Hashtag History

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Olga of Kiev, the first recorded female ruler of Russia who, in an effort to avenge her husband’s murder by the Drevilian, quite literally slaughtered the Drevlian people and burned their capital to the ground. Later in life, she would convert to Christianity and, some 600 years after her death, the Russian Orthodox Church would formally ordain her a...

CONTENT WARNING: This week's episode contains mentions of child abuse, animal mutilation, suicide, and more. This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the Satanic Panic, which spanned the 1980s and into the 1990s here in the United States. It was a phenomenon that alleged that mass child abuse across the United States all had ties back to satanic cults. This phenomenon originated with the 19...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the Ford Pinto’s Explosive History. The 1971 Ford Pinto was rushed into production for a myriad of reasons that we will be getting into in this episode. Because of this rushed turnaround time, Ford had to cut a lot of corners. And these corners included selling a car with a fuel tank that Ford KNEW carried a high risk of setting on fire during rear-e...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Patty Hearst who -- in 1974 at only nineteen-years-old -- was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California. A few days after her kidnapping, a tape was received by a Berkeley radio station from the Symbionese Liberation Army that stated that they were holding Hearst as a prisoner of war and demanded that the Hearst family give millions of dol...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Selena Quintanilla Perez, an American singer, businesswoman, and fashion designer that would be credited as one of the most influential Latin artists of all time at a time when the Tejano music industry was largely dominated by male artists. She would break through this glass ceiling and become by far one of the most well-known Mexican-American enter...

Welcome back for Season Nine! This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Andree de Jongh, a member of the Belgian Resistance during World War II. She organized and led the Comet Line (or Le Réseau Comète, as it was called by it’s French-speaking members) to assist Allied soldiers and airmen to escape from Nazi-occupied Belgium. Between August 1941 and December 1942, she escorted an estimated...

This week on Hashtag History, we are joined by Caitlin and Sarah of Luminol Podcast as we discuss the disappearance of Etan Patz and the legacy of the Missing Children Milk Carton Campaign. Etan Patz was a six-year-old boy who went missing in 1979 as he was walking to his school bus. It wouldn’t be until several decades later that his murderer would be apprehended and tried for his crimes. What ma...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the murder of Gianni Versace, a world-renowned fashion designer that would go on to quite literally revolutionize the fashion industry. He was shot and killed on the steps of his mansion in Miami Beach when he was only fifty years old by what is known as a spree killer, Andrew Cunanan.  In the spring and summer of 1997, Cunanan, who had never ha...

This week on Hashtag History, we are wrapping up our two-part series on Lance Armstrong, the only professional cyclist to win seven Tour de France titles...all before it was revealed more than a dozen years after his first win that he had been using performance-enhancing drugs in every single one of his Tour de France wins from 1999 to 2005. We are starting this week in 1999 and going all the way...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Lance Armstrong, the only professional cyclist to win seven Tour de France titles...all before it was revealed more than a dozen years after his first win that he had been using performance-enhancing drugs in every single one of his Tour de France wins from 1999 to 2005. This news was particularly devastating to those that had admired and supported A...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Rudy Kurniawan, a world famous wine connoisseur, collector, seller...and total fraudster. In 2012 when the Federal Bureau of Investigations raided Kurniawan’s Arcadia, California home, they found the place littered with empty wine bottles, detached labels, corking tools, wax for sealing bottles, and extensive wine tasting notes. It would appear that...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Rodney King, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who was captured on video camera on March 3, 1991 as he was being beaten viciously by four Los Angeles Police Department officers. The review would find that he had been struck over fifty times with a baton leaving him with fractures to the skull, a broken leg and teeth, bruises, lacerations to the face,...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Benedict Arnold, the OG traitor, who was a major general of the American Continental Army during the Revolutionary War...all before selling out and switching sides to join the British Army. And this wasn’t any old betrayal; Arnold had been given command of West Point under George Washington (who trusted him completely) and then, when his plans to sur...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing that infamous 1967 Bigfoot film. Five decades later and - despite all the analysis and scrutiny that the film has received - it still, to this day, has never officially been debunked. And it really was that film that ingrained Bigfoot in American folklore. Stay tuned as we talk about a brief History of Bigfoot, that infamous film, the hoaxes and cons...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Mary Mallon - more infamously known as Typhoid Mary (or, as she has also been called, “The Most Dangerous Woman in America”) - who was the first person in the United States to be identified as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. By the time it was discovered that she was a carrier of the disease, she had spread typhoid fever to over fifty people; thr...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the weird and wondrous World War II tactical deception that was Operation Mincemeat. This was a 1943 British deception operation in which the corpse of a deceased British homeless man (dressed as an officer of the Royal Marines and carrying fabricated correspondence about fictitious military plans to invade Sicily) was purposefully planted in Nazi-fr...

We are SO EXCITED to announce that, in honor of the Two Year Anniversary of the Hashtag History podcast, we will be hosting our first ever LIVE show via ZOOM! It will take place on Saturday, July 24th at 4:00 PM PST.  We will have a LIVE cocktail segment that all registered attendees can participate in, lots of raffles and prizes and giveaways, AND a handful of special guests that will join u...

This week on Hashtag History, we are so honored and so excited to have the amazing Alicia Gutierrez-Romine on the podcast! Alicia is an author, historian, and professor that recently published her book titled "From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969". In this episode, we get to ask Alicia all of the questions about the history of criminal abortions. This conversat...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Gouverneur Morris who - in addition to being the Forgotten Founding Father - was also maybe the weirdest, wildest, and (dare I say it?) freakiest Founding Father of them all. This guy liked to have sex in public (one of those public places being the Louvre), he had a peg leg which was maybe from a carriage accident but also maybe from when he jumped...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Lee Miller. Miller was a model and photographer, most well-known for being a war correspondent for Vogue during World War II, capturing over 60,000 images (images that many of the male photographers wouldn’t dare to take of the liberated concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. But most iconic of all was when, on April 30, 1945, while Adolf Hitl...

In a special, bonus episode, we had the honor of having Ian from Necronomipod on the podcast to discuss the St. Valentine's Day Massacre! On February 14, 1929, Chicago's North Side Gang (well known to be a rival of infamous Mob Boss, Al Capone) was gunned down in a garage in Chicago, Illinois. Although Capone has been linked to the incident and many believe him to be directly responsible for the m...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing Alan Turing. Turing was an English Mathematician responsible for the early development of algorithms, computer science, and artificial intelligence. He was also responsible for assisting in cracking coded messages during World War II which quite literally resulted in the Allies winning the war. Jack Copeland - professor and author - has said that, be...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing MK Ultra. MK Ultra was a project operated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency in which they performed illegal experiments on oftentimes unknowing human subjects by using drugs like LSD, electroshock, hypnosis, abuse, food and sleep deprivation, AND MORE to determine if these techniques would be useful in order to force confessions, brain...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the 1916 shark attacks. These were a series of attacks over the course of two weeks in the summer of 1916 in New Jersey which resulted in the deaths of four people and one other injured. This series of shark attacks is what really initiated American fear of sharks and the misconstrued belief that they are these evil “man-eaters”. And, although the wr...

This week on Hashtag History, we are discussing the Japanese Detention Camps, camps that were established here in the United States during World War II following the attack of Pearl Harbor. Under President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, it became policy for the U.S. Government to place HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Japanese in detention camps here on American soil. Of the more than 120,000...