The Weird History Podcast

We made it to 100 episodes! For the occasion we’ve a new name, a new logo, and your questions and my answers.

The platypus appears to be some kind of melding or mashup between a duck and a beaver. It is not, though the first Western scientist to examine a specimen thought that it was exactly that: A taxidermy hoax made of […]

Belief that one’s blood type affects personality is common in Japan. Dating sites, celebrity profiles, and vital statistics for fictional characters often include blood type, and belief that it affects personal attitude or character is somewhat akin to belief in […]

Immigration from Mexico to the US is not new. Workers have been deciding to immigrate to the US, legally or not, for over a century. However, legal channels for immigration have often not been forthcoming. In the early twentieth century […]

It was bound to happen eventually. There’s no new episode this week.

There is a statue on the moon. In 1971 the crew of Apollo 15 placed a small figurine and a plaque on the lunar surface to memorialize American and Soviet astronauts who had died in the pursuit of space exploration. […]

Teddy Roosevelt buried a time capsule in Portland in 1903. One hundred years later, Roosevelt’s time capsule was nowhere to be found. The box laid by the president that was meant to preserve history for 100 years could not be […]

In 1854 the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings made their debut into American politics. They ran candidates in 76 of the 82 available House of Representatives races, and won 35 of those seats. At the same time, they also became a force to […]

Decades before the modern versions of the Democratic and Republican parties formed, the US also had a few other major political parties. One was the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Another was the Whigs, who had intermittent […]

The ancient Mesoamerican ball game is very probably the oldest ball game in the world. We know that it was played with a rubber ball on a stone court, and that players would try to hit the ball with their […]

This week’s episode is an interview with artist and cartoonist Kory Bing about dinosaurs and other extinct megafauna. We talked about drawing dinosaurs, what dinosaurs are, and how dinosaurs and other extinct animals are portrayed in popular culture. Kory writes […]

Today PT Barnum is remembered as one of the founders of modern advertising and one of America’s greatest hucksters. His first successful hoax was to successfully promote a taxidermy monkey sewn to a fish as the corpse of a mermaid. […]

In 1897 the US Supreme Court carved out an exception the 13th Amendment, which bans slavery and involuntary servitude. Robertson v. Baldwin held that merchant marine sailors could be arrested by law enforcement, imprisoned, and then returned to their ships. […]

As far as your humble podcaster is concerned, pasta is a wonder of the world right up there with the Pyramids and the Internet. We don’t exactly know where it came from, though. In the United States Pasta is often […]

One of the most bizarre myths about the Soviet Union is that Joseph Stalin attempted to create human/chimp hybrid supersoldiers. This bit of pseudohistory has become especially prevalent in the alternate universe of fundamentalist Christianity. Often, this myth is held […]

No one knows who wrote The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. There is no record of an English knight alive at the right time with that name who could have written it. One oft-repeated theory is that Mandeville retired to […]

As the Travels of Sire John Mandeville move away from the familiar and the Holy Land, they get progressively more bizarre. The laws of convention and even reality seem to break down as Mandeville encounters cannibals, dog people, weaponized elephants, […]

Supposedly, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is about an English knight who sets out for the Holy Land in the 1330s. However, the journey to Jerusalem and the surrounding environs are only a small part of a larger narrative […]

This week’s episode is an interview with author Bill Lascher about his upcoming book Eve of a Hundred Midnights, about two American war correspondents covering the East Asian theater of WWII.  In it, Lascher details how they got into journalism, […]

Anymore, pinball is an archaic amusement found in the corners of old arcades and bars, but in the mid twentieth century it was the center of a moral panic. Cities across the country banned pinball for its associations with gambling. […]

The origins of coffee are encircled by myth and legend, sometimes involving goats. It’s one of the most popular beverages on Earth, and for many people (including your humble podcaster) one of the most important. Drinking coffee is a daily […]

Claymation was a dominant force in American popular culture during the late 1980s, which characters such as the California Raisins and the Noid achieving a sort of pre-Internet media ubiquity. The creative force behind Claymation was Will Vinton Studios, a […]

Before the interstate highway system spread over the US, the country was knit together through a network of railroads and auto trails. One of the longest of these was the Lincoln Highway, a coast-to-coast collection of roads that linked New […]

If it’s ever completed, South Dakota’s Crazy Horse Memorial will be the largest statue in the world. The gigantic structure will feature the Lakota leader’s face, upper body, and mount, and will dwarf every other monument and memorial on Earth. […]

This week’s episode is an interview with Quizmistress and Jeopardy! contestant Molly Newman. Molly runs multiple successful trivia nights in Portland, Oregon, hosts private trivia events, and knows what makes questions good, bad, boring, easy, hard, funny, and compelling. With […]