History Mystery

Episode 6 | History's Mysteries — Unexplained Events In this Mystery episode we focus on the Dancing Plague of 1518 — the event where a woman in Strasbourg began dancing in the street and couldn't stop, approximately 400 people joined her within a month, some danced for days without rest, several died, and the city hired musicians to help, which made it worse. This episode covers the civic...

Episode 5 | History's Mysteries — Unexplained Structures & Places In this Mystery episode we focus on the Antikythera Mechanism — a corroded lump of bronze recovered from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901, which sat in museum storage for two years before anyone looked carefully enough to find dozens of precisely cut bronze gears inside, making it a functioning astronomical computer 1,400 years...

Episode 4 | History's Mysteries — Unsolved Events In this Mystery episode we focus on the Lost Colony of Roanoke — 115 English settlers established a colony on the coast of North Carolina in 1587, and when the governor returned three years later, every single one of them was gone. The buildings had been deliberately dismantled. One word was carved on a post: CROATOAN. This episode covers Engla...

Episode 3 | Human History — Civilizations & Empires In this History episode we focus on the Persian Empire — the largest empire the world had yet seen, governing perhaps 44 percent of the world's population at its peak and built on a governing philosophy unlike anything that had come before it: let the conquered peoples keep their gods, their customs, and their local institutions. This epi...

Episode 2 | Human History — Groups & Movements In this History episode we focus on the Protestant Reformation — the 1517 act by a theology professor that the printing press turned into a continental revolution, splitting Christianity in two and producing religious wars that killed millions. This episode covers Luther's 95 Theses and his refusal to recant at the Diet of Worms, Calvin's...

Episode 1 | Human History — Individuals In this History episode we focus on Catherine the Great — a minor German princess who arrived in Russia at 14 with no claim to the throne and left as one of the most powerful rulers in the history of the modern world. This episode covers the coup that removed her husband, her 34-year reign expanding Russia by more than 200,000 square miles, the legal reforms...

Episode 20 | Season 3 Capstone — History Episodes In this History episode we close out Season 3 by finding the patterns that connect sixty episodes — from Rockefeller and Genghis Khan and Rome to Stalin and Churchill and the French Revolution and Ancient Egypt. This episode lays out the four patterns that run through every rise and every fall, every civilization and every individual, and asks what...

Bonus Episode | Historical Events In this History episode we focus on the full story of how humanity got back to the Moon — from the V-2 rocket built with slave labor in Nazi Germany, through Operation Paperclip, the Cold War space race, six Apollo landings, a 54-year gap, and finally the April 2026 Artemis II mission that sent four astronauts around the Moon for the first time since 1972. This ep...

Episode 19 | Season 3 Capstone — Mystery Episodes In this Mystery episode we step back from the individual cases and draw the thread that connects the Season 3 mysteries — the JFK assassination, the Illuminati, Göbekli Tepe, Roswell, the Carrington Event, and Rendlesham Forest. This episode explores the distinction between genuine unresolved questions where the evidence is real and the inquiry is...

Episode 18 | History's Mysteries — Unexplained Events In this Mystery episode we focus on the Rendlesham Forest incident — three nights in December 1980 where US Air Force personnel at a NATO nuclear weapons base in England reported encounters with unexplained lights and objects, with one senior officer recording the investigation on tape in real time and filing an official memo to the British...

Episode 17 | History's Mysteries — Unexplained Structures & Places In this Mystery episode we focus on Teotihuacan — the city that housed up to two hundred thousand people at its peak around 400 AD, one of the largest cities on earth, whose builders left no deciphered writing, no confirmed royal portraits, and no name for themselves. This episode covers what the archaeology tells us about...

Episode 16 | History's Mysteries — Unexplained Events In this Mystery episode we focus on the Roswell Incident — the July 1947 event where the US Army Air Force announced they had recovered a flying disc, retracted it within hours, and then in 1994 admitted the weather balloon story was also false. This episode covers what Mac Brazel found on the ranch, what Project Mogul actually was and why...

Episode 15 | Human History — Civilizations & Empires In this History episode we focus on Ancient Mesopotamia — the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, five thousand years ago, where writing, law, cities, the wheel, the sixty-minute hour, and the first literature all came from. This episode covers the Sumerian city-states and the invention of cuneiform writing, Sargon of Akkad's firs...

Episode 14 | History's Mysteries — Secret Societies & Conspiracies In this Mystery episode we focus on the Freemasons — the organization condemned by the Pope since 1738, blamed for the French Revolution in 1797, and currently accused of controlling the world through celebrities and dollar bill symbols, whose actual documented activities consist mainly of charity fundraising and fraternal...

Episode 13 | Human History — Individuals In this History episode we focus on Winston Churchill — the man who kept Britain in the war in 1940 when almost any rational calculation suggested accommodation with Hitler was the only viable option, and the man whose War Cabinet's decisions made the 1943 Bengal famine significantly worse, killing between two and four million people. This episode cover...

Episode 12 | History's Mysteries — Unexplained Events In this Mystery episode we focus on the Carrington Event — the 1859 solar storm so powerful that telegraph offices caught fire and the Northern Lights were visible in Cuba, and the 2012 solar ejection of comparable size that missed the earth by nine days. This episode covers the astronomy and physics of coronal mass ejections, the specific...

Episode 11 | History's Mysteries — Unexplained Structures & Places In this Mystery episode we focus on Machu Picchu — built by the Inca around 1450, occupied for roughly a century, and then abandoned so completely that the Spanish conquest destroyed the empire without ever knowing this city existed. This episode covers the Inca emperor Pachacuti and the extraordinary engineering he command...

Episode 10 | History's Mysteries — Secret Societies & Conspiracies In this Mystery episode we focus on the Illuminati — a Bavarian secret society founded in 1776 with five members, shut down by the government ten years later, and supposedly still controlling the world today. This episode tells both stories: the real Illuminati — Adam Weishaupt's Enlightenment reading club that lasted a...

Episode 9 | Human History — Civilizations & Empires In this History episode we focus on the Soviet Union — the largest country on earth, the great communist experiment, and a collapse so fast it shocked everyone including the people who caused it. This episode covers the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war, Stalin's industrialization and purges, the Great Patriotic War and its twenty-seven...

Episode 8 | Human History — Civilizations & Empires In this History episode we focus on the French Revolution — the most important political event of the modern era, and one of history's greatest cautionary tales about what happens when a movement for freedom turns on itself. This episode covers the financial crisis and bread riots that sparked it, the Tennis Court Oath, the storming of th...

Episode 7 | Human History — Individuals In this History episode we focus on Vlad the Impaler — the 15th-century Prince of Wallachia who left a forest of twenty thousand impaled Ottoman bodies outside his capital city, stopped the most powerful sultan in the world cold, and four centuries later became the inspiration for the most famous monster in Western literature. This episode covers his childho...

Episode 6 | Human History — Civilizations & Empires In this History episode we focus on the Black Death — the pandemic that killed between thirty and sixty percent of Europe's entire population in five years and didn't just kill people. It ended a civilization and started another one. This episode covers the bacterium Yersinia pestis and its path from Central Asia to the ports of Sicil...

Episode 5 | History's Mysteries — Unexplained Structures & Places In this Mystery episode we focus on Göbekli Tepe — a temple complex 11,600 years old, six thousand years older than Stonehenge, seven thousand years before the first known city, built by hunter-gatherers who according to the standard model of civilization weren't supposed to be capable of building anything like it. This episode...

Episode 4 | History's Mysteries — Unsolved Events In this Mystery episode we focus on the JFK assassination — the most investigated political killing in American history, and the one where the official record still does not fully close the case. This episode covers what happened in Dealey Plaza, what the Warren Commission found and what it missed, what subsequent investigations discovered, and...

Episode 3 | Human History — Civilizations & Empires In this History episode we focus on Ancient Egypt — the longest-running civilization in history, from the first pharaoh to Cleopatra, from the construction of the Great Pyramid to the death of the last queen. This episode covers thirty-one dynasties and more than one hundred and seventy pharaohs: the unification under Narmer, the Old Kingdom...