History Buffoons Podcast

The Preakness is only 1 3/16 miles, but its history takes way more twists than that. We’re coming off watching the Kentucky Derby, mixing up the signature Black Eyed Susan cocktail, and then digging into how the Preakness Stakes becomes a pillar of American thoroughbred racing and the most stressful checkpoint in the Triple Crown. We walk through the origins of horse racing, then zoom in on the Pr...

A man in late 1700s France can eat nonstop and still feel starving. Not “big appetite” starving, but a relentless, aggressive hunger that drives him from normal meals to rotten meat, garbage, and eventually things nobody wants to imagine swallowing. We’re Kate and Bradley, and we take you into the documented case of Tarrare, one of history’s most unsettling medical mysteries, pieced together from...

Mary Todd Lincoln’s name still gets tossed around as shorthand for “unstable,” but that label collapses the real story into a punchline. We dig into what her life actually looks like when you line up the facts: a politically engaged woman raised in comfort and expectations, a complicated marriage to a self-made lawyer with a very different emotional style, and a public role that turns every choice...

One tiny technical glitch turned pop perfection into one of the biggest music scandals ever. We’re Bradley and Kate, and we’re digging into Millie Vanilli, the late-1980s hit machine that gave the world “Girl You Know It’s True” and “Blame It On The Rain,” then collapsed when everyone realized the voices on the records weren’t the two guys on stage. We zoom out to the MTV era where image, choreogr...

A pitcher so dominant he rewrote the strikeout leaderboard, and so unpredictable he could be lured off the mound by a puppy in the stands. We’re Bradley and Kate, and we’re telling the story of George “Rube” Waddell, a Deadball Era icon whose MLB greatness and total chaos somehow coexist in the same box score. We dig into Rube’s rise from a Pennsylvania farm kid with a cannon arm to one of basebal...

A kid climbs onto a train believing he’s headed toward something better, clutching a single pink envelope addressed to the father who just gave him away. By morning, it’s gone. That small theft becomes a gut-punch symbol for the entire Orphan Train Movement, a massive child relocation effort that moved about 200,000 children from 1854 to 1929 from cities like New York to rural communities across A...

Ninety-six people died at Hillsborough in 1989, but the shock isn’t only the disaster itself. The part that keeps twisting the knife is what came next: an official story that didn’t match what families and survivors lived through, years of “accidental death” language that felt like a shrug, and institutions that seemed more focused on protecting themselves than facing the facts. We walk through th...

A decent, hard-working reformer walks into the 1850s, discovers spiritualism, and decides electricity can save the world. That’s not a metaphor. We’re telling the true story of John Murray Spear, a Universalist minister and outspoken abolitionist who believed people and systems could be redeemed, then took that same hope and aimed it at building a literal mechanical messiah. We talk through why sp...

Ninety-six people die at a football match, and the first story many hear is that the fans caused it. That tension between what happened and what powerful people claimed happened is why we finally sat down to tell Part 1 of the Hillsborough disaster with the care it deserves. We start with the Hicks family, lifelong Liverpool FC supporters traveling to Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield for the 1989...

Kate’s running on a cold, Bradley’s trying to fill in, and somehow that turns into one of our most chaotic History Buffoons hangouts yet. It starts with a Wisconsin detour to Rebellion Brewing Company in Cedarburg, where we meet great people, taste a lineup of beers, and fall hard for a vanilla porter that has no business being that smooth. Then we flip the switch into a rapid-fire “would you rath...

High heels with a permit. Bigfoot with legal protection. A city rule that basically turns snowballs into “missiles.” We grab a stack of real municipal codes and ordinances that are still on the books and ask the only reasonable question: how is this still a law? We’re Bradley and Kate, and we keep it fast, weird, and surprisingly informative. We break down what these strange laws actually say, whe...

A single tombstone inscription from Sicily gives us a gladiator story that feels too weird to be real: Flamma, a Syrian-born fighter in Ancient Rome, steps into the arena 34 times, wins 21, fights to nine draws, loses four, and then gets offered freedom four separate times. And he turns it down. Every. Single. Time. We walk through what that record actually means in Roman gladiator combat, includi...

A superpower rolls in with tanks and a million soldiers, convinced the job will be quick. Then the snow hits, the forests close in, and Finland refuses to play by the rules. We’re Bradley and Kate, and we’re telling the underdog story of the Winter War, when the Soviet Union invades Finland in late 1939 and discovers that “overwhelming force” doesn’t mean much on narrow roads, in deep drifts, at b...

A tiny pill promised calm nights and easier mornings, then left a generation of families asking how a “safe” sedative could cause so much harm. We unravel the thalidomide story from its meteoric rise as a gentle sleep aid to the global wave of birth defects that followed, tracing how a single oversight in early pregnancy testing reshaped medicine, regulation, and public trust. We walk through the...

A routine biopsy. An unstoppable cell line. A legacy that reshaped medicine while raising questions we still struggle to answer. We tell the story of Henrietta Lacks—her life in Virginia and Maryland, her fight against an aggressive cervical cancer, and the fateful moment when doctors at Johns Hopkins sent a tiny sample to George Gey’s lab. Those cells refused to die. Labeled HeLa, they divided at...

A wall of dust a mile high. Coffee that tasted like soil. Kids coughing through the night while parents sealed windows with wet sheets. We dive into the Dirty Thirties to trace how a wheat boom, a drought, and one very bad idea—“rain follows the plow”—turned the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl, and how people fought their way back. We start with the sales pitch that lured settlers west: the Homest...

A servant is hanged before a crowd, declared dead, and sent to the university as a cadaver. Then a faint gasp stops the scalpels. We follow Anne Greene’s astonishing survival in 1650 Oxford—where public justice, scarce cadavers, and emerging medical practice collided—and explore how a single breath unraveled the era’s certainty about death, guilt, and divine will. We walk through the culture of th...

A servant who wasn’t supposed to notice anything noticed everything. We dive into the astonishing, under-told story of Mary Bowser—a Black woman born enslaved in Richmond—who used education, nerve, and perfect cover to spy inside Jefferson Davis’s household and feed critical intelligence to the Union. We set the stage in Civil War–era Richmond, a city powered by enslaved labor and blinded by its o...

A sword in one hand and an aria on her lips—Julie D’Aubigny refused to live small. We follow her wild arc from a court-trained tomboy who mastered the rapier to a fugitive busking in taverns, then to a contralto who conquered the Paris Opera under the gaze of Louis XIV. Along the way she loved boldly, dressed as she pleased, and treated the law like a suggestion. When a forbidden romance led to a...

The sky shouldn’t do this. Just after midnight, a quiet Washington town found itself coated in clear, jelly-like blobs that smeared across windshields, clung to grass, and sent neighbors searching for answers as nausea, headaches, and vertigo began to ripple through the community. We retrace Oakville’s strangest weather report and follow the breadcrumbs from first responders and ER visits to shaky...

A royal feast inside Edinburgh Castle promised safety, friendship, and a reset between a child king and the heirs of Scotland’s most powerful clan. Instead, the Black Dinner of 1440 delivered a brutal omen, a midnight judgment, and two young Douglases beheaded under the crown’s roof—an unforgivable breach of hospitality that rippled across the realm. We follow the power lines behind the spectacle:...

A wooden ship locked in Antarctic ice for 13 months. A captain who wouldn’t turn back. A doctor who broke the rules and saved the crew with the world’s least appetizing “medicine.” We tell the raw, human story of the Belgica—part survival epic, part scientific milestone, and a cautionary tale about leadership at the edge of the map. We start with the chaotic launch and a crew stitched together fro...

A midnight breakup over rural North Carolina. Two hydrogen bombs sheared from a disintegrating B-52. And one small switch that kept the East Coast from waking to a mushroom cloud. We dive into the Goldsboro incident of 1961, where a routine Cold War alert flight turned into one of the closest brushes with accidental nuclear detonation in U.S. history. We walk through the tense chain of events: the...

A nervous hello, a lime beer, and then a sand-choked staircase that changed history. We pull back the curtain on Howard Carter’s last-chance bet with Lord Carnarvon and the painstaking, high-stakes work that turned a flicker of candlelight into “wonderful things.” From Carter’s early days as a teen draftsman in the Valley of the Kings to the disciplined process of photographing, stabilizing, and c...

A forgotten epidemic turned people into “living statues,” and one composite patient—Leonard—shows what it means to be awake, alive, and trapped. We trace encephalitis lethargica from its eerie rise to its unexplained disappearance, then step into the late 1960s, when Dr. Oliver Sacks reached for a radical idea: use L‑Dopa, the new Parkinson’s drug, to unlock minds stilled for decades. Leonard open...