HISTORY This Week

March 17, 1828. The celebrated clown, Joseph Grimaldi, rises from his sickbed. Once London’s most energetic performer, he’s gradually been crippled by decades of pratfalls and acrobatics. He can barely manage the short walk to Sadler’s Wells theater, where he’s about to star in a final show. Grimaldi dresses backstage as if he’s in a daze, burdened by a lifetime of personal sorrows. And yet, when...

March 10, 1949. Defendant Mildred Gillars arrives at a courthouse to hear her verdict. To trial-watchers, she’s known as Axis Sally—the American woman who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin during World War II. In taunting tones, she spent years pushing anti-Semitic and anti-Allies messages aimed at weakening the morale of American soldiers. But Gillars insists that she’s misunderstood, even in...

A new History Channel podcast, American Football is the untold tale of the rough-and-tumble origins of the National Football League. Produced and presented by Michael Strahan and narrated by actress and pro football enthusiast Kate Mara, this podcast reaches back into the past to explain the dirty, bloody, and tumultuous beginnings of America's most popular sport. In this first episode, the sport...

March 2, 1969. French pilot André Turcat takes to the skies above Toulouse-Blagnac airport. He’s flying an odd-looking plane: long and slender with triangular wings and a bent-down nose like a bird of prey. It’s called the Concorde – a jet designed to move supersonic flight from military to civilian use. If it works, paying passengers will be able to cross continents and oceans at fantastic speeds...

February 22, 1962. The city of Berlin is cut in half by a concrete and barbed wire wall. On the west side, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy is giving a rousing speech when suddenly, what look like balloons explode above the crowd, revealing Soviet-red flags. “The Communists will let the balloons through,” Kennedy says. “But they won’t let their people through!” Meanwhile in the east, the stree...

February 14, 1934. When Adelaide Hall steps onstage at The Apollo Theater, she’s greeted by an audience unlike those she’s experienced before. Hall is already famous—she’s been on Broadway and performed at Harlem’s Cotton Club. But those theaters are segregated. The Apollo has just recently opened its doors to Black audiences, and Hall’s performance there helps put the revamped theater on the map....

February 11, 2005. FBI agents bust down the door of a cinder block house near the University of Kentucky campus. Amid flash grenades and screaming teens, they arrest three students – plus a fourth student in a nearby dorm. The crime? Stealing almost $750,000 of rare books and manuscripts from the library at Transylvania University. Why did four freshmen decide to actually go through with their rea...

January 30, 1649 / 1661. London, 1649. King Charles I lays his head on a chopping block. The axe falls and, soon with it, the monarchy. What follows is Parliament’s grueling effort to set up a functioning republic – one of the first in history. It will be led by Oliver Cromwell, a brilliant military leader who becomes the country’s most powerful man. But on January 30, 1661 – exactly twelve years...

January 27, 1925. Musher “Wild Bill” Shannon and his team of sled dogs race off into the frigid Alaskan night. He’s carrying a package of life-saving serum, wrapped in fur to keep it from freezing. There’s no time to waste: nearly 700 miles away, in the snowed-in town of Nome, children are dying of diphtheria. Twenty mushers and hundreds of dogs are about to take part in an almost superhuman effor...

Here’s a special episode of Cautionary Tales, a podcast from our friends at Pushkin Industries. On Cautionary Tales, bestselling author Tim Harford shares stories of human error, natural disasters, and tragic catastrophes from history that contain important lessons for today. In today’s episode, we’ll learn about civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr and jewelry store owner Gerald Ratner. The tw...

January 11, 2022. Lt. Col. James Harvey arrives at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada for the first time in 73 years. He’s there to accept a plaque celebrating the last time he was there—for the Air Force’s first ever weapons competition. Back then, Harvey and the other Tuskegee Airmen on his team had squared off against the best military pilots around. They tackled high-skill tests of simulated aeri...

January 3, 1924. Archeologists crowd into an ancient Egyptian tomb to uncover what awaits them in the unopened burial chamber. The world is waiting to find out. That’s because two years before, the discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun revealed antiquities so dazzling that a media frenzy ensued – newspapers, newsreels, and Hollywood movies vied to show audiences these wonders of ancient...

December 26, 2022. For the first time, a behind-the-scenes look at a key part of the History This Week episode-making process. Today, we’re inviting our listeners to pull up a chair and join one of our pitch sessions. Usually, an editor consults with the team to choose which story we'll be telling in a given episode. But this time… you'll decide! So listen, vote, and maybe win some History This We...

Christmas Eve, 1913. For months, newspapers have been trumpeting an urgent message:  Do your Christmas shopping early.  It would be easy to assume this was the work of greedy department stores and slick ad companies. But it wasn’t – at least not at first. It started as the rallying cry of a labor reformer who was striving to improve the lives of retail workers. Ever since, Americans have been wres...

December 16, 1773. Samuel Adams sits in a crowded meeting of American colonists at Boston’s Old South Meeting House. He’s watching small groups of men slip quietly out the door. Once outside, the men don disguises and make their way toward three ships moored in the harbor – each weighted down with chests of valuable British East India tea. The men climb aboard, tear open the chests and dump the te...

December 8, 1914. Crowds pour into the New Amsterdam Theater to see the opening night of a new show, “Watch Your Step.” It’s the first full-length revue written by the popular young songwriter, Irving Berlin. His songs show off Berlin’s signature wit and simplicity, but also his musical sophistication. As his fellow composer, Jerome Kern, would later put it: "Berlin has no place in American music—...

November 30, 1954. At about 12:45 in the afternoon, a space rock comes plummeting through the roof of a house in Sylacauga, Alabama. It bounces off a standup radio, ricochets around the living room, and collides with the thigh of Mrs. Ann Hodges, who’s been napping on the couch. Newspapers declare: “experts agreed unanimously that Mrs. Hodges was the first person known to have been struck by a met...

November 22, 1718. Early morning, off the North Carolina coast. The pirate Blackbeard, peering over the rail of his ship, is startled to discover that a pair of British naval ships are after him. He rouses his hungover crew and gives the order to flee to the open sea. The pirating life is treacherous: filled with double-crosses, shifting alliances, and violence. The best pirates cultivate harsh re...

November 16, 1532. Atahualpa, the king of the Inca Empire, marches towards the city of Cajamarca in modern-day Peru, surrounded by 80,000 soldiers. Once he arrives, Atahualpa expects the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro to surrender in the town square. But Pizarro has a plan of his own. With just 168 men, he will unleash a trap that destroys the Inca Empire, and brings thousands of years of...

November 7, 1811. William Henry Harrison and his troops are camped near the Wabash river. They’ve been told to keep the peace—but Harrison wants land, and he’s come here to try and take it. Less than a mile away is a flourishing Native American settlement called Prophetstown. It’s led by Tecumseh, a skilled diplomat and warrior, and his brother Tenskwatawa, whose religious teachings have attracted...

November 5, 1998. Using DNA evidence, the scientific journal Nature publishes findings that put to rest a centuries-old mystery: Was Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello, the mother of six of Thomas Jefferson’s children? Until then, the historical consensus had been this: “The Jefferson-Hemings relationship can be neither refuted nor substantiated.” Jefferson’s white descendants were mor...

October 26, 1948. A mysterious fog descends upon the valley town of Donora, Pennsylvania. Most of its residents work at the local steel mill and are used to murky air. But there’s something different about this miasma of acrid vapors. People begin to cough convulsively; some have trouble breathing. Residents crowd into local doctors’ offices, some arriving at the doorstep gasping for breath. They...

It Was Said, the 2021 Webby Award winner for Best Podcast Series, returns with a new season to look back on some of the most powerful, impactful, and timeless speeches in history. Written and narrated by Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author-historian Jon Meacham, this documentary podcast series takes you through another season of ten generation-defining speeches. Meacham, along with top hi...

October 22, 1975. After traveling millions of miles through space, a Soviet spacecraft plunges through thick clouds of sulfuric acid to land on Venus. Its goal: take a photograph of another planet’s surface and send it back home—history’s first up-close glimpse at a world other than our own. Venus, our closest neighbor, is similar in size to Earth and may even share some planetary material. It’s w...

October 13, 1982. The announcement came from Switzerland, across the world from where Jim Thorpe was raised on Indian territory in Oklahoma. In his time, Thorpe was the most popular athlete in the world, winning two gold medals at the 1912 Olympics. But for a variety of reasons—including his Native American heritage—those medals were stripped away. But today, though Thorpe passed away years earlie...