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Didn’t pay attention in history class? HowStuffWorks has you covered.
Rewriting history is no easy feat, but this week, two guys sought to do just that. They came out with a theory based on the supposition that the infamous outlaw Butch Cassidy didn’t die in a 1908 shootout in Bolivia, as most scholars think, but instead lived quietly to old age. It’s an idea based off of a newly discovered 200-page manuscript from 1934 entitled “Bandit Invincible: The Story of Butch Cassidy,” but their hypothesis goes beyond what’s printed on the page.
Are we rooting for D.B. Cooper?
by Deblina Chakraborty | August 13, 2011
The FBI says the case of airline hijacker D.B. Cooper isn’t a high priority, but you wouldn’t know it. For past couple of weeks, this 40-year-old story of the guy who parachuted out of a plane with a $200,000 ransom, never to be seen again, has been the historical mystery du jour — even though the latest lead in the investigation has proven to be something of a bust.
When it comes to the history of politics, Sarah and I never tire of covering the more, shall we say, “unique” characters who defy the mainstream in promoting their agendas. A new piece on Constitution Daily points out some of the most unusual political parties the world has ever seen.
If “Stuff You Missed in History Class” could only include “stuff schools don’t teach,” California would’ve just made our jobs a little tougher. Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill ensuring that, come January 2012, there will be at least one aspect of the past students in the Golden State will definitely not miss: gay history.
History Class with David McCullough
by Sarah Dowdey | May 26, 2011
Listeners love a good history book recommendation, but it’s not every day we devote a whole podcast to one work — and interview the author while we’re at it! Last week, Deblina and I spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough about his latest book, “The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.”
The featured expats aren’t exactly your expected crowd: Mr. McCullough’s work starts long after the enlightened Franklin/Jefferson era and ends long before the post-war literary scene of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. It covers the middle years, 1830 to 1900, and focuses on men and women, who, as Mr. McCullough describes them, “were ambitious to excel in their chosen careers […] to be the best they could possibly be.”
Maria Hallett, former lover of pirate Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy, was a central character in the story of the Whydah shipwreck, one of several Sarah and I covered in shipwreck-themed podcast series recently. In fact, she may have been the whole reason the Whydah was in New England on April 26, 1717, when it met that massive storm off the coast of Cape Cod that led to its demise. We didn’t have the chance to talk about Maria’s fate in that episode, so I wanted to do that here.
Book Ban Sells a Great Soul Short
by Deblina Chakraborty | April 15, 2011
How much can a new piece of information change how we view the past? That’s a question that seems to come up a lot in my posts, and it’s one that definitely surrounds the buzz-laden release of Joseph Lelyveld’s book about Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Great Soul.” Lelyveld’s work has caused quite the fuss, mainly because it focuses on Gandhi’s close relationship with a German architect named Hermann Kallenbach — suggesting to some people that the celebrated hero of India’s independence movement might have been bisexual.
Since January, I’ve been brooding over a whole stable of Royal Geographic Society explorers — the result of reading David Grann’s “The Lost City of Z” over the Christmas holiday. Percy Fawcett, John Hanning Speke, Richard Francis Burton … all podcast-worthy adventurers with strange stories and interesting lives.
But I thought Stanley and Livingstone, arguably two of the most famous names in Victorian exploration, ought to come first. After Dr. David Livingstone, longtime missionary and celebrity explorer, dropped off the map in search the Nile’s source, journalist Henry Morton Stanley went looking. Their unlikely meeting made international news and stocked Stanley’s home paper the New York Herald with headlines for a year.
As if, on the heels of a devastating earthquake-tsunami combo in Japan, we needed any more reminders of Mother Nature’s destructive power, researchers think they may have finally located a storied city she pummeled ages ago. Perhaps you’ve heard of it — it’s a little place called Atlantis, and according to a team of archeologists led by Connecticut-based professor Richard Freund, it’s sitting somewhere beneath the marshlands of the Dona Ana Park in southern Spain.
While researching our episode on Caravaggio, I couldn’t help but think of Lady Caroline Lamb’s assessment of another tortured artist, Lord Byron, famously called “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Caravaggio was dangerous to know; in fact, his rap sheet was long enough for us to toss the offenses back and forth like a ball on a pallacorda court.
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