Barely Historical

Opera has everything: drama, sex, ridiculous costumes, murder—and apparently, a deeply concerning amount of testicle removal. This week, Jo and Amanda are getting into castrati, the male singers who were castrated as boys to preserve their high singing voices. And somehow, that definition is only the beginning of the weird shit. We’re talking about the Catholic Church’s complicated involvement, It...

The city needed someone to carry out its justice, so it hired a guy, made him essential, and then treated him like a walking biohazard. This week we ruin the executioner: specifically Franz "Meister Frantz" Schmidt of Nuremberg, who killed almost 400 people, treated something like 15,000 patients as an unlicensed healer, and spent his retirement personally petitioning the Holy Roman Empe...

The Pony Express is one of the most famous legends of the American West—but apparently, Jo and Amanda knew almost nothing about it. This week on Barely Historical , we're getting into the real history of the Pony Express: the teenage riders racing mail across nearly 2,000 miles, the isolated station workers who actually kept the operation running, the surprisingly expensive cost of sending a l...

In late 1953, Swanson had ten refrigerated train cars full of unsold Thanksgiving turkey and no plan. A salesman named Jerry Thomas, not a chef, not a food scientist, looked at 260 tons of poultry and said what if we put it on a tray with little compartments like the airlines use. Nobody in that room thought they were about to start a national argument about what it means to be a wife. They though...

Syphilis is one of those diseases you think you know about until you actually learn its history. Then it gets significantly worse. In this episode of Barely Historical , Jo and Amanda dive into the horrifying, bizarre, and occasionally absurd history of syphilis , from its mysterious origins and the infamous “French disease” to the brutal symptoms, disfigurement, neurological damage, and treatment...

Postmortem Photography | The Internet's Been Lying to Us In 1867, a photographer walked into a Philadelphia parlor, set up a tripod next to the sofa, and photographed a woman who had died the day before. Her husband had brushed her hair and put her wedding ring back on her finger. He paid three dollars, about a week's wages, and kept that photo on the mantle for the rest of his life. That...

Did Lizzie Borden really kill her father and stepmother, or did America turn an acquitted woman into its first true crime celebrity? In 1892, two brutal hatchet murders shocked Fall River, Massachusetts. But the real story isn't just about the crime. It's about how newspapers, public obsession, and nonstop speculation transformed Lizzie Borden into one of America's first viral figures,...

The World Cup is supposed to bring the world together. Instead, its history includes dictators, corruption, stolen trophies, political propaganda, murder, and one very good dog named Pickles. In this episode of Barely Historical , Amanda and Jolynne dive into the unbelievable true stories behind the world’s biggest sporting event. From the first World Cup in Uruguay to Mussolini’s propaganda tourn...

Forget the eagles and the Boston Tea Party. This 4th of July we're chasing the stories hiding next to the story. Amanda and JoLynne hand out America's most cursed historical awards, dig into the presidents who behaved badly, and cover the ones who literally would not stay in the ground. On the docket: Andrew Jackson killing a man after taking a bullet to the chest, William Henry Harrison d...

What happens when one family tree becomes less of a tree… and more of a wreath? This week on Barely Historical, we’re tackling one of the internet’s most infamous families: the Whittakers of West Virginia. But instead of treating them like a punchline, we wanted to understand how they got there. We dig into over a century of Appalachian history, coal country, geographic isolation, poverty, and the...

Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, the day Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that enslaved people there were free more than two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. In this episode of Barely Historical, we explore the history of Juneteenth, why freedom was delayed in Texas, how General Order No. 3 finally reached a quarter million enslaved people, and why Junete...

Hot take to start the show: every man who has ever lost his entire mind over a woman has blamed her for it. Two thousand years ago that energy started a civil war, ended with Julius Caesar getting stabbed 23 times on the Senate floor, and somehow left us remembering the smartest woman in the Mediterranean for her eyeliner and a snake. This week Amanda and JoLynne take on Cleopatra VII, the last Ph...

This week, we’re diving into the chaotic world of the De Clare sisters, one of medieval England’s most powerful families. What starts as inheritance drama quickly turns into royal favoritism, political manipulation, tangled family trees, suspiciously close relationships, and enough rumors to make an entire kingdom uncomfortable. We talk about King Edward II, Hugh Despenser, Piers Gaveston, medieva...

Patreon Bonus Episode. The year is 1978, and apparently the hottest relationship trend is mutual destruction. JoLynne and Amanda ruin history with the chaotic, toxic, and wildly overrated romance of SID VICIOUS and NANCY SPUNGEN. From the rise of punk in a collapsing England to the disaster that was the Sex Pistols’ U.S. tour, we follow two people who should have absolutely never been left unsuper...

What were Gilded Age mansions really hiding? In this episode of Barely Historical, we dive into the outrageous world of America’s most extravagant homes—built during the late 1800s by names like the Vanderbilts, Astors, and Morgans. These weren’t just houses… they were statements. Massive, detailed, and honestly a little unhinged. But once you get past the marble staircases, gold leaf everything,...

The year is 1919. Boston is minding its business when a 50-foot tank full of molasses says, “absolutely not.” JoLynne and Amanda ruin history with a literal syrup tsunami, corporate negligence, and the moment breakfast turned into a crime scene. This is the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, and yes… it is exactly as insane as it sounds. In this episode, we cover a 30–40 foot wave of molasses moving at...

Every spring, humans suddenly feel the urge to reset their lives. We clean our houses, change our routines, and convince ourselves we’re becoming better people overnight. But this isn’t random. It’s ancient. In this episode of Barely Historical , we dive into the real history behind Ostara, Easter, and spring traditions . From pagan fertility rituals and seasonal survival instincts to eggs, rabbit...

Imagine being so good at math that the federal government trusts you to calculate whether astronauts survive reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Orbital mechanics. Launch windows. Trajectory equations. Reentry angles. The kind of math where one wrong decimal can kill someone. Now imagine being trusted with that level of responsibility while still being told you cannot use the same bathroom as your co...

This Valentine’s Day, Barely Historical is skipping the roses and going straight to the gunfire. In this episode, Jo and Amanda dive into one of the most infamous crimes in American history: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, when Chicago’s Prohibition-era gang wars turned a holiday into a headline soaked in blood. While the rest of the world was exchanging chocolates, Al Capone’s criminal...

Welcome to the full unhinged version of Mother’s Little Helpers , where mid-century America dressed women in pastels and then medicated them into silence. JoLynne and Amanda ruin the real history behind the “little yellow pills” of the 1950s and 60s. Valium. Librium. Milltown. Doctors prescribing tranquilizers like they were mints. Dear Abby giving advice that aged like milk. Don Draper level diss...

The year is 1692. Massachusetts is cold, paranoid, and running on bad carbs. Two girls start convulsing, the town loses its collective mind, and suddenly everyone’s a witch — or about to be. This is the chaotic half you’re allowed to hear. We cover the gossip, the bad science, and the first sparks of hysteria that made Salem the messiest small town in history. In this episode: • The girls, the fit...

In 1920, police in Dresden, Germany responded to what appeared to be a murder scene: a headless, blood-soaked body in an artist's garden. The "victim"? A life-size doll. The perpetrator? Famous Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. The motive? A bad breakup three years earlier. This week, we're diving into one of the most unhinged relationships in art history: the three-year tox...

Henry VIII didn’t just have “wife drama” he turned his midlife crisis into national policy. In this episode of Barely Historical , Jo and Amanda break down how one insecure man with too much power went from “kinda charming” to full-blown menace, and why the real story is way messier than the divorce beheaded survived trivia. We get into the early 1500s chaos, Henry’s obsession with a male heir, th...

What if Stranger Things isn’t just a nostalgic monster show, but a remix of real government experiments, moral panic, and 1980s paranoia? In this episode of Barely Historical, Amanda and JoLynne ruin the real history behind Stranger Things , from MKUltra and the Montauk Project to Dungeons & Dragons fear campaigns, heavy metal hysteria, and the very real Satanic Panic that destroyed lives in t...

New Year’s Eve has never been chill. In this episode of Barely Historical, hosts JoLynne and Amanda explore the strange, dark, and often unhinged history of New Year’s Eve superstitions from around the world. Long before glitter, champagne, and countdown clocks, people genuinely believed that what you ate, cleaned, wore, said, or touched on New Year’s Eve could determine your luck, wealth, health,...