Hashtag History

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the 1968 Olympics, the Black Boycott, and the Black Power Salute seen around the world. On October 16, 1968, two African-American Olympic athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos (who had just won gold and bronze respectively in the 200-meter sprint) took their place on the winners podium and each raised a black-gloved fist into the air as the Unit...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the Berlin Wall. This was a wall that was first erected in August of 1961 to essentially separate East and West Germany from one another. Following the Second World War, Germany - and Berlin itself - was split up into four allied occupation zones. The western portions were governed by the United States, Great Britain, and later France, while the east...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon. When she did this in 1967, let’s just say that men were not ready for women to have this much equality. Because during the race, the race manager Jock Semple assaulted her by running up behind her and attempting to rip her bib number off of her shirt in order to disqualify her f...

This week on Hashtag History, Leah is taking over the episode to discuss an infamous and mysterious character from History, Lola Montez. Montez was an Irish dancer and actress who became famous in the mid-19th Century as a Spanish dancer, among many other pursuits, one of which landed her as the lover of an actual Bavarian king! Lola’s story comes with its fair share of controversies, especially w...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing historic torture techniques. We have all of course heard of some of these historic torture techniques before; think back to Medieval Europe and the stories we’ve heard of people being tied by their limbs and then stretched out to the point of dislocation. Or think of Rome and the horrendous torture technique of crucifixion; most widely known because...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the Little Rock Nine. Little Rock Nine is the name given to the nine students that were the first Black students to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, following the Brown v. Board of Education decision which ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. When these children went to Central High for their first day of...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the Enron Scandal, a major accounting fraud that took place in late-2001 when Enron Corporation - who, only the year prior, was considered to be one of the most successful companies in the world - announced that it was posting a $638 billion dollar loss in the third quarter…and then followed up that up shortly thereafter by filing for Chapter 11 bank...

Welcome back for Season Eleven! This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing War of the Worlds. And not necessarily the novel, The War of the Worlds, written by H.G. Wells, which is about aliens from Mars invading the Earth. No, more specifically, we are discussing an incident that occurred the day before Halloween in 1938 when actor Orson Welles (no relation to author H.G. Wells) read aloud an...

This week on Hashtag History, we are continuing to revisit our coverage of the Chappaquiddick incident. If you have been with us for some time now, you will recall that we covered Chappaquiddick in our first ever podcast episode in July of 2019. With us now reaching Episode 100, we wanted to bring it back to where it all began. If you have listened to our original coverage of this incident, don't...

This week on Hashtag History, we are revisiting our coverage of the Chappaquiddick incident. If you have been with us for some time now, you will recall that we covered Chappaquiddick in our first ever podcast episode in July of 2019. As we are nearing Episode 100, we wanted to bring it back to where it all began. If you have listened to our original coverage of this incident, don't go anywhere! T...

In this week's BONUS Hasty History episode, we will be discussing the Great Emu War of 1932 which was - quite literally - a war that Australia declared on the local emus…and LOST. This story is WILD and we cannot wait to share it with you! Hasty History BONUS episodes are no-nonsense, crash course, cram session History lessons. No cocktail segment, no ads, no bloopers. Just a quick download of som...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the Caning of Charles Sumner, also oftentimes referred to as the Brooks-Sumner Affair. On May 22, 1856, during a debate in the Senate chamber regarding slavery, Representative of South Carolina Preston Brooks (who was a huge supporter of slavery) picked up a cane and beat Senator from Massachusetts Charles Sumner nearly to death on the Senate floor....

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Paul Schäfer, a Nazi who -- following World War II -- had to flee Germany when he was charged with sexually abusing two boys at the orphanage that he ran there. He fled to Chile where he would establish a super creepy and torturous cult known as the Colonia Dignidad where he would physically and sexually abuse minors and torture political deviants…al...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the racist history of the Masters Tournament. The Masters was systemically white, upper-class men. Despite it beginning in 1934, the first Black golfer would not be allowed to compete in the tournament until 1975! The club would not admit its first Black member until 1990! Co-founder of the Tournament, Clifford Roberts, was allegedly quoted as saying...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing an incredible and very well-known woman in History, Nellie Bly. Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, Bly was an American investigative journalist most well-known for breaking the record when she traveled the world in just 72 days! AND also most well-known for that time she went undercover as a mental patient in order to expose the realities of New York’s ins...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing hidden presidential illnesses. Between the fact that most people had no idea during Franklin D. Roosevelt's lifetime that he was paralyzed from the waist down, John F. Kennedy's had chronic back pain and Addison's Disease which would lead to a heavy addiction to painkillers and anti-anxiety medications, OR that it wouldn’t be until after the death of...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the Chernobyl Disaster. This was an incident that occurred on April 26, 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in  Ukraine where a test went disastrously wrong and resulted in a radioactive explosion. Two people would die as a direct result of the explosion with nearly thirty more people dying over the course of the next few months due to exp...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Vincent Chin, a twenty-seven year old Chinese-American man that was beaten to death in Detroit, Michigan, on June 19, 1982. He was beaten by two white men that worked in the Detroit automobile industry. These men would beat Chin to death when they mistook him for Japanese and blamed him for their being out of work due to the recent influx in Japanese...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing a few stories of what we like to call slack-wearing suffragettes. This episode has a heavy focus, however, on the Van Buren Sisters who were two sisters who rode 5,500 miles in 60 days to cross the continental United States on their own motorcycle! In 1916, they became the second and third women to drive motorcycles across the entire continent! Follo...

As you all know, we are currently on a season break and working hard behind the scenes to bring you a very exciting Season Ten very soon! In the meantime, however, we thought it would be fun to give you some bonus content! We hope you enjoy! In this week's BONUS Hasty History episode, we will be discussing the 1917 Bath Riots. These were a series of riots that occurred in January of 1917 when seve...

As you all know, we are currently on a season break and working hard behind the scenes to bring you a very exciting Season Ten very soon! In the meantime, however, we thought it would be fun to give you some bonus content! We hope you enjoy! In January of 1908, a woman named Katie Mulcahey was arrested when she was caught smoking in public. Just one day prior, a new ordinance was passed that banne...

This week on Hashtag History, we are joined by Amber Hunt of the Crimes of the Centuries podcast as we discuss the Osage Nation Murders. The Osage Nation Murders were a series of murders that occurred over the course of decades in the early 1900s. Also know as the Reign of Terror, the Osage Nation Murders marks the murders of approximately sixty Osage Native Americans by those that wanted to take...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the forced sterilization of thousands of Latinas here in California throughout the 20th century. In 1909, California passed a eugenics law that allowed for the sterilization of people considered to be “unfit or feeble-minded” unquote. Of the 20,000 people forcibly sterilized in California between the years of 1909 and 1979, it was found that Latinas...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Henri Charriere - or, as he was nicknamed, Papillon - a condemned prisoner that was sent to one of the most infamous prisons in History in French Guiana known as Devil’s Island. After eight escape attempts, Charriere finally successfully escaped the notoriously impossible-to-escape prison, living the latter part of his life as a free man when he was...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Liebeck vs. McDonald’s Restaurants, more commonly known as the McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case. In 1992, a seventy-nine-year old woman named Stella Liebeck bought a cup of coffee from a McDonald’s drive thru in Albuquerque, New Mexico. While in her car, she spilled the coffee in her lap and suffered severe burns. She took this matter to court and would be...