History Fix

This week I'll explore the social history of the cannabis plant including its use since ancient times as a fiber, medicine, and for its psychoactive properties both ritualistically and recreationally. I'll explore how cannabis first made its way to the Americas and how it became a main crop of colonial planters that they were actually required by law to grow. I'll explore it's...

Thomas Alva Edison has always been portrayed as the greatest, most prolific by far American inventor. The man obtained over a thousand patents in his lifetime and is credited with inventing or improving upon devices that changed our world, our lives forever: the lightbulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, telegraphs, telephones, x-rays, and batteries. The list goes on. His contemporaries...

Check out zipOns from befree Adaptive Clothing here! This week we'll take a look at the 6 Hanoverian monarchs: George I, George II, George III, George IV, William IV, and Victoria. We'll examine how George I, a German, came to be king of Great Britain and Ireland despite being only 57th in line for the throne and how German monarchs continued to rule the country for the next 187 years an...

Check out zipOns from befree Adaptive Clothing here! In the 1950s a mysterious man appeared at Tokyo’s Haneda airport. He looked normal enough, just a regular looking mid-thirties white guy in a suit there on a business trip. But when he presented his passport to airport officials, they were puzzled. The passport was unlike any they had ever seen before. It listed the man as being from a nation ca...

This week, we'll get lost in the mind boggling mystery that is the Dyatlov Pass case, when 9 experienced hikers died under suspicious and unexplainable circumstances while traversing Russia's Ural Mountains in 1959. When a group of ski/hikers led by 23 year old student Igor Dyatlov failed to return after a 3 week journey, search parties were sent. They quickly found the group's aban...

I'm back this week with yet another inspiring underdog story... but make it Christmas! This week, I'll trace the origins of one of the most beloved Christmas characters, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, all the way back to his roots on the desk of a department story copywriter in 1939 Chicago. Robert L. May was down on his luck when his boss at Montgomery Ward asked him to write a childre...

Just in time for the 121st anniversary on Tuesday, I bring to you the story of two brothers from Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, who changed the world forever with their groundbreaking first flight on December 17th, 1903. Though it lasted just 12 seconds, it marks the first powered, sustained, and controlled airplane flight, something humans had tried and failed to do for centuries. Join special...

I'll pick up where I left off last week, with the storming of the Bastille and the fall of the "ancien regime." We'll explore how, over the next few years, this new France will become more of a hellscape than a paradise. As a radical group, the Jacobins, seizes control, distopia ensues with the September Massacres of 1792, the "Reign of Terror" spanning 1793 to 1794,...

This week I discuss the events leading up to the outbreak of the French Revolution during the summer of 1789. You'll learn how Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette came to find themselves on the French throne at a time when the system, that had worked for centuries, was beginning to fail. Shifting social classes, failing harvests, population booms, and economic busts will begin to fuel a runaway se...

On November 11, 1620, forty-one men aboard the ship the Mayflower signed a document of great importance. With their signatures they vowed to create fair and just laws and to work together for the good of the Plymouth colony. This document, the Mayflower Compact, was the first to outline self-governance in the so called “New World” and it would go on to serve as a foundation for both the Declaratio...

It’s the greatest adventure story ever told, Lewis and Clark’s daring pursuit to cross thousands of miles of rugged terrain, to explore the rest of the continent, to finally reach the Pacific Ocean, gaze out over its vast expanse, with their faithful guide by their side of course, Sacagawea. You know Sacagawea, she’s the most famous American woman of all time. I’m not kidding. She’s the only one w...

Starting in the 1800s, the US government forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of indigenous children from their homes and sent them to boarding schools hundreds of miles away where they ruthlessly tried to destroy all traces of their culture, to assimilate them into white society. Upon arrival, their hair was cut off, their names were changed, and they were regularly beaten for speaking their na...

In the Black Hills region of South Dakota stands a massive American monument, the faces of four US presidents blasted into the side of a mountain. George Washington represents the birth of the nation. Thomas Jefferson represents its growth. Theodore Roosevelt development and Abraham Lincoln preservation. Mount Rushmore National Memorial hosts more than 2 million visitors each year who gaze upon th...

This week, I'll explore the peculiar true story that inspired William Peter Blatty to write the  book and screenplay for the 1973 hit film "The Exorcist."  This is the story of a boy around 14 years old who experienced something truly bizarre back in 1949. And unlike Regan in the exorcist, whose story is completely fabricated, this one is well documented, with lots of credible witne...

It’s January of 1692 and there’s something very wrong with 9 year old Betty Parris. Her father, the minister Samuel Parris, rushes to her bedside. Betty screams. Her body writhes under the blankets, twisting and contorting into grotesque shapes. She grunts, she moans, she snorts, and shrieks. She grabs a candle from the bedside table and hurls it across the room uttering a shrill scream as if defe...

This week, I'll examine several cases of historical hauntings. These are ghost stories where you actually get to find out the single most important question... who was that? We'll go all the way back to ancient Babylon, cruise through ancient Greece and Rome and then spend some time in London and, later, Washington DC. Several of the "ghosts" we'll hear about have even bee...

Mary Shelley was just 18 years old when the idea for Frankenstein struck her on a rainy night in Geneva, Switzerland. Cooped up on vacation with nonstop rain, famous poet Lord Byron had challenged the group of literary geniuses to come up with a ghost story. Mary struggled. She could think of nothing. Then one night, as she struggled to sleep, she was hit with what she referred to as a "wakin...

This is part 2 of last week's episode on Christopher Columbus. This week, you'll learn about Columbus' disastrous third voyage to the Americas when he finally pays the price for governing like a power hungry tyrant. And yet consequences, of course, will be few, and he'll return once again for his fourth and final voyage. We'll also delve into the shockwaves sent out by Col...

Few humans in history have sent out more shockwaves than Christopher Columbus. His four voyages to the Americas changed our whole existence, culturally, spiritually, ethnically, economically, politically, geographically, morally possibly more than any single person ever has. When Columbus' ships first dropped anchor off the islands of the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, as the anchor struck the...

Before Henry VIII, before Louis XVI, there was a dynasty in Italy so corrupt, so scandalous, gluttonous, hedonistic, that the others don’t even compare. But this was not a royal family. These were not kings, they were popes, cardinals, bishops. These were holy men, men of the church. Men whose unholy actions may very well have helped spark the dissatisfaction that led to the protestant reformation...

The bloody history of childbirth is riddled with death and despair. It's a burden that was carried almost entirely by women, behind closed doors, something men took no part in. And, because of that, we know very little about it today. What we do know is that it was an extremely dangerous affair. Mortality was so high, many women wrote a will as soon as they found out they were pregnant. The 1...

On March 25th, 1911, a fire erupted on the 8th floor of the Asch building in New York City. The 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of this building housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory which employed around 500 people, mostly young immigrant women, to sew women's blouses under sweatshop conditions. The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, believed the building to be fireproof and refused to take any...

Michael Rockefeller was the great grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world. He was also the son of Nelson Rockefeller, New York governor, Vice President of the United States, and a well known art collector. Michael had big shoes to fill. To do that, he followed in his father's art collecting footsteps, traveling to the Asmat region on the w...

Perched between the ocean and the sound in Nags Head, completely dominating the narrow sliver of land that makes up part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, is a monumental sand dune, a mountain of lush golden sand. This dune system, known as Jockey’s Ridge, is somewhere around 4,000 years old and can reach heights of over 100 feet. It’s majestic, it’s miraculous, the tallest living sand dune on the...

Polio has been around since ancient times but it was a very quiet disease for most of history, affecting few people and raising little alarm. It wasn’t until the 20th century that polio began to appear among the masses, terrifying epidemics, a mysterious disease that seemed to target children out of nowhere, paralyzing them, killing them. No one knew how it spread. No one knew how to treat it. No...