Snarkives: The Fire

In 945, the Drevlians murdered Olga of Kiev's husband and sent ambassadors to propose she marry their prince instead. She buried the first delegation alive in their boats, burned the second in a bathhouse, massacred five thousand more at a funeral feast, and then burned the capital down using birds. She ruled as regent for fifteen years, outmaneuvered the Byzantine Emperor, converted to Christiani...

In 1249, a crusader army marched on Cairo, the Sultan of Egypt died mid-invasion, and his widow decided nobody needed to know. Shajar al-Durr, purchased at a slave market, forged a dead man's signature, broke a crusade, captured a king of France, and put her own name on the coins of Egypt. The chroniclers who wrote her story all worked for the people who came after her. So she answered in architec...

Between 1945 and 1950, five people disappeared in the wilderness of southwestern Vermont near Glastenbury Mountain. A 74-year-old hunting guide who knew the area well. An 18-year-old college student in a red coat. A 68-year-old veteran on a bus. An eight-year-old boy. A 53-year-old hiker taking a shortcut to camp. None of them came back. In 1992, a writer named Joseph Citro called it the Benningto...

In the 1870s, two paleontologists set out to discover dinosaurs and ended up discovering new depths of human pettiness instead. Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh started as friends, became enemies over a fossil quarry in New Jersey, and spent the next thirty years dynamiting each other's dig sites, planting spies in each other's camps, and going to war in the newspapers. They both died...

In 1661, a magistrate in Wiltshire confiscated a vagrant drummer's drum. Then the drum started playing itself. For two years. This is the story of the haunting that terrified Restoration England, attracted a Royal Society fellow with a notebook, and left fingerprints on the Salem witch trials. Snarkives Podcasts will always be free to listen. If you want to help keep the lights on, Moxie in treats...

A whole war. Fifty thousand dead. Six hundred ships lost. And it might have started with a jar containing a severed ear that may or may not have ever been shown to Parliament. This week I found the War of Jenkins' Ear and I cannot stop thinking about it. Snarkives Podcasts will always be free to listen. If you want to help keep the lights on, Moxie in treats, and me caffeinated enough to keep post...

Paris, 1730s. Apprentices. Starving. Their master's cats eating better than them. What happens next is exactly as unhinged as it sounds.   Snarkives Podcasts will always be free to listen. If you want to help keep the lights on, Moxie in treats, and me caffeinated enough to keep posting episodes, you can toss a few dollars in the tip jar: https://ko-fi.com/snarkives   Sources Robert Darnton, "The...