in a specific time and place for a specific purpose. We'll examine the medieval period (AKA the middle ages or the dark ages) in Europe to better understand why and how castles were built and what they...

This week, we're going all the way back to ancient Greece. We'll examine the story of Aspasia of Miletus, a woman who came to Athens around 450 BC and quickly became the talk of the town. Her name appears over and over again in writing from the time, Socrates wrote about her, Plato, Plutarch, Cicero the orator, Xenophon the historian, Athenaeus the writer, Aristophanes the comic playwrig...

This week, we'll delve into a cautionary tale: the "Radium Girls." These women were employed to paint glow in the dark numbers on watch faces and dials in the 1920s and 30s using radium paint. Assured that the paint was safe, the girls were instructed to shape their paintbrushes into sharp points with their own lips. But, turns out, ingesting radioactive radium paint isn’t safe at a...

This week, Joan Collins from the Pea Island Preservation Society joins me again to discuss Richard Etheridge, the first Black man to serve as keeper in the US Life Saving Service. Born into slavery, Etheridge fought for the Union army during the Civil War. Afterwards, he returned home to the Outer Banks of North Carolina where he re-entered service as a life saver, more specifically, surfman numbe...

Between mainland North Carolina and the narrow stretch of barrier islands we call the Outer Banks, sits a tiny island, just 12 miles long and around 3 miles wide. Dotted with rich maritime forest and bordered by brackish salt marsh on all sides, it’s home to two sleepy towns aptly named Manteo and Wanchese. This is Roanoke Island of course, of Lost Colony fame. But some 300 years later, in the mid...

In this episode, we'll uncover the truly impressive accomplishments of Benjamin Banneker, a free Black man living in rural Maryland in the 1700s. Banneker was a self taught astronomer who helped to lay out the boundary for the construction of Washington DC. He also built his own working clock and wrote and published almanacs for the years 1792 to 1797. He also called Thomas Jefferson out for...

This week, we'll delve into the mind blowing life of Josephine Baker, a Black performing artist who took Paris by storm starting in the 1920s. She sang, she danced, she barely wore any clothing, and she had a pet cheetah named Chiquita that regularly terrorized the orchestra pit. But Josephine Baker was so much more than that. from St. Louis street rat to world famous performer, first Black f...

This week I'll explore the social history of the cannabis plant including its use since ancient times as a fiber, medicine, and for its psychoactive properties both ritualistically and recreationally. I'll explore how cannabis first made its way to the Americas and how it became a main crop of colonial planters that they were actually required by law to grow. I'll explore it's...

Thomas Alva Edison has always been portrayed as the greatest, most prolific by far American inventor. The man obtained over a thousand patents in his lifetime and is credited with inventing or improving upon devices that changed our world, our lives forever: the lightbulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, telegraphs, telephones, x-rays, and batteries. The list goes on. His contemporaries...

Check out zipOns from befree Adaptive Clothing here! This week we'll take a look at the 6 Hanoverian monarchs: George I, George II, George III, George IV, William IV, and Victoria. We'll examine how George I, a German, came to be king of Great Britain and Ireland despite being only 57th in line for the throne and how German monarchs continued to rule the country for the next 187 years an...

Check out zipOns from befree Adaptive Clothing here! In the 1950s a mysterious man appeared at Tokyo’s Haneda airport. He looked normal enough, just a regular looking mid-thirties white guy in a suit there on a business trip. But when he presented his passport to airport officials, they were puzzled. The passport was unlike any they had ever seen before. It listed the man as being from a nation ca...

This week, we'll get lost in the mind boggling mystery that is the Dyatlov Pass case, when 9 experienced hikers died under suspicious and unexplainable circumstances while traversing Russia's Ural Mountains in 1959. When a group of ski/hikers led by 23 year old student Igor Dyatlov failed to return after a 3 week journey, search parties were sent. They quickly found the group's aban...

I'm back this week with yet another inspiring underdog story... but make it Christmas! This week, I'll trace the origins of one of the most beloved Christmas characters, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, all the way back to his roots on the desk of a department story copywriter in 1939 Chicago. Robert L. May was down on his luck when his boss at Montgomery Ward asked him to write a childre...

Just in time for the 121st anniversary on Tuesday, I bring to you the story of two brothers from Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, who changed the world forever with their groundbreaking first flight on December 17th, 1903. Though it lasted just 12 seconds, it marks the first powered, sustained, and controlled airplane flight, something humans had tried and failed to do for centuries. Join special...

I'll pick up where I left off last week, with the storming of the Bastille and the fall of the "ancien regime." We'll explore how, over the next few years, this new France will become more of a hellscape than a paradise. As a radical group, the Jacobins, seizes control, distopia ensues with the September Massacres of 1792, the "Reign of Terror" spanning 1793 to 1794,...

This week I discuss the events leading up to the outbreak of the French Revolution during the summer of 1789. You'll learn how Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette came to find themselves on the French throne at a time when the system, that had worked for centuries, was beginning to fail. Shifting social classes, failing harvests, population booms, and economic busts will begin to fuel a runaway se...

On November 11, 1620, forty-one men aboard the ship the Mayflower signed a document of great importance. With their signatures they vowed to create fair and just laws and to work together for the good of the Plymouth colony. This document, the Mayflower Compact, was the first to outline self-governance in the so called “New World” and it would go on to serve as a foundation for both the Declaratio...

It’s the greatest adventure story ever told, Lewis and Clark’s daring pursuit to cross thousands of miles of rugged terrain, to explore the rest of the continent, to finally reach the Pacific Ocean, gaze out over its vast expanse, with their faithful guide by their side of course, Sacagawea. You know Sacagawea, she’s the most famous American woman of all time. I’m not kidding. She’s the only one w...

Starting in the 1800s, the US government forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of indigenous children from their homes and sent them to boarding schools hundreds of miles away where they ruthlessly tried to destroy all traces of their culture, to assimilate them into white society. Upon arrival, their hair was cut off, their names were changed, and they were regularly beaten for speaking their na...

In the Black Hills region of South Dakota stands a massive American monument, the faces of four US presidents blasted into the side of a mountain. George Washington represents the birth of the nation. Thomas Jefferson represents its growth. Theodore Roosevelt development and Abraham Lincoln preservation. Mount Rushmore National Memorial hosts more than 2 million visitors each year who gaze upon th...