A Popular History of Unpopular Things

Join Kelli as she goes over the biggest, manmade, non-nuclear explosion in history - the Halifax Explosion. On December 6th, 1917, a French ship filled with explosives was heading into Halifax Harbor, in Nova Scotia, Canada. At the same time, the Norwegian ship Imo was leaving to pick up supplies from New York to ship over to Europe to help with WWI. Unfortunately for thousands of people at Halifa...

Join Kelli as she goes over the deadliest mine explosion in history - the Monongah Mine Disaster of 1907. In the industrial world of the early 20th century, there was little regulation over safety in the workplace or fair wages. The Monongah mine in West Virginia was no exception. Fine coal dust in the air, coupled with pockets of methane gas, made conditions incredibly unsafe. When the rail carti...

Happy First Birthday to the APHOUT podcast! It's been a wild ride full of cannibalism, adventures gone wrong, and all kinds of gore, and I can't wait to keep it going! --- Join Kelli as she discusses the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, a test during WWII where 36 unpaid volunteers willingly starved themselves half to death to get concrete data on starvation and how to rehabilitate the s...

Kelli, along with Anna and Paul of the Engineering History Podcast, do another joint episode on the Great Wall of China! Join us as we tackle how and why the Great Wall was built, starting with the Qin Dynasty and then tracing it through the Ming Dynasty. While Kelli muses on the legitimacy of dead bodies in the walls, Anna explores the engineering of sticky rice and Paul enthuses about the Mongol...

Join Kelli as she explores the myth of the mellified man, a medicinal candy made out of mummified, honeyed corpses. If you thought the Western Europeans were the only ones to consume their dead for medicine, well... get ready to hear what Li Shizhen has to say about mellification. Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric Find him on all streaming services and YouTube , and check out his debut EP, Yell...

Join Kelli as she explores the history of the Mongol Empire and how we go from Genghis Khan to Timur, a Turco-Mongol leader who is responsible for building an empire off of the deaths of 17 million people in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. His infamous calling card? Leaving pyramids and towers made of the skulls of the dead he killed at the entrance to each city, a powerful reminder not to...

Join Kelli as she goes over the story of Alfred Packer, who was accused of killing and eating his five hiking companions in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. He definitely engaged in cannibalism, but he disputed the murder charges. Was he a murderer? Or did he just eat his fellow man to survive in the harsh winters of the Colorado Rockies? This is the story of the man who inspired Matt...

Join Kelli as she explores Rainbow Valley, a place in the death zone of Mount Everest, high up above 8,000 meters (over 26,000 feet), where your body slowly dies off, cell by cell, because of the extreme cold and lack of oxygen. The Rainbow Valley is made colorful by the jackets of the dead climbers that you'll have to climb over on your way to the peak of our world, the summit of Mount Evere...

Join Kelli as she explores the history of the Irish Potato Famine. We know that a fungal disease, blight, swept through Ireland in from 1845 to 1852, wiping out most of the potatoes. But where did blight come from? Did it only affect the Irish? If blight was elsewhere, why were they the ones so badly affected? Was it only potatoes affected? And if so, why were there not alternative food sources? H...

Join Kelli as she gives the history of the Radium Girls - young women who worked in factories painting watches and dials with paint containing RADIUM. The girls were encouraged to use their lips to keep the brushes pointy, and as a result, they were consuming alpha radiation particles from the radioactive radium. The result? Disintegrating bones, rotting necrotic tissue, and painful death. Follow...

Join Kelli as she explores the history of late 19th century's East End of London, where Jack the Ripper made his infamous, and gruesome, killings of five women before disappearing into the darkness in the fall of 1888. Though he was never found, his murders give us a chance to explore the lives of women, the poor, and the working classes in the gritty, industrial life of England's bigges...

Join Kelli as she explores the real history behind HH Holmes - born Herman Webster Mudgett - and how he became known as America's first serial killer. Was he the man we know him as today? Or is his story of a murder house and the deaths of tourists in Chicago just a legend? This episode is part of a two-episode look into two late 19th century murdered - Holmes and Jack the Ripper - and how th...

Join Kelli as she tells the story of two shipwrecks that took place on Auckland Island in 1864, at the same time , though neither knew the other was there. One wreck tells the tale of a group that banded together in the face of adversity and used their creativity and strength to survive. The other wreck is more like an adult version of Lord of the Flies; the situation quickly devolved into chaos,...

In a special joint podcast, Kelli from APHOUT joins Anna and Paul from the Engineering History Podcast to talk about the history and engineering behind the Battle of Alesia, a decisive battle between Julius Caesar and his Roman forces against Vercingetorix and the Gauls in 52 BCE. Together we explore the intersection of history and engineering in Ancient Rome! Follow The Engineering History Podcas...

Join Kelli as she explains how and why the French built their famous Catacombs, an Ossuary filled with the bones of possibly 6 million, anonymous people. Skulls and femur bones line the walls of this grotesquely beautiful, and immensely famous, Parisian attraction. But where did the bodies come from? And why were they put into the tunnels under Paris? Find out in the latest episode of A Popular Hi...

Join Kelli as she explores the worst mass-murder suicide in history. Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple cult, brought more than 900 of his followers to a remote agricultural compound in the Guyanese jungle. As he started to lose control of his followers, and with the government investigating allegations of abuse, he directed (and in some cases forced) them to drink a cyanide-laced punch. In o...

Join Kelli as she explores the exhumation and re-killing of Mercy Brown, a girl suspected of being a vampire feeding off of her living relatives in a small town in Rhode Island, 1892. Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric Want to start your own podcast? Click this link to get set up with Buzzsprout and you'll get a $20 credit to sign up! Sources: Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England...

Join Kelli as she looks back at the dancing plague of 1518, when residents of Strasbourg all started to dance for days and weeks on end - and some of them danced to their deaths. Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric Want to start your own podcast? Click this link to get set up with Buzzsprout and you'll get a $20 credit to sign up! Support the show Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric | Yello...

Join Kelli as she teaches you about a very common but forgotten medical practice in Europe during the Medieval and Early Modern Periods - consuming the skin, bones, and blood of corpses as medicine. The history of cannibalism just got even more unpopular. Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric Want to start your own podcast? Click this link to get set up with Buzzsprout and you'll get a $20 cre...

Join Kelli as she tells the amazing story of Uruguayan Flight 571, where 45 people crashed into the snowy peaks on the Andes Mountains on the border of Argentina and Chile. After ten weeks , two of the 16 survivors emerged from the mountains. To survive, they had to do the unthinkable - they had to cannibalize the flesh of their dead friends and relatives. This is a story of resilience, survival,...

Join Kelli as she explains what happened to the Terror and Erebus, the doomed ships of Captain Sir John Franklin's 1945 expedition, where all 134 men perished, most of whom were never found. The bones and artifacts left behind tell a chilling story of how far some men will go to survive - even if all hope is lost. Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric Want to start your own podcast? Click this...

Join Kelli as she teaches how nuclear power plants work, and why the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded on April 26, 1986 - the worst nuclear incident in history. Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric Want to start your own podcast? Click this link to get set up with Buzzsprout and you'll get a $20 credit to sign up! Sources referenced in the podcast: Illinois Energy Prof YouTube Adam Higg...

Join Kelli as she discusses the roots of the Cholera epidemic in London in the 1850s, and how a particularly smelly year in 1858 known as the "Great Stink" forced Parliament to fix London's sanitation infrastructure. Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric Want to start your own podcast? Click this link to get set up with Buzzsprout and you'll get a $20 credit to sign up! Support...

Join Kelli as she discusses the history surrounding the lost Roanoke colony, the first English attempt at colonizing the New World. In addition to discussing what happened to the colonists, Kelli will look into the history of the period to understand why Roanoke failed in 1587, but Jamestown survived only 20 years later. Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric Want to start your own podcast? Click th...

Join Kelli for this double-feature episode as she looks into two weird food stories - the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 and the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876. Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric Want to start your own podcast? Click this link to get set up with Buzzsprout and you'll get a $20 credit to sign up! Support the show Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric | Yello Kake Follow me on Ins...