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The Weird History Podcast — History
The Weird History Podcast

Latest Episodes:

91 Kory Bing on Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Megafauna Jul 28, 2016

Show notes

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 and draws the webcomic Skin Deep and regularly illustrates dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and other extinct megafauna. Find her work here.

Theme music: Cowboy Surfer by the Vivisectors

Kory Headshot

fijimermaid — 90 The Fiji Mermaid Jul 21, 2016
Show notes

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. To do this, Barnum wrote fake letters from different regions of the country to various New York newspapers, and hired an associate of his to pose as an English scientist who had the mermaid in his possession. Using deceit, fake names, and fraudulent correspondence, Barnum successfully stoked interest in the so-called “mermaid.”

The fate of the mermaid is unknown. It was possibly destroyed in a fire, but Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology has a specimen that is, possibly, Barnum’s original. After Barnum several other sideshows, museums, and curiosity shops copied the mermaid, and today many is the tourist trap cabinet of curiosities sports the horrific corpse of a monkey glued to a fish.

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shanghaied — 89 Live at the Jack London, Robertson V Baldwin Jul 14, 2016
Show notes

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. Essentially, forced labor in the United States was legal, as long as it was on boats. It was not until 1915 that Congress banned the practice.

This episode was part of Stumptown Stories, a Pacific Northwest history collective in Portland, Oregon.

Pictured below is a still from the 1915 Charlie Chaplin film Shanghaied, which came out the same year that Congress passed legislation guaranteeing certain rights for sailors.

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TaccuinoSanitatis,Casanatense — 88 The Unknown Origins of Pasta, A Wonder of the World Jul 07, 2016
Show notes

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 erroneously identified with Marco Polo. Supposedly, Polo brought back a variation on Chinese noodles from his travels, and introduced it to Italy. This story originates, though, in the United States. In 1929 a publication called the Macaroni Journal invented the Polo story, and ever since then that myth has refused to die.

Some Italian sources claim that pasta originated with the Etruscans, a pre-Roman civilization on the Italian peninsula, but evidence for this is spotty. It is more likely that pasta originated in the Middle East and traveled to the Italian Peninsula via the Emirate of Sicily.

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Ilya Ivanov — 87 Stalin’s Nonexistent Human/Chimp Hybrid Supersoldiers Jun 30, 2016
Show notes

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 up as a way to conflate Darwinism with Communism. While loosely based on actual events, it does not hold up to scrutiny.

Ilya Ivanov (pictured) was a Russian Scientist who, beginning in 1910, attempted to hybridize chimpanzees and orangutangs with humans. He was not successful. Ivanov’s experiments, though, began long before Stalin took power, and even before the Communist revolution. What’s more, Stalin did not believe in evolution. Stalin rejected Darwin’s ideas and, instead, promoted an alternative view known as Lysenkoism, a pseudoscience that Stalin saw as more consistent with his version of communism.

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blemmyes — 86 Mandeville, Part Three Jun 23, 2016
Show notes

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 Belgium, lived under a pseudonym, and only confessed his authorship of the Travels on his deathbed. Other than the uncorroborated word of a Liege notrary, though, we have nothing to substantiate this theory.

What we do know is that the work was not wholly original, and combined elements of several pre-existing fantasies and romances into a single narrative. And, despite or maybe because of the fantasy elements, it did so well. It remains a fascinating look at what it means to encounter the unfamiliar, to travel, and to see the world that lies just beyond the lands you know.

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dog-people — 85 Mandeville, Part Two Jun 16, 2016
Show notes

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, and headless humans who have faces on their chest. In one particularly striking passage Mandeville says that not only is the world round, but that one can circumnavigate it, and he also characterizes the Kingdom of the Great Khan as perhaps the most advanced nation in the entire world. The book ends with description of the Earthly Paradise, the one spot on the globe that Mandeville, despite all of his experience, cannot reach.

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grainpyramids — 84 Mandeville, Part One Jun 09, 2016
Show notes

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 that involves fantastical creatures, foreign kingdoms, and wonders both inspiring and gross. During the first part of his journey Mandeville describes the life and religion of the Greeks (including their opinions on beards), a woman who was turned into a dragon (and the knights who failed to save her) and the temple of the Pheonix. That’s only the beginning, though. Next week, we’ll stay with Sir John Mandeville as he ventures further into the unknown and into even more bizarre foreign lands.

Among the pseudohistory of Mandeville’s travelogue is the theory that the pyramids were meant to store grain, pictured below.

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evofahundredmidnights — 83 Bill Lascher on Eve of a Hundred Midnights Jun 02, 2016
Show notes

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, what it was like to cover wartime China, and their various encounters with and escapes from the dangers of war.

Eve of a Hundred Midnights comes out on June 21st, 2016.

pinballsmash — 82 For Amusement Only May 26, 2016
Show notes

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. Most notably, New York’s mayor Fiorello La Guardia had machines rounded up and smashed, often in highly visible public settings. The game’s association with gambling wasn’t baseless, though. After prohibition, coin machines did become a notable stream of income for organized crime, and some pinball tables did indeed disperse cash or prizes. It wasn’t until 1976 that the New York ban was lifted, and that pinball became a commonplace and acceptable amusement.

I’ve previously written about pinball and organized crime in Oregon for the Portland Mercury. Check out that feature here.

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