The Weird History Podcast

By all reasonable metrics Shek Yeung, who raided the South China Sea in the early 1800s, is one of the most successful pirates of all time. In her new novel Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea author Rita Chang-Eppig tells a fictionalized version of the pirate queen’s life, her rise to power, and her relationship with powers both temporal and spiritual.

William Shakespeare seems to have hated hedgehogs. We don’t quite know why, but it could have something to do with how the tiny animal is depicted by the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. Special Thanks to Jamie Jeffers of The British History Podcast and Miles Stokes of Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men for providing voicework for this episode.

Before Valentine’s Day, ancient Romans celebrated a festival of fertility in the shadow of the Palatine Hill. Lupercalia was a popular holiday that featured blood, goat sacrifice, and getting whipped by naked guys.

During the Dust Bowl city officials in Los Angeles, fueled by anti-communist paranoia and xenophobia, were determined to keep migrants out of California. To that end, they dispatched the LAPD to remote border crossing points far outside the city in order to keep out anyone who looked like they were fleeing blight or didn’t have work. Author Bill Lascher spoke with us about his new book The Golden Fortress, which outlines how in 1936 LA law enforcement went to the far reaches of the Golden State to keep California closed.

Eric Tagliacozzo is a professor of history at Cornell University, and his new book In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds From Yemen to Yokohama outlines five centuries of maritime history in the Asian world. In this wide-ranging interview, we discussed how China created trade routes that stretched all the way to Africa’s Swahili coast, the ocean-going history of Vietnam, and the role of consumer goods, piracy, slavery, and religion in the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, Pacific, and beyond.

Archaeology has changed considerably over the past century. In this episode, we spoke with Ann R. Williams of National Geographic about the new book Lost Cities Ancient Tombs, significant discoveries from the past century, and what it means to dig up the past.

After his death in 1945, Mussolini’s corpse was autopsied and thrown into a pauper’s grave. But, that was just the beginning of the cadaver’s posthumous career. Eventually the body was stolen by neofascists, hidden away for over a decade, and used as a political bargaining chip in postwar Italy.

The Marvel Universe is massive. Marvel comics go back well over half a century, and span thousands upon thousands of pages. Reading all of them would be a Herculean undertaking. And one man, Douglas Wolk, did exactly that, and wrote a book about it. We talked his new release All of the Marvels, and about how one of the most well-known fictional universes in the world has dealt with real-world history, like war, civil rights, crime, AIDS, Watergate, and more.

In 1907 French waiters went on strike, and won the right to wear facial hair.

Nearly every English-language movie has a disclaimer in the credits that says something like “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” Obviously this isn’t true. Historical epics, biopics, and other movies are clearly based on real people. Why does this disclaimer pretend otherwise?
The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with Rasputin.

Covid-19 has killed and sickened hundreds of thousands of people, and transformed our economy, how we work, and how we relate to each other. Even in the midst of this world-historic crisis, though, people deny it. Conspiracy theorists and naysayers claim covid is a hoax, and others refuse to get vaccinated for a variety of pseudoscientific reasons. This denialism isn’t new. During past crisis, such as the AIDS pandemic, plenty of conspiracy theorists claimed that it wasn’t real, or that HIV didn’t cause AIDS, and vaccine denialism has a long, horrible pedigree. Sara and Jack Gorman are the authors of Denying to the Grave, which gets into why unscientific ideas get so popular, and how we can more effectively engage with people who don’t engage with facts or evidence, even when it’s all around them.

The Mexican-American War was not fought for good reasons. The war was one of imperial and expansionist ambition and territorial expansion, and even in the 1840s many Americans at the time knew they were on the wrong side of history. Among the Americans who knew that the U.S. probably shouldn’t wage a war of aggression on its neighbor were a battalion of mostly Irish immigrants who became known as Saint Patrick’s Battalion. They defected from the American to Mexican side of the conflict, battled against the American invaders, and are now remembered as heroes in both Mexico and Ireland.

Treason is the only crime specifically defined in the U.S. Constitution, and talk of treason has been in the air for the last four years. Carlton F.W. Larson is a professor of constitutional law at University of California at Davis, and the author of On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law. He joined us to discuss how treason is defined in the U.S., why it’s defined in that particular way, and the U.S.’s checkered past when it comes to actually prosecuting (or not prosecuting) people for treason.

It’s not enough to just talk about the history of the Grand Guignol. We also want to bring you a little bit of what it was like to take in a night of horror there. On this special Halloween episode, we bring you three adaptations of Grand Guignol plays: Him!, The Ultimate Torture, and The Kiss of Blood.

The Grand Guignol was a small Parisian theater which regularly produced original works of horror. The theater, which operated from 1897 until 1962, showcased short plays about murder, insanity, dismemberment, disease, and other horrors, much to the delight of regulars and tourists alike. The theater produced over 1,200 original plays during it’s six decades of work, and today occupies a special place in the history of the horror genre. However, the Grand Guignol’s mythic status is sometimes at odds with how plays were actually staged, and how horror effects were achieved on stage. In this episode, we look at the history of the Grand Guignol in general, and how the artists who worked there achieved an atmosphere of terror and dread.

Sasha Abramsky is a journalist and author whose new book Little Wonder tells the story of Lottie Dod, the modern world’s first female sporting celebrity. Dod came to prominence as a tennis prodigy and later excelled in other sports like golf, archery, and mountain climbing before voluntarily giving up her celebrity and fading into obscurity.

Today’s show is a conversation with Michel Paradis, attorney and author of Last Mission to Tokyo. Early in WWII the U.S. launched the Doolittle Raids against Japan, attacking the Japanese mainland for the first time. Most of the raiders were able to land safely in allied China, but some were captured by the Japanese and put on trial for the attack. After the war, the Japanese officers who put the raiders on trial were, themselves, put on trial by the Americans. Last Mission to Tokyo tells the story of that trial, and plays out like a legal thriller or detective story, except the stakes are on the level of war crimes and international relations.

In 1987 journalist Randy Shilts chronicled the early years of AIDS in North America in his book And the Band Played On. Shilts’ reporting was mostly concerned with the failures of the U.S. government and healthcare infrastructure to respond to AIDS, but much of the promotion and hype around the book focused on a man named Gaeten Dugas. Dugas had been a flight attendant for Air Canada, and Shilts blamed him for spreading AIDS throughout North America. Dugas, later named “Patient Zero” was demonized as the man spread a new, incurable disease across a continent.
However, in 2016 a study published in Nature exonerated Dugas, and revealed that Shilts and the public at large had unjustly blamed him for being the source of the epidemic. The truth was more complicated.

Slavery in the United States did not end all at once. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, the last enslaved persons in the United States didn’t know they were legally free until June 19th, 1865 when the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas. That day, which became known as “Juneteenth,” has been recognized as a holiday by numerous African-American communities throughout the U.S. since 1865. While it’s still not an official federal holiday, it is recognized as a state holiday by over forty U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Hello everyone. We’re all dealing with a lot right now. This is an update on how I’ve been doing, and the state of the show.

British impressment of American sailors and restrictions on maritime trade are only part of the story in the run-up to the War of 1812. Another major factor was American expansionism. The British, at the time, were supplying munitions to Native American populations in the Old Northwest who were violently resisting American expansion, and a war with Britain could, potentially, cut off that support. Also, lots of Americans wanted to take over Canada.

America doesn’t talk much about the War of 1812. In the historical narrative that the U.S. likes to construct for itself, its first official, declared war might as well not exist. The war’s been ignored for a variety of reasons (we’ll get to why later) but in this episode we’re going to examine surface causes for the war. Conventional narratives about the war of 1812 point the finger at British impressment of American sailors in the early 1800s, and policies like the Orders in Council that restricted American trade with France. High-profile naval conflicts like the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair and the Little Belt Affair, in which American and British ships exchanged fire over the Royal Navy’s right to conscript sailors, inflamed American political passions against Britain. However, these were only surface causes. Next episode, we’ll dive into deep reasons for America’s conflict with Britain in 1812.

In 1970 Oregon governor Tom McCall had a problem: An American Legion convention was descending on Portland in August of that year, with a potential visit by then-president Richard Nixon. A group called the People’s Army Jamboree promised to protest the convention and Nixon, and McCall wanted to avoid the possibility of urban warfare in his state’s largest city. His solution: Vortex One, a week-long state-sponsored music festival where attendees could enjoy sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll free from law enforcement interference. This, McCall thought, would lure potential protesters away from Portland.
This episode is an excerpt from Storied and Scandalous Portland, Oregon, my upcoming book about vice, transgression, and weirdness in the Rose City. If you’re in the Portland area, be sure to join me at Powell’s Books on Sunday, March 22nd at 7:30 for a live reading and book signing.

The Poetic Edda is one of our main sources for Norse mythology, and the poems in it feature tales of gods, heroes, giants, and (of course) Ragnarok. However, not everything in the Poetic Edda focuses on quests, battles, heroes, or monsters. Some of the major poems featuring the Aesir don’t feature the gods fighting frost giants or battling with monsters like Fenris or the World Serpent. Rather, they spend an awful lot of time insulting each other.
In a poem known as The Flyting of Loki or Loki’s Quarrel, the god of mischief crashes a feast and systematically goes around the room insulting each of the other gods. In Harbard’s Song Odin (in disguise as a ferryman) taunts and belittles Thor for no reason at all. Each of the poems is an example of flyting, a Northern European medieval practice of trading comedic, poetic insults for the amusement of onlookers.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Santa Claus is the result of cultural crossover and exchange. Historical and folkloric figures like St. Nicholas, Sinterklaas, and Father Christmas combined in various ways over several generations to create the English-speaking world’s most popular personification of Christmas. It was a long, messy journey that involved sailors venerating Saint Nicholas, the Netherlands getting more into the Saint than anyone else in Europe did, New Amsterdam, New York, Washington Irving, and more than a little anonymous poetry.

Saint Nicholas is not Santa Claus, but he’s now inescapably bound up with Santa’s story and identity. Nicholas was the bishop of Myra, a town in what we no call Turkey, and we don’t have any surviving sources about him from his lifetime. The first major biography we have of Nicholas dates from 800s, centuries after his death, and stories about him are likely fictional or exaggerated. Those stories tell of a man who expelled demons, stayed executions, slapped the Christian heretic Arius (pictured below) and showed great generosity to his fellow citizens of Myra.

World monuments get replicated all the time. There are no shortage of Statues of Liberty or Eiffel Towers, for instance. However, the world monument that’s probably replicated more than any other is Stonehenge. Copies and parodies of the stone circle are everywhere, and in this episode we talk about Stonehenge replicas in general, and the Maryhill Stonehenge in particular. That Stonehenge comes to us via Sam Hill, an eccentric industrialist and pacifist who built his monument as a memorial for soldiers who died in World War One.

In 1959 a Pepsi executive successfully showcased his product at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, an event created to foster cultural exchange during the Cold War. Nikita Khrushchev himself tasted the beverage, and years later Pepsi became one of the few American products widely available in the USSR. Pepsi’s deal with the Soviet Union was essentially a gigantic barter deal: They’d ship Pepsi syrup to the USSR, and in return they’d get Stolychanaya vodka. This worked well until 1989, when a vodka boycott forced Pepsi to ask for other compensation. Instead of vodka, the USSR paid them in decommissioned naval vessels: 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer. Because of that deal, Pepsi was briefly the sixth largest navy on Earth.

Alvin Schwartz is best known for traumatizing children with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. However, one of Schwartz’s most terrifying tales for kids is from a different book, In a Dark, Dark Room and other Scary Stories. The story The Green Ribbon frightened an entire generation of schoolchildren with a narrative about a woman who wore a green ribbon around her neck every single day of her life… because it was keeping her head on.
Schwartz was a folklorist, and his stories all had antecedents in other works or in oral tradition. The Green Ribbon dates back to at least 1824, with Washington Irving’s short story The Adventure of the German Student. Several other versions of the story exist, all of which feature a ribbon-wearing woman whose head only stays on because of a thin layer of fabric.

Today Dracula is one of the most ubiquitous public domain characters in popular media. However, in the 1920s German filmmakers had to get permission from Bram Stoker’s estate in order to make a film based on the 1897 novel. Prana Films, however, was not able to secure permission from Stoker’s widow for an official adaptation. Instead, producer Albin Grau and director F.W. Murnau made Nosferatu, a Dracula film in all but name.

Franz Joseph Hayden was a brilliant composer and one of the most important figures in European classical music. He inspired luminaries such as Mozart and Beethoven, and even today his music is beloved the world over.
However, shortly after he died in 1809 his head was stolen.
Why? Because phrenology!

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most successful American artists of the 20th century, and the figure most associated with pop art after Andy Warhol. Lichtenstein is known for his comics images like “WHAAM!,” pictured below, and his techniques brought be nday dots and comic-book colors into the gallery. However, Lichtenstein’s works were not his own invention: They were based on existing panels in war, romance, and daily comics. While Lichtenstein made millions of art sales, the artists he copied got nothing, not even recognition for the images they created.
This was a live talk at Rose City Comic Con with an accompanying presentation deck. Visual aides for this episode are here.

In the first decade of the 1700s a visitor to London claimed to be from a far-off land: Formosa. He described it as being an idyllic paradise, albeit one filled with cannibalism. The supposed Formosan, who called himself George Psalmanazar, was in fact a blonde-haired, blue-eyed continental European who had never been to Taiwan in his life.

The Iran-Contra affair was a failure. It didn’t topple the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, nor did it improve U.S. relations with Iran. And yet, the subsequent cover-up and damage-control by the Reagan administration was a success. Almost no one talks about the scandal now. Despite damning evidence against the administration being out in the open, the scandal did not impact Reagan’s legacy in the way Watergate did Nixon’s, or Clinton’s scandals did his. It was also, oddly enough, probably the best thing to ever happen to Oliver North’s career.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Most people remember Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but fewer remember Michael Collins, the member of the mission who did not set foot on the moon. However, even though Collins didn’t set foot on the lunar surface, he did achieve something almost just as momentous: By orbiting around the moon in 1969 he became the single most isolated human being in all of history.

Duncan Ryuken Williams’s new book,American Sutra, explores Japanese Internment with a focus on Buddhism. Most Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were Buddhists, and before and during internment these members of the Japanese-American community were treated very differently than those who’d converted to Christianity. Buddhists in internment camps found ways to practice their faith, despite it being discouraged, and Buddhist soldiers were crucial to the American war effort, both in Europe and the Pacific.

We’ve hit two hundred episodes! To celebrate we’re taking your questions. Designer, photographer, and all-around superhero Sarah Giffrow joined Joe to answer talk about how to think about history, the state of podcasting, and dinosaurs.

Humans are the only animals to wear clothing, and much of that clothing is made out of other animals. In Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear author Melissa Kwasny explores the worlds of leather, wool, silk, feathers, pearls, and fur. Her research into the animal origins of clothing prompted an exploration of both the history of clothing as well as the ethical and environmental issues surrounding wearable animal products.

Congress had made its view clear with the Boland amendments: The United States government would not support the Contras in Nicaragua. However, the Reagan administration was determined to support the anti-Sandinista fighters. To get funds where they needed to be the administration concocted a complicated scheme involving missiles, Iran, hostages, and Hezbollah. It worked at first, with secret American arms sales leading to the release of an American hostage. However, complications at the Lisbon airport, more hostage taking in Lebanon, and the need for constant secrecy ensured that the scheme wouldn’t last forever.

Beef occupies a unique place in American culture. In his new book Red Meat Republic Joshua Specht examines the history of the American beef industry. He examines how ranching and range land was seized from Native Americans, how beef shaped industrial and labor history, and the role beef still plays in American ideas of class, gender, and identity.

In the early 1980s the Reagan administration changed how the U.S. engaged with Communism abroad. Instead of following a policy of containment, the U.S. would actively support anti-Communist insurgents around the world. This policy, which later became known as the Reagan administration, positioned the US as the supporter and benefactor of fighters like the Afghan Mujahideen and the Nicaraguan Contras.
However, Reagan’s policy of intervention didn’t garner universal support, especially in light of atrocities committed by the Contras. News of American intervention in Nicaragua angered many in the U.S. In 1982 and 1984 Congress attached amendments to routine appropriations bills that prevented the CIA and State Department from providing funds to the Contras. These amendments, known as the Boland Amendments, prevented the executive branch from taking further action in Nicaragua.
If the administration wished to support the Contras further, they would have to break the law.

The Cold War defined geopolitics for much of the 20th century, often turning local conflicts and regional politics into large, proxy battles between the United States and Soviet Union. In 1979 the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) successfully ousted Nicaragua’s Somoza regime, ending four decades of dictatorship. Almost immediately after the revolution, though, the remnants of the old regime began fighting back. These new rebel fighters, the Contras, received support from the American CIA as early as 1981.
The revolution set the stage for one of the strangest episodes of the Cold War, the Iran-Contra affair, in which US officials, in the name of supporting rebel fighters in Central America, would turn to cloak-and-dagger deals with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Since the late 1800s numerous figures such as Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and Malcolm X have expressed doubt about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. These deniers, variously known as anti-Stratfordians, have put forward a variety of other candidates as the possible author of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, including Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. However, all of the evidence suggests that there is no mystery about who wrote the plays. All available evidence for authorship points to Shakespeare being exactly who we thought he was: The son of a glover from Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Notre Dame Cathedral, the world’s best-known example of Gothic architecture, was partially destroyed in a fire. The church requires extensive restoration, but this is not the first time that Notre Dame has fallen into ruin. When Victor Hugo wrote his 1831 novel Notre Dame de Paris (known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame in English) the church was in disrepair. Hugo’s novel inspired a restoration starting in 1844, and architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc created much of what we, until last Monday, associated with Notre Dame. The picture below is from 1847, during Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration. Note the lack of spire, which had yet to be built.
Change, even tragic change, is a fact of life for monuments, and in this episode we also look at how other famous sites have been transformed throughout their history.

In 1983 a Soviet satellite system erroneously detected five incoming American nuclear missiles. Stanislav Petrov, the man tasked with reporting the alert to the USSR’s leadership, suddenly had a dire choice: He could do his duty and start a nuclear war, or ignore the report in hopes that it was a false alarm. He chose the latter, and in doing so saved the world.
 

Francisco Goya is one of the first modern artist, and toward the end of his life he painted his most well-known works, the Black Paintings, into the walls of his home outside Madrid. The most famous of the Black Paintings is Saturn Devouring His Son (pictured below), but it’s only one of fifteen disturbing, dark images in the series.

The show is going in a new direction. Listen to find out why.

The image of cowboys playing poker has shown up again and again in Westerns. However, if you walked into a saloon in the late 1800s, you likely wouldn’t find poker, blackjack, or other contemporary casino games. Instead, you’d probably find a game of faro. The French card game (also known as “bucking the tiger” or “riding the tiger”) was popular throughout Europe and North America up until WWII. Faro was all but synonymous with gambling, and prominent figures like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were fans of the game. However, it is essentially extinct now.

Find out what a badly-sourced article in the Toronto Sun, a fake list of grunge slang in the New York Times, and an oft-repeated anecdote about a floating bordello can tell us about better evaluating sources and looking at how we know what we know.

This week we look at the animal companions of America’s chief executives, including opossums, eagles, and very good dogs.

Taiwan’s status is a matter of debate. In this episode we get into its history and try to suss out whether it’s part of China or an independent country.

I’m doing a big thing in 2019, and I need to tell you about it.

Over the past decade or so the Krampus, a demonic figure from German folklore, has become something of a Christmas staple in the United States. However, the Krampus is by no means the only German Christmas monster. Frau Berchta, Knecht Ruprecht, Belsnickel, and Pere Fouettard have also struck fear into the hearts of children around the holidays.

In the 1920s German architect Herman Sorgel had a plan: Solve nearly all of Europe’s social, economic, and environmental problems by partially draining the Mediterranean. He called the project “Atlantropa,” and it would have been a massive environmental disaster.
View a 1951 clip outlining the plan (in German) here. Below is an image of Sorgel’s plan for a mssive dam across the strait of Gibraltar, which would have dwarfed even the Three Gorges Dam.

Thanksgiving, at least in New York City at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s, used to look a lot like Halloween. Traditional trappings like turkey and family gatherings were certainly present, but it was also a day for children (and adults) to dress in costumes, make noise, and go from house to house demanding treats and pennies.

Lucy Bellwood is a cartoonist and author in Portland, Oregon. Last year her illustration of sailor tattoos went viral. We talked about nautical tattoos, their meanings, and what it means to get well-known on the Internet very quickly. We also touched on how one researches and studies history, especially in the context of tattoo myths about James Cook and a book Bellwood recommends, The Discovery of Jeanne Baret.
Letterpress versions of Bellwood’s print are available here, and regular prints are here.

Being buried alive was one of the most common phobias of the Victorian era. Fear of premature interment in a coffin inspired the creation of the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial, an Edgar Allan Poe short story about fear of being buried alive, and safety coffins designed to let in air and light and, in the event of early burial, allow the still-living person contact with the outside world.

Cannibalism is one of the the most prevalent taboos across human societies, and people who practice cannibalism have frequently been demonized throughout history. The Wendigo, a creature from Algonquin folklore, is one of the most vivid examples of how cannibalism is demonized. The story goes that if someone consumes human flesh, they will become a flesh-eating monster that never truly satiates its desire for human flesh.
The image below is from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, illustrated by Stephen Gammell.

Some reflections on giving tours, ghost tours, and how the Philip experiment is kind of like Dungeons and Dragons.

In 897 Pope Stephen VI put the corpse of one of his predecessors, Formosus, on trial. The current pope ordered that the former pope’s dead body be dressed in papal finery and put on a throne to stand trial. Stephen VI acted as prosecutor, accusing his predecessor of attempting to have two bishoprics at once and coveting the papacy. The current pope then ordered the Formosus’ body stripped of its finery, the fingers on his right hand be cut off, and his body thrown into the Tiber.
The painting below, Pope Formosus and Stephen VII, is the work of French artist Jean-Paul Laurens and painted in 1870.

From 1954 until 2011 the Comics Code Authority exercised control over what could and couldn’t be in comic books. The first version of the code was one of the most restrictive content regimes U.S. media has ever known, banning subject matter such as sex, drugs, and supernatural elements such as werewolves and vampires. The Code was revised in 1971 and 1989, before slowly fading away after 2001 and then being wholly abandoned by 2011. The Comics Code Authority seal is now, ironically, owned by theComic Book Legal Defense Fund.

From 1964 until 2011 comic books were nominally approved by a content regime called the Comics Code Authority. The Authority grew out of anti-comic book sentiment in the early part of the twentieth century. Anti-comics advocates like Fredric Wertham portrayed comic books as filled with crime, sex, and corrupting ideas. In 1954 a senate subcommittee headed by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver all but put comic books on trial, with Kefauver grilling EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines about the content of then-popular horror comics. The exchange would change comic book publishing forever.

The disappearance of the Roanoke colony is one of America’s oldest mysteries. However, the story of the Roanoke colony was only a major pillar of American historiography after the 1830s, and later on in the 1800s Virginia Dare, the granddaughter of colonial governor and artist John White, became a symbol of the American South and white supremacy.
For more on the Roanoke colony check out Andrew Lawler’s excellent new book The Secret Token, which I heartily endorse.

Shakespeare’s Tempest is a fantasy, but it’s backgrounded by European encounters with the New World. When the play was written in 1610 or 1611 European sailors had already been exploring the Americas for over a century. References to the New World show up in both the play’s text and themes, and scholars have often viewed the tempest through a colonial or postcolonial lens, though it still escapes easy allegory.
This episode was recorded live at The Steep and Thorny Way to Heaven, a Portland art space.

The Pacific Northwest was one of the last areas to be accurately mapped by European and American cartographers. At various times mapmakers thought that it was near a Asian region called Ania, that California was an Island, or that a great inland sea took up much of the American west. When Lewis and Clark ventured westward, they had a clearer idea of the coastline, yet they were still taken by surprise when they encountered the Rocky anc Cascade mountain ranges.
Visuals to accompany this live event are here.

Hacking predated personal computers. From the 1960s until the 1990s early hackers known as “phreaks” learned how to hack into phone lines, make long-distance calls for free, set up secret conference calls, and explore the global telephone network.

In the first decade of the 20th century you could pick up a phone in New York City and listen to the world’s first ever electronic synthesizer. The Telharmonium was the invention of Thaddeus Cahill, and the 200 ton musical instrument used rotating cogs to produce electronic sounds, accessible to anyone who subscribed to what’s arguably the progenitor of all musical streaming services.

In the early 1980s the US Navy was determined to uncover a secret gay subculture at the Great Lakes Naval Base just outside of Chicago. All of the men they were looking for seemed to be friends of Dorothy. If the NIS could find, Dorothy, they thought, they could blow this whole thing wide open.
We’ve talked about The Wizard of Oz and monetary policy before. This is different.

This week we close out our look at North Korea with three different scenarios for the future: War, reform, and reunification. None of the these futures are good. A war would kill millions. Reform could entrench a brutal dictatorship. Reunification could create an impoverished underclass in a new Korea for a generation.
Image via CNN.

Escaping North Korea is difficult, but it can be done. Notable escapees include Choi Eun-Hee and Shin Sang-Ok, a South Korean actress and director who Kim Jong Il captured and forced to make movies, like the Godzilla knockoff Pulgasari, pictured below. Kenji Fujimoto is the pseudonym for Kim’s personal chef who escaped to Japan in 2001. But, the vast majority of North Koreans escape the country because of famine and desperation, and the trip is a long and arduous one through China and Southeast Asia.

Happy Defenestration Day! On May 23rd, 1618 a bunch of angry Bohemian nobles shoved some government officials out of a window. The Second Defenestration of Prague kicked off the Thirty Years’ War, but today we mark it as a sesquipedalian occasion to celebrate very large words.

Even as its citizens starved, Kim Jong Il was able to assure that North Korea was able to obtain nuclear weapons. He did this by raising revenue with criminal activity, prioritizing the military above all else, bribing a Pakistani nuclear scientist, and reverse-engineering Scud missiles.

The transition of power from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il was a gradual one. From 1980 until 1994, it’s probably that the younger Kim did most of the day-to-day ruling of North Korea, with Kim Il Sung acting in a more removed capacity. When Kim Il Sung did die, it was at an opportune time. His son assumed power in 1994, just in time to preside over a famine that would kill over two million North Korean citizens.

The 1980s and early 1990s were a bad time for North Korea. The DPRK had to endure South Korea hosting the 1988 Olympics, the country sunk billions of dollars into wasteful infrastructure projects, and the Cold War ended, depriving them of Soviet aid. After that, North Korea suffered a symbolic blow in 1994 when Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader, died at the age of eighty two.

For years South Korea was a dysfunctional military dictatorship under leaders like Rhee Syngman and Park Chun Hee. Assassination, martial law, and political repression were the order of the day. North Korean propaganda was able to exploit the militarism, chaos, and violence in their neighbor in propaganda, but after democratic reforms in the 1980s, the relative stability of the Korean peninsula is very different. For the most part. South Korea still does have the occasional presidential scandal.

On April 1st, 1957 a BBC One news program ran a straight-faced and ostensibly real report on Switerzerland’s spring spaghetti crop, and convinced some of their viewers that spaghetti grew on trees.

During the Cold War, North Korea primarily interacted with South Korea and the United States via building the DMZ, several assassination attempts on South Korean presidents, and the taking of the USS Pueblo, the crew of which are pictured below. Note how they held their fingers when being photographed by their North Korean captors.

Juche is the animating principal of North Korea. It’s usually translated as “self-reliance,” but in fact it means whatever is good for the regime. Juche is the ideology that North Korea uses to convince it’s people, the outside world, and itself that its system of totalitarianism and authoritarianism has a coherent ideological basis. It’s distinct from communism, often incoherent, and is what keeps North Korea from integrating itself into the larger world.

The Cold War was a good time for North Korea. For much of the mid 20th century it was relatively better off than South Korea, and North Korean citizens recognized that the new regime was worlds better than what they had under Japanese occupation. In this time period of prosperity, the North Korean leadership played China and the Soviet Union off each other, instituted a caste system, and cultivated a policy of isolationism.

The Korean War was supposed to be over quickly. However, due to intervention from the United Nations, China, and the Soviet Union, what would have been a quick regional conflict turned into a years-long war that involved over twenty countries and left millions dead. At the end of it, the borders between the two Koreas looked much like they had before the war, and it gradually became apparent that the division would not go away anytime soon.

Prior to the Korean War, both North and South saw themselves as the legitimate government for the entire peninsula. At the time, the North was considered the more advanced, industrialized part of the peninsula, and Kim Il Sung believed that he could win a war with the more rural South. Stalin gave Kim permission for an invasion, and the Soviet premier believed that the war would be small, regional, and over quickly. However, the United States was able to mobilize the United Nations for what was termed a “police action” to intervene on the peninsula. The was would be regional, but it would drag on for years and involve several major world powers.

After WWII, the Korean peninsula was briefly united again as The People’s Republic of Korea. However, the unification wouldn’t last. American and Soviet forces divided the peninsula along the 38th parallel, and in the north the Soviet Union set about creating a puppet state. However, the leader they chose, Kim Il Sung, and the founding ideology of their new state would not play out entirely as they had planned.

Japanese occupation changed North Korea, with various citizens either collaborating with or actively resisting it. One of those resistors was a guerrilla fighter named Kim Song Ju, who would later be known as Kim Il Sung. If you believe North Korean propaganda (which you shouldn’t) Kim Il Sung was born of humble farmers and formed a secret Korean resistance during the occupation. In fact, his grandfather was a Protestant minister, he spent most of his youth in China, and the units he fought with were organized either by the Chinese or Russians.

Japan’s occupation of Korea was a gradual process. As far back as 1876 Japan approached Korea with unequal treaties that attempted to economically exploit the peninsula. In 1895 Japanese officials assassinated Korea’s Queen Min, who opposed foreign occupation and influence, and Korea subsequently declared itself an empire. However, Japan returned in 1905 with yet another treaty that stripped Korea of its sovereignty, and completely annexed the peninsula in 1910.

This year, we’re doing a long-form series on North Korea. We’ll get into the history, culture, and ideology of the isolated, totalitarian country. In order to get proper context, we’re starting with a (very) brief overview of Korean history. In the twentieth century, Korea is often thought of as a country in tumult, and one that is at the mercy of its more powerful neighbors. However, for most of Korea’s history, it was anything but.

Sarah Fraser is the author of The Last Highlander, which details the life of Simon Fraser, the 11th Lord Lovat. Fraser’s life was one of political intrigue, feuds, international deal making, and rebellion. He was eventually beheaded in 1747, the last British peer to face such a fate.

We’re on break for the holidays. The podcast will return on January 8th with an interview episode, and on January 15th with the launch of a new long-form series!

The Nativity scene is an iconic Christmas decoration, but it only has a tenuous biblical foundation. Christmas traditions are often varied and strange, and representations of the Nativity can vary from region to region. In Spain, one element of the Nativity scene is the caganer, a peasant man defecating behind the barn. Yes. That is a real thing. While all traditions are unusual to outsiders, Catalonia’s tradition of poop-related Christmas things might be the oddest.
 

This episode is a little different. It’s about a topic that I’ve previously written and spoken about, though not on the podcast. Vanport was one of the largest federal housing projects in the United States during WWII. It went up hastily and cheaply just outside of Portland, Oregon, producing supply ships in less than two months, and was Oregon’s first major African-American population center. In 1948, though, it was destroyed by a cataclysmic flood that wiped the then second-largest town in Oregon off the map entirely.