Outrageous History!

In March of 1951, an extremely tense period of world history, Globemaster cargo plane 49-244 disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean just west of Ireland. The plane and survivors disappeared without a trace.  After analyzing thousands of pages of declassified documents and conducting personal interviews associated with that flight, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Tod Robberson asks, what was the rea...

For most of her life, Anna Rosenberg served the United States at the highest levels of government, a close advisor to four presidents as well as running a successful public and labor relations business. Immigrating with her family from Hungary, she became a media darling at a young age, eventually becoming one of, if not, the most admired female government officials of the 20th century. Among many...

Why is it called the Jeep? Depends on who you ask. Who first designed and developed this workhorse of the US military? Again, not a simple question to answer.  Decades after thousands of these historic and vital vehicles were shipped all over the world to transport American soldiers and cargo, its true origins were still shrouded in obscurity. Those shrouds have been lifted by author Paul Bruno, w...

The bitter and destructive struggle in the Levant has a lengthy, complex and  grievous history. No doubt the region has experienced its share of territorial bloodshed from ancient times. However, much of the conflict and hostility which has plagued it over the last century or so can be traced to the pacts made between European powers during and after the First World War. In that war, the Arab worl...

Many of our images of the First World War emanated from the trenches at the European front lines. But the war was not limited to those deplorable conditions. In the Mideast, another conflict seethed as the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire along with the  Allied Powers of the British Empire, France, Russia, Italy and others fought to impose their spheres o...

World War II soldiers had to endure the grind of pushing through rough terrain in extreme cold and heat and to witness comrades dying in front of their eyes, sometimes for years.  To help alleviate those hardships, even temporarily, soldiers stationed at military bases were treated to entertainment of all kinds, but those stage shows were not practical at the front lines. To reach those soldiers,...

A few years before his death, Wyatt Earp wrote to a friend, saying, "Notoriety has been the bane of my life. I detest it." As perhaps the most famous lawman in the United States, Earp and his brothers are well known for the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral, but those few minutes of gunfire are really only a slice of the Earps' struggle to tame the lawlessness in the town of Tombst...

The year is 1940. The German army occupies Norway and begins construction of superhighways, a polar railroad and a glistening new German city in northern Norway. The Nazi party encourages German soldiers and Norwegian women to produce babies - all to create Hitler's vision of a super race of German/Norwegian Vikings. These master plans to rule the expected German empire were largely unknown u...

The Ridley Scott- directed film "Napoleon" is a big film. Big battle scenes.  Moscow going up in flames. Napoleon facing down his detractors. The over-the-top coronation of the emperor. But according to the noted Oxford Napoleonic historian, Michael Broers, the film's emphasis on Napoleon's relationship with Josephine is as important as those other "big" elements. Bro...

Frank Lloyd Wright, Antoni Gaudi, Adolf Loos, Louis Sullivan; why were their lives such a mess? Maybe it's the Jekyll and Hyde conundrum.  In this episode of Surfing the Time Capsule, we'll take a look at this puzzling condition that seems to bedevil some architects.

Is the Leonardo da Vinci painting entitled "Salvator Mundi" worth almost half a billion dollars? For Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, that's chump change. Join journalist Ernest Granson as he examines the motivation behind the astronomical values of the world's most expensive paintings.

Was Richard Nixon really a snivelling crook? Was Ayn Rand really a condescending, selfish snob? In this initial episode of Surfing the Time Capsule from Outrageous History, journalist Ernest Granson suggests that the two notorious personalities shared a common attribute - greed. You would think their colleagues and followers would consider that to be an undesirable trait, but turns out, colleagues...

In 2017, a painting of Jesus Christ holding a crystal orb became the world's most expensive painting when Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) paid $450 million for the piece which was auctioned off by Christie's in London. MBS purchased the painting based on its attribution to the Renaissance painter and all around genius, Leonardo da Vinci. But did Leonardo actually pai...

Propaganda, publicity, public relations, spin. These words are really interchangeable but for many, they all evoke somewhat negative connotations. For politicians, the presidents of the United States especially, that's a problem. From the publicity-hungry Theodore Roosevelt to the media-obsessed Richard Nixon to the "no-spin" Barrack Obama, the chief executives have sought to put th...

The Anglo-Saxons of pre-England  Britannia lived in a world of real monsters where walking through the unsettled areas outside of town could mean being scorched by dragons or gobbled up by terrifying, giant humanoids. Were these monsters real and why were the medieval Anglo-Saxons so fearful of them? Join journalist Ernest Granson as his guest, author and historian, Tim Flight, examines the powerf...

Imagine becoming a young widow with a baby boy and being entrusted with the priceless legacy of one of the world's most famous painters. That is the situation in which Johanna van Gogh-Bonger found herself when her beloved husband of only two years passed away. That husband was Theo van Gogh, brother of Vincent van Gogh. The two brothers died within a year of each other leaving Johanna or Jo,...

Just who was Stanley Martin Lieber - or as millions of superhero fans know him - Stan Lee? Sure, Stan Lee has been credited by those fans as the creator of Spiderman, The Avengers, The X Men and a whole universe of superheroes that dominate not only the comic book industry but to a large extent, the film industry. He was a writer, a self-promoter, a husband, a father and considered himself "a...

Could there be such a person? That is how scientist J.B.S. Haldane has been described. He is credited with laying the foundations of genetics but his knowledge spanned far beyond that and until he passed away he constantly strove to inform the public about all aspects of science. Some of his knowledge he gained through self-experimentation, for instance, drinking hydrochloric acid and breathing in...

The Watergate scandal in the 1970s turned U.S. politics upside down, creating skepticism, cynicism and pessimism throughout the country. For those involved in both the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Washington D.C.'s Watergate hotel/apartment complex and the burglary coverup, it meant jail time and a loss of reputation. For southern socialite Martha Mitchell , w...

The life story of Ayn Rand reads much like one of her block buster novels, except for the unhappy ending. In "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" , the main female and male characters, one of whom is John Galt, become heroines and heroes, rhapsodizing with spectacular literary, political and philosophical statements. In real life, Ayn Rand, the queen of extreme capitalism, p...

Art dealer and former gallery owner, Richard Polsky, spent a career trying to become the owner of an Andy Warhol silk screen. As a passionate admirer of Warhol's works, Richard eventually achieved his goal of purchasing, not one but two pieces, at separate times. But circumstances resulted in his move to sell both. Although he always believed in a growing monetary value of Warhol's piece...

When American automotive entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin and the Province of New Brunswick's Premier Richard Hatfield sat down for coffee at the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel in Fredericton in 1973, little did they realize the bumpy road they would soon ride together. At that meeting, Bricklin, ever the salesman, convinced Hatfield to commit to a joint venture between the province and Bricklin's...

If you're taking part in contemporary politics, you had better board up your closet to prevent any skeletons from being revealed. It wasn't necessarily so 100 years ago. The private lives of politicians, were for the most part, kept private, even by publicity-seeking media outlets. If that weren't the case, then the  longest serving Canadian prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie Ki...

Russia's Tsar Nicolas and his family died a gruesome death, executed by the Bolsheviks, after Nicolas was forced to abdicate following the Russian Revolution of 1917. King George V of Great Britain was Nicolas' cousin and agonized over offering the Romanov family refuge in England. George never made that offer. The irony is that Nicolas and George were all part of Queen Victoria's h...

Rhea Clyman, born in Poland and raised in Canada, jostled her way into becoming an foreign correspondent for the Toronto Evening Telegram in the 1920s. One of the few women journalists during that era, she managed to land an assignment to cover the newly emerging Communist U.S.S.R. Her epic trips to Siberia and other parts of the famine ravaged country, changed her view of the Communist concept an...