By September 1066, England had become the prize in one of the most extraordinary succession crises of the medieval world. King Edward the Confessor was dead, Harold Godwinson occupied the English throne, and two powerful foreign rulers had already claimed that the crown belonged to them. Duke William of Normandy was preparing an invasion across…
Interest in historical sites where popular legend has substantially diverged from the documentary record has remained strong among readers of American history, particularly cases involving a private individual’s life story overtaken by commercially convenient folklore after their death. The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, represents one of the clearest such cases in American…
From Manhattan firehouses to Honolulu, the surprising life of the man history turned into baseball’s founding father. Brian D’Ambrosio explains. Said to be the New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club, circa 1847 – Alexander Cartwright, top-centre. Source: Public domain, 19cbaseball.com, available here. Alexander Cartwright did not invent baseball. That statement sounds almost sacrilegious in Cooperstown,…
As one of the wealthiest figures in American history, Andrew Carnegie left behind a legacy that remains deeply contested among historians and the public alike. While his name is permanently memorialized on thousands of public libraries, universities, and cultural institutions across the globe, his rise to unprecedented economic dominance was achieved through methods that raise…
by Natalie Livingstone Glancing at Dame Laura Knight’s painting of the Nuremberg Trials below, you might assume the historic pursuit of Nazi war criminals was a strictly male affair. However, as author Natalie Livingstone reveals, that depiction is far from the whole truth. Sparked by her personal connection as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, in…
Looksmaxxing, weight loss, and muscle building have fueled a massive craze for injectable peptides. Some natural and some synthetic. These injectables have unleashed a multi-billion-dollar gray-market industry online and a high-stakes frontier for the pharmaceutical industry. Today, we reach back to the quest to manufacture the first peptide-based medicine: Insulin. Guests: Alison Li, historian of…
The controversy surrounding the Tariff of 1828, often identified as the “Tariff of Abominations,” represents one of the earliest and clearest moments when sectional identity and constitutional theory collided in the early United States. What began as a dispute over duties on imported goods evolved into a foundational argument about the nature of the Union…
When Edward the Confessor died on the 5th January 1066, England did not simply lose a king. It lost the political center around which a fragile succession had been organized. Within hours, the kingdom had a new ruler, but that ruler was immediately confronted by men who believed that the English crown belonged to them.…
From dating shows to police interrogation rooms, the polygraph test has long been marketed as a way to detect deception. But can it really? And who decided we needed a truth machine in the first place? In this episode, a Throughline listener sends us on a quest to uncover the story of the lie detector.…
Carl von Clausewitz is one of the most celebrated, referenced, and original military strategists: his magnum opus On War is eclipsed in popularity and impact on the philosophy of war only by The Art of War. The philosophy of war according to Clausewitz is illustrated in the book’s most enduring quote: ‘War is merely the…