Sidequests

The Hindenburg exploded. Everyone died. Hydrogen caused the disaster. It was the maiden voyage. Four facts. All wrong. This week’s Sidequests takes ten minutes to dismantle one of the most mythologized disasters of the 20th century — and what’s left when the myth falls away is somehow more interesting than the legend. What the Hindenburg actually represents is simpler and stranger than the myth: t...

Episode 4 of our series on the Titanic Disaster picks up where Southampton left off — Titanic steaming across the English Channel toward Cherbourg, France, where the Continental passengers are waiting. The ship can’t enter the harbor (too shallow for a vessel drawing 34 feet), so she anchors offshore and sends tenders. Two ships: Nomadic for first and second class, Traffic for third. Within two ho...

Early 1800s Edinburgh was the heart of medical science in Britain. Its universities attracted ambitious students from across the world, all desperate to learn surgery the old-fashioned way—by cutting bodies open. But there was a problem: You can’t learn anatomy from a textbook. You need corpses. And in Edinburgh, there weren’t nearly enough to go around. Legally, only executed criminals could be d...

October 1973: Americans wait in line for hours to buy gasoline. Prices have quadrupled. Rationing is in effect. The images are iconic—cars stretching around city blocks, gas stations running dry, tempers flaring. But the gas lines everyone remembers were just the visible symptom. The 1973 oil crisis didn’t just cause a recession. It ended an era and created the world we live in today. 1973 was the...

April 10, 1912. Six in the morning. Dawn breaking over Southampton. At Berth 44, the largest moving object on earth sits waiting — boilers burning, officers walking their inspections, stewards arranging flowers in rooms no one has slept in yet. In six hours, she sails. But before Titanic ever reached open water, she nearly collided with another ship in the harbor. And deep in her belly, a coal fir...

On January 15, 1919, a storage tank in Boston's North End burst open and sent more than 2 million gallons of molasses roaring through the streets at 35 miles per hour. Buildings collapsed. People were buried alive. 21 died. It sounds absurd — and it was also completely preventable. The tank had been leaking for years, the warnings were ignored, and the company painted it brown to hide the evidence...

In July 1518, a woman walked into the streets of Strasbourg and started dancing. She didn't stop for days. Within a month, hundreds had joined her — collapsing from exhaustion, some reportedly dying — in one of history's most baffling and unsettling outbreaks. The city's response made it worse. The medical theories still don't fully explain it. And the way it ended is somehow the strangest part of...

January 1909: RMS Republic collided with another ship in dense fog. A forty-foot gash tore open her hull. Fifteen hundred people were aboard. But the ship stayed afloat for thirty-nine hours. Wireless brought rescue. Passengers were transferred safely. Only six people died. The newspapers called it the "Miracle of Wireless." White Star Line learned a lesson: modern ships don't just sink. Watertigh...

In August 1976, two American officers were killed in the Korean DMZ — beaten to death with axes during a routine tree-trimming operation. Three days later, the U.S. military came back to finish the job. This time, they brought B-52 bombers, fighter jets, helicopter gunships, an aircraft carrier group, and a special forces unit trained in hand-to-hand combat. The mission: cut down one poplar tree....

In 1932, the Australian military went to war. Not against a rival nation. Not against armed insurgents. Against emus — 20,000 of them — cutting through struggling farmland on their seasonal migration. The government's solution: two soldiers, two Lewis machine guns, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The result: one of the most embarrassing military defeats in recorded history. This is the Great Emu...

In 1898, author Morgan Robertson published a novel about an "unsinkable" ocean liner that struck an iceberg and sank with massive loss of life. He called it the Titan . Fourteen years later, the Titanic —nearly identical in size and fate—met the same end. The parallels are eerie, but they reveal something deeper: this disaster wasn't just possible, it was practically inevitable. This is the first...

In June 1919, a German rear admiral gave a secret order and within hours, 52 warships slipped beneath the surface of a Scottish harbor. The British were furious. Nine German sailors were shot. And nobody realized, yet, that those sunken ships would eventually become one of the most valuable scientific resources of the 20th century. This episode is about low-background steel: why it matters, where...

Sidequests is a podcast about the history you didn’t know you needed... and sometimes, the history that explains the week you just had. We go down a rabbit hole. Sometimes it’s obscure. Sometimes it’s weird. Sometimes it’s both, and somewhere in the middle of it you realize the fourteenth century is suddenly more relevant than it has any right to be. In 1309, the entire papal court packed up and m...

Right now, four human beings are hurtling through deep space at 24,000 mph. For the first time since 1972, humans are looking back at a shrinking blue marble on the Artemis II mission. But how did we actually get here? In this premiere episode of  Sidequests , we headfirst down the rabbit hole of the 23-year political odyssey behind a ten-day mission. From the tragic 2003 Space Shuttle Columb...