History Buffoons Podcast

A Nazi foreign minister begs Hitler for permission to come to Berlin and die beside him, then turns around and insists he had “nothing to do” with policy. That kind of contradiction is where Dr. Douglas Kelley lives in 22 Cells in Nuremberg, and it’s where we spend this conversation too: not just what the defendants did, but how they thought, justified, deflected, and clung to status once the war was over.

We keep moving through the Nuremberg Trials roster and the categories Kelley uses to make sense of them, from smooth “salesmen” and career diplomats to “gunmen” who...

A war criminal can still be charming in conversation and that’s exactly why this story matters. We take you inside the Nuremberg jail through the eyes of Dr. Douglas Kelley, a 32-year-old US Army psychiatrist tasked with evaluating 22 high-ranking Nazi prisoners before the Nuremberg Trials. His job starts as a competency check and suicide risk assessment, but it turns into something darker and more revealing: a front-row seat to the personalities, excuses, and beliefs that helped power Nazi Germany. 

We talk through what Kelley actually does, from long interviews to psychological testing like the Rorschach inkblot tes...

Pompeii isn’t just a tragedy locked in plaster. It’s a step-by-step disaster where people make real choices under falling rock, shaking ground, and a sky that turns into night. We start with the basics of why volcanoes exist at all, then zoom in on Italy’s chaotic tectonic setup where earthquakes and eruptions share the same neighborhood. That context matters, because if tremors are “normal,” a warning can feel like background noise.

From there, we rebuild Pompeii as a living Roman city: bakeries, taverns, vineyards, mosaics, and a community still repairing damage from the big quake of 6...

Hunger, obsession, and sheer stubborn will can shape a person into something almost unbreakable. We’re Bradley and Kate, and we’re telling the true story of Dieter Dengler: a kid in postwar Germany who grows up scavenging for food, sees an American plane roar low over his town, and locks onto one mission for life: fly. That childhood thread matters, because it follows him all the way into the Vietnam War and into the worst kind of survival situation imaginable.

Dengler immigrates to the United States with limited English and no safety net, then fights his way...

A shipbuilder from rural Maine doesn’t usually end up knighted by a king, commanding invasions, and running Massachusetts, but William Phipps is not a usual story. We trace how a man with little schooling and no elite family connections pushes his way into Boston society, marries into stability, and bets everything on the fastest shortcut in the Atlantic world: shipwreck treasure and maritime salvage.

From a failed hunt near the Bahamas to the breakthrough at the Concepcion wreck, we talk through the real mechanics of treasure recovery, the ever-present risk of mutiny, and why one spectacular wi...

A KGB assassin walks into a West Berlin police station and says the quiet part out loud: “I killed them.” That confession detonates a Cold War secret, because the murders weren’t messy shootouts or Hollywood spy scenes. They were up-close, clinical assassinations carried out with a disguised cyanide spray weapon meant to make death look natural in the middle of Munich.

We trace the final mission of Bohdan Stashynsky, the Soviet intelligence operative sent to kill Stepan Bandera after successfully eliminating Lev Rebet. Bandera isn’t an easy target: he lives under an alias, moves carefully, and carr...

Someone poisons a kitchen ingredient, two people die, and England responds by inventing a punishment so violent it still sounds unreal: boiling a person alive in public. We tell the true Tudor England story behind the 1531 Act for Poisoning, starting with Bishop John Fisher, a respected scholar and Bishop of Rochester who dares to publicly oppose Henry VIII as the king tries to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and clear the way for Anne Boleyn.

The poisoning at Fisher’s residence spreads fast and wide. A container of yeast is contaminated, pottage is served, and th...

A basement water alarm chirps in the night, and somehow that’s the calm before we dive into one of the most unsettling Cold War espionage stories we’ve ever covered. We start with a blunt conversation about the Lindsay Clancy case, postpartum psychosis, and why social media can twist people into arguing against evidence. Then we crack open Blake’s Hard Cider Pomegranate Fizz and pivot hard into history.

Bohdan Stashynsky grows up in western Ukraine where borders flip, occupations collide, and “politics” can get your family arrested. We walk through the tangled roots of Ukrainian nationalis...

A small Appalachian town tells a big American story: who gets to enforce the law when a corporation owns nearly everything around you. We’re Bradley and Kate, and after a quick two-year anniversary catch-up (plus some kitten chaos), we head into the coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining is deadly, company towns tighten the screws, and union talk can cost a family their job and their home.

We break down how scrip pay, evictions, and private enforcement set the stage for the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to operate like an armed security force for coal operators. Th...

A 52-foot yacht sets off on a 15,000-mile voyage from England to Australia, and five minutes of bad luck turns it into one of the most infamous survival stories ever recorded. We’re Kate and Bradley, and we walk through the Mignonette shipwreck from the first shock of the rogue wave to the brutal, sunbaked reality of a crowded dinghy with almost no fresh water, no real supplies, and no certainty that help is coming. 

The details are what make this story stick: two tins of “food” that end up being preserved turnips, the desperate scramble to catch r...

“Kamikaze” is one of those words that feels locked to World War II, but the original meaning is older, stranger, and way more revealing. We follow the term back to medieval Japan, where “kamikaze” first means “divine wind,” not airplanes and not a cocktail. The trail runs straight through the Mongol Empire at full power, Kublai Khan’s ambition, and an invasion plan big enough to swallow kingdoms. 

We walk through why Japan was such an obsession for Kublai Khan after he conquered China and built the Yuan dynasty machine that could crank out fleets and supply chains. Then we...

“You’ve got a Buckley’s chance.” It sounds like a throwaway line until you learn it may be rooted in a real man whose survival odds were basically zero. We start with the meaning of this classic piece of Australian slang, then follow the winding path that likely put it on the map: William Buckley, a British convict shipped to early colonial Australia and pushed to the edge of endurance.

We walk through Buckley’s early life in England, his time in the British Army, and the petty-seeming crime that still lands him a transportation sentence. From there...

A beach day in Key West can feel like pure escape until you learn what’s under the sand. We tell the story of the African Cemetery at Higgs Beach, a burial ground tied to three illegal slave ships and nearly 300 lives that ended just days or weeks after rescue. In 2002, archaeologists used ground-penetrating radar to solve a mystery that had puzzled historians for generations, confirming grave shafts hidden in plain sight where families had picnicked and kids had played for decades.

We rewind to 1860, when the transatlantic slave trade is already outlawed on paper, yet still th...

A thousand beluga whales. A freezing strait that tightens into a handful of breathing holes. Polar bears waiting at the surface. Then, out of the Cold War backdrop, a Soviet icebreaker shows up with one job: carve an escape route through Arctic sea ice and somehow convince a massive pod of whales to follow it to open water.

We’re Kate and Bradley, and we take you to the Chukchi Sea near the Senyavin Strait, where a routine beluga migration in 1984 turns into a slow moving crisis. We talk through what makes belugas so resilient in harsh Ar...

A woman outlifts the most famous strongman on earth, a trapeze artist turns a “proper” outfit into a midair reveal, and a Welsh powerhouse lives boldly with zero interest in anyone’s approval. That’s where we’re headed, with a listener request that sends us down a rabbit hole of early circus and vaudeville history and three performers most people have never heard of today.

We start with Katie Sandwina, born Katie Brombach, raised in the circus world, and remembered for feats that forced audiences to rethink what “women can’t do.” We also dig into the story that f...

A Confederate ship slips out of Charleston Harbor before sunrise, glides past guarded checkpoints, and rolls right under the guns of Fort Sumter. The wild part is not the ship. It’s the captain on deck. Robert Smalls is 23 years old, born enslaved in South Carolina, and he’s about to pull off one of the most daring escapes of the American Civil War.

We walk through how Smalls learns the harbor’s channels, tides, and signal system aboard the CSS Planter, and how a careless routine by the ship’s white officers opens a narrow window for a ne...

A medieval power meeting goes wrong in the most horrifying way possible: the floor collapses, and dozens of nobles drop into a cesspit. We’re Bradley and Kate, and we’re walking you through the Erfurt Latrine Disaster of 1184, a real incident preserved in medieval chronicles that proves the Middle Ages could be stranger than fiction. If you like weird history, darkly comic true stories, and the kind of details they definitely didn’t teach in school, you’re in the right place.

We set the scene in medieval Germany inside the Holy Roman Empire, where King Henry VI...

Episode 100 calls for a toast, but we’re not celebrating with a feel-good story. We’re cracking open a classic beer and digging into the Bone Wars, a late-1800s feud so petty and so destructive that it makes modern internet drama look quaint. Picture the American West baking in the heat, a dinosaur bone surfacing after millions of years, and grown men deciding the best solution is sabotage. Yes, dynamite shows up in this story.

We walk through how Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh go from professional respect to scorched-earth rivalry. One rushes discoveries into...

A queen’s downfall is famous. The five men who died to make the story believable are not, and that’s the part we can’t stop thinking about.

We walk through the chain reaction that follows Anne Boleyn’s slide from untouchable to trapped: Henry VIII’s desperation for a male heir, the court’s appetite for gossip, and Thomas Cromwell’s ruthless ability to turn “suspicions” into charges that look official. Along the way, we connect the political stakes of the Church of England era with the human stakes of getting singled out at court, where a harmless j...

They tried to fix a snake problem with cash, and accidentally built a snake industry. We’re Kate and Bradley, and we’re telling the infamous real-world story behind the Cobra Effect, a perfect example of unintended consequences, perverse incentives, and how a “simple” policy can backfire in spectacular fashion.

We drop you into 19th century Delhi under British colonial rule, where cobras are everywhere and the authorities feel pressure to prove they can impose order. So they choose a bounty program: bring in a cobra head, get paid. It’s clean, measurable, and totally reasonable until human natu...

A 5-foot-1 farm kid gets told he is too small for war, then he breaks into the French Army anyway. That is not a metaphor, it is Albert Roach’s real World War I origin story, and it sets the tone for one of the most jaw-dropping Great War biographies we’ve ever read. We start with the French obsession with elan vital and the “right” look for a soldier, then watch Roach smash that idea with stubbornness, nerve, and a talent for turning chaos into leverage.  

From sneaking onto a troop train to slipping into a training...

The most famous hymn in the world has one of the most uncomfortable origin stories. “Amazing Grace” was written by John Newton, a man who spent years at sea, fought authority like it was his job, and participated directly in the transatlantic slave trade before becoming a respected Anglican minister.

We’re Bradley and Kate, and we walk through Newton’s full arc, not the cleaned up version. That means childhood loss in 1700s London, brutal shipboard life, heavy drinking, and the Royal Navy’s violent discipline. It also means the West Africa trading world where slavery is treated...

A U.S. destroyer chases a German U-boat through the North Atlantic, the sonar pings start to lie, and the target seems to vanish like a ghost. The twist isn’t a secret engine or a lucky escape. It’s ocean physics. We walk through the thermocline, that sharp temperature layer that can bend sound and create an acoustic shadow, turning early World War II sonar into “useless nonsense” at exactly the wrong moment in the Battle of the Atlantic. 

From there, we zoom in on Mary Sears and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where a civilian scientist...

Deadwood starts with a simple, dangerous idea: there’s gold in the Black Hills, so people move in even when they’re not supposed to. We follow the real history of Deadwood, South Dakota from its first days as an unsanctioned mining camp on Lakota land protected by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, through the chaos of a boomtown where businesses pop up faster than any real law can keep up.

From muddy streets packed into a narrow gulch to a theater that opens before a jail, the town’s priorities tell you everything. We break down the mo...

Curious George didn’t just come from a cute idea. He came from a suitcase of drawings carried through a collapsing Europe while German-born Jewish refugees tried to stay one step ahead of the war.

We tell the story of H A Rey (born Hans Augusto Reyersbach) and Margaret Rey, a sharp, blunt, brilliant partner who sees his artistic talent as something worth rescuing. Their path runs from post World War I Germany to Brazil, then into pre-war Paris, where they begin turning animal sketches into children’s book characters. A baby monkey named Fifi steals the spot...

A $125 million Mars mission disappears because two teams can’t agree on units. That’s not a sci-fi plot, it’s the kind of avoidable disaster that makes us laugh, then cringe, then double-check our own work.

We start with NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter and the brutal math of a metric vs imperial unit conversion mistake. One set of numbers in pounds of force gets read as newtons, and a “small” difference compounds until the spacecraft approaches Mars too low and is gone in moments. From there we head to Louisiana for the Lake Peigneur disaster, where drilli...

1.5 million balloons rise over downtown Cleveland, cameras roll, a Guinness World Records official watches, and a fundraising idea turns into a story people still argue about decades later. We’re Bradley and Kate, and we wanted to know what Balloonfest 1986 actually was before the internet decided it was a full-blown “disaster.”

We walk through why the United Way of Cleveland needed a big public event, how a mass balloon release promised visibility and donations, and why they brought in the oddly iconic specialist Treb Heining from Balloon Art by Treb. You’ll hear the nuts-and-bolts details that make or...

The Preakness is only 1 3/16 miles, but its history takes way more twists than that. We’re coming off watching the Kentucky Derby, mixing up the signature Black Eyed Susan cocktail, and then digging into how the Preakness Stakes becomes a pillar of American thoroughbred racing and the most stressful checkpoint in the Triple Crown.

We walk through the origins of horse racing, then zoom in on the Preakness itself: where the name comes from, why the “first year” can be confusing, and how the race bounces around before it finally finds a stable identity at Pimlico Race Course...

A man in late 1700s France can eat nonstop and still feel starving. Not “big appetite” starving, but a relentless, aggressive hunger that drives him from normal meals to rotten meat, garbage, and eventually things nobody wants to imagine swallowing. We’re Kate and Bradley, and we take you into the documented case of Tarrare, one of history’s most unsettling medical mysteries, pieced together from period reports and military hospital notes.

We follow Tarrare from rural childhood into the world of sideshows, where crowds pay to watch him devour baskets of apples in seconds and swallow inedible...

Mary Todd Lincoln’s name still gets tossed around as shorthand for “unstable,” but that label collapses the real story into a punchline. We dig into what her life actually looks like when you line up the facts: a politically engaged woman raised in comfort and expectations, a complicated marriage to a self-made lawyer with a very different emotional style, and a public role that turns every choice into a target.

We walk through the major losses that shape her world, starting with the death of her mother when Mary is only six, then the death of her so...

One tiny technical glitch turned pop perfection into one of the biggest music scandals ever. We’re Bradley and Kate, and we’re digging into Millie Vanilli, the late-1980s hit machine that gave the world “Girl You Know It’s True” and “Blame It On The Rain,” then collapsed when everyone realized the voices on the records weren’t the two guys on stage.

We zoom out to the MTV era where image, choreography, and music video polish can matter more than raw talent, and we follow producer Frank Farian’s formula: pair incredible session singers with performers wh...

A pitcher so dominant he rewrote the strikeout leaderboard, and so unpredictable he could be lured off the mound by a puppy in the stands. We’re Bradley and Kate, and we’re telling the story of George “Rube” Waddell, a Deadball Era icon whose MLB greatness and total chaos somehow coexist in the same box score.

We dig into Rube’s rise from a Pennsylvania farm kid with a cannon arm to one of baseball history’s most feared left-handed pitchers, including his jaw-dropping 349 strikeouts in 1904 and the elite earned run average that still puts him in rare comp...

A kid climbs onto a train believing he’s headed toward something better, clutching a single pink envelope addressed to the father who just gave him away. By morning, it’s gone. That small theft becomes a gut-punch symbol for the entire Orphan Train Movement, a massive child relocation effort that moved about 200,000 children from 1854 to 1929 from cities like New York to rural communities across America.

We walk through Lee Nailing’s true story from an upstate New York farm to the Jefferson County Orphan Asylum, where hunger, loneliness, and “stern but distant” adults teach him to stop trust...

Ninety-six people died at Hillsborough in 1989, but the shock isn’t only the disaster itself. The part that keeps twisting the knife is what came next: an official story that didn’t match what families and survivors lived through, years of “accidental death” language that felt like a shrug, and institutions that seemed more focused on protecting themselves than facing the facts.

We walk through the long arc of the aftermath using the Hicks family as our through-line, especially Trevor and Jenny Hicks, who lose their daughters Sarah (19) and Victoria (15) and then spend decades fighting for the truth to...

A decent, hard-working reformer walks into the 1850s, discovers spiritualism, and decides electricity can save the world. That’s not a metaphor. We’re telling the true story of John Murray Spear, a Universalist minister and outspoken abolitionist who believed people and systems could be redeemed, then took that same hope and aimed it at building a literal mechanical messiah.

We talk through why spiritualism was so contagious in mid-19th century America: the Fox sisters, seances as social events, automatic writing, and the idea that invisible forces might be “science” when electricity itself still feels magical. We also...

Ninety-six people die at a football match, and the first story many hear is that the fans caused it. That tension between what happened and what powerful people claimed happened is why we finally sat down to tell Part 1 of the Hillsborough disaster with the care it deserves.

We start with the Hicks family, lifelong Liverpool FC supporters traveling to Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield for the 1989 FA Cup semifinal. Through Jenny Hicks’s account, we track the day’s key failures in crowd management and stadium safety: congestion at the Leppings Lane turnstiles, the decision to open Gate...

Kate’s running on a cold, Bradley’s trying to fill in, and somehow that turns into one of our most chaotic History Buffoons hangouts yet. It starts with a Wisconsin detour to Rebellion Brewing Company in Cedarburg, where we meet great people, taste a lineup of beers, and fall hard for a vanilla porter that has no business being that smooth.

Then we flip the switch into a rapid-fire “would you rather” game pulled from our weird history catalog, and the questions get uncomfortably real. Would you rather be Ignaz Semmelweis trying to convince doctors to wash the...

High heels with a permit. Bigfoot with legal protection. A city rule that basically turns snowballs into “missiles.” We grab a stack of real municipal codes and ordinances that are still on the books and ask the only reasonable question: how is this still a law?

We’re Bradley and Kate, and we keep it fast, weird, and surprisingly informative. We break down what these strange laws actually say, where they came from, and why they were written in the first place. A lot of the funniest “bizarre laws” start with something dead serious: uneven sidewalks that trigger la...

A single tombstone inscription from Sicily gives us a gladiator story that feels too weird to be real: Flamma, a Syrian-born fighter in Ancient Rome, steps into the arena 34 times, wins 21, fights to nine draws, loses four, and then gets offered freedom four separate times. And he turns it down. Every. Single. Time.

We walk through what that record actually means in Roman gladiator combat, including why the “fight to the death” myth falls apart once you understand how expensive fighters are to train and how mercy decisions work. We also break down Flamma’s fighting class as a s...

A superpower rolls in with tanks and a million soldiers, convinced the job will be quick. Then the snow hits, the forests close in, and Finland refuses to play by the rules. We’re Bradley and Kate, and we’re telling the underdog story of the Winter War, when the Soviet Union invades Finland in late 1939 and discovers that “overwhelming force” doesn’t mean much on narrow roads, in deep drifts, at brutal temperatures.

We break down why Stalin wants a buffer zone near Leningrad, how negotiations collapse, and why the Mainila shelling incident is widely viewed as a prete...