Gladio Free Europe

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support us on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- England has a new king, and the realm has come down with a terrible case of coronation fever. You may have seen the ridiculous merchandise, the extravagant robes, or the swords and other odd utensils used in the ceremony, but you asking yourself — what does this all mean? Well, Liam and Russian Sam sat through the coronation of Charles III so you don't have...

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support us on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- After a couple weeks of adventuring across Japan and the Caucasus, the hosts of Gladio Free Europe are back in the States. Liam shares his experiences seeing the traces of the violent Sengoku period all across Japan's main island Honshu, and explains how this trip finally brought him to his "white guy into Buddhism" phase. Thousands of miles away, R...

In 2011, the US National Archives released 12,000 pages of documents relating to the activities of the Public Health Service in 1940s Guatemala. This report conclusively proved that a team of doctors led by John Charles Cutler, previously involved in the notorious Tuskegee Experiment, knowingly infected patients in Guatemala with syphilis and other venereal diseases. Our friend Krebbs joins Russia...

⁠⁠⁠⁠Support us on Patreon⁠⁠⁠ --- This week, we talk about centaurs, demons, and self-filling pots of food. That's right, we're talking about saints and their hagiographies! This unusual genre stands at the crossroads between the Late Antique and Medieval worlds, and despite their often strange contents, they have a lot to tell us about the world in which they were written. Finally, we look...

⁠⁠⁠Support us on Patreon⁠⁠ --- With Argentina, 1985 having been in the running for Best Foreign Language Film, we are joined by our good friend Kevin as we delve into the history of the Argentinian Junta and its genocidal campaign of disappearances, extrajudicial murder, torture, and the kidnapping of children. The latter crime is the subject of The Official Story , another Argentinian movie which...

Gladio Free Europe received a frosty transmission this week from the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Writer, prophet, and friend of the pod Jon called in to talk about life in Alaska. We run through the past 300 years of the 49th state, beginning with initial bloody encounters between indigenous Yupik and Inuit peoples and the Russian Empire and the ensuing colonial contest with Britain, the United...

Support us on Patreon ---  More and more people are talking about bog bodies! Due to great feedback on our most recent episode we're following up our bog talk with an overview of recent developments in wetland archaeology and an overview of some of the most interesting bog sites in Europe. We dive into our favorite finds that we didn't have time to cover in our last episode, like the morbid b...

Support us on Patreon --- We get knee-deep in the peat this week to examine the bog body phenomenon. Due to their unusually anaerobic nature, bogs across the world have a remarkable ability to preserve any animal matter that falls into them. The cold and wet climate of Northern Europe has proven especially fruitful for the preservation of human corpses, many of which date back to the iron age and...

We are now on Patreon ! We are not setting up a paywall, but if you would like to support Gladio Free Europe, we'll be thankful for your contribution. --- The Golden Age of Hollywood was a rough time to be an actor. Overdoses, suicides, and secret abortions were routine, but always escaped the papers thanks to the hard work of the studio fixers. In the 1930s to the 1950s, Hollywood studio heads hi...

Support us on Patreon --- In 1768, hundreds of Greek peasants were brought to Florida by an ambitious British businessman in hopes of creating a classical paradise in America. Within just three months, New Smyrna would be the site of a full-on worker's revolution and this utopian dream would go in flames.  Liam and Russian Sam go back to Florida this week to chart the early history of the Sun...

Support us on Patreon --- This week, we are joined by archaeologist Anton Larsson to discuss the other English-language movie about the Thirty Years War: Queen Christina , a historical romance starring the famous Greta Garbo. We discuss the multifaceted legacy of Sweden's famous philosopher-queen who oversaw the end of the long war waged by her father Gustavus Adolphus before ultimately converting...

Support us on Patreon --- The one and only Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House stopped by in our little valley to bring us the latest updates on the Thirty Years' War. We ventured into an overview of the history of the war, when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse roamed the Earth, the 1971 James Clavell flick The Last Valley starring Omar Sharif and Michael Caine, and Matt's upcoming series Hell o...

Support us on Patreon --- Bring out your cudgels, the midwestern barbarians are afoot! This week we delve into the massively underrated 1942 Christmas film The Man Who Came to Dinner starring Bette Davis and Monty Woolley, the story of the cranky proto-podcaster Sheridan Whiteside who seemingly breaks his hip on a speaking tour and is forced to recuperate in a podunk Ohio town. To contemporaries,...

Support us on Patreon --- Was your grandmother a Neanderthal? Did the English language originate in ancient Iran? What's a haplogroup anyway? These questions and more will be answered in our Q&A with returning guest Natasha , a molecular biologist with great insight into what recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA can and can't teach us about our past. This episode goes over the broad strokes of...

Support us on Patreon --- Thousands of years ago, the Egyptian princess Scota gave birth to a child who invented the Gaelic language and led his family on a journey through the desert for 440 years. Their descendants would move to Greece and then Spain, before becoming the first humans to finally conquer Ireland from a race of elves called the Tuatha Dé Danann. Meanwhile in Britain, 33 wicked Gree...

Support us on Patreon --- Every kid in America grows up hearing about "The First Thanksgiving" featuring Squanto, the Mayflower, and the surprising nutritional value of dead-fish fertilizer. But this patriotic narrative offers only a tiny glimpse at the astonishing and agonizing history of contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples of New England, who called themselves the Ninnimissinuok. Ou...

Support us on Patreon --- At the turn of the century, thousands of Americans believed they had met the messiah: Cyrus Teed, an unassuming doctor from upstate New York.    In this episode, Liam and Russian Sam explore the dead religion of Koreshanity, a short-lived but influential cult that sought to establish a celibate utopia before the end of days. Fascinating, occasionally frightening...

Support us on Patreon --- In the heart of Old Prague, in the attic of the Altneuschul Synagogue, lies the inanimate body of a golem, or so the legend goes! We watched the 1920 classic of German cinema The Golem: How He Came Into The World to explore the strange history of this iconic creature, its ancient connection to the mythology of the Ancient Near East, and later Judaism. How did an entity so...

From Godzilla to Game of Thrones, dragons dominate today's pop culture landscape and play a monstrous role in the modern imagination. But how did this obsession with fire-breathing reptiles begin? For this week's episode, Liam and Russian Sam follow the cultural history of dragons across Europe and Asia. We explore why so many cultures imagined their own colossal serpents, diving into paleontology...

The Magnet is almost here! The GFE team will be republishing Ramón Sender's legendary book Imán in English for the first time in almost 90 years, and all of you get a front row seat! In this special sneak preview, we present a brief analysis of the Rif War as a catalyst for Spanish fascism and the proto-existentialist bent of the novel, followed by excerpts from the book describing the conditions...

We're back in Morocco! We pick up with the reign of Mawlay Muhammad III, often called the "architect of modern Morocco." In addition to building up several new cities, Muhammad reformed the state through a sweeping decentralization of power. Although effective at dealing with the challenges of his own time, Muhammad's reforms would have negative ramifications down the line. We catch up with his ro...

We return to North Africa this week to explore some of the most infamous and intriguing characters of early modern history: the Corsairs of the Barbary Coast. What compelled Dutch sailors and English knights to "turn Turk" and sail under the Ottoman flag? What does Miguel de Cervantes have to do with a famous mosque in Istanbul? And were pirate attacks on Ireland an inside job? We going into all t...

CIA agent Everette Howard Hunt, Jr is notorious for involvement in the 1954 Guatemalan coup, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the break-in at the Watergate hotel. But not many people know about most heinous crime: his decades-long side hustle as a hack writer. In this episode, we try to stomach his paranoid 1972 thriller "The Coven," in which a straight-laced attorney uncovers that Black Panthers are...

We’re finally launching our exploration of Moroccan history, the most important country that Americans have hardly heard of. This episode will be a crash course on Moroccan history up until the early modern period. We follow rise of the 'Alawi dynasty that still holds power today, exploring how they came to power, kicked out the conquistadors, and established a massive army of slave-soldiers who h...

We continue our journey into medieval Sicily by following the rag-tag band of Normans who carved out a tiny foothold on the Italian peninsula. In less than 50 years, these French-speaking adventurers and grandchildren of the Vikings would unite Southern Italy and established themselves as the overlords on the advanced and prosperous island of Sicily. We’ll explore how these adventurers like Robert...