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History Buffoons Podcast
Two buffoons who want to learn about history!
Our names are Bradley and Kate. We both love to learn about history but also don't want to take it too seriously. Join us as we dive in to random stories, people, events and so much more throughout history. Each episode we will talk about a new topic with a light hearted approach to learn and have some fun.
Find us at: historybuffoonspodcast.com
Reach out to us at: historybuffoonspodcast@gmail.com
Episodes
121 episodes
Flamma Lamma Ding Dong: Flamma The Gladiator
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 offere...
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Episode 86
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41:06
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Several Shoulders: The Molotov Cocktail
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 Wi...
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Episode 85
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47:48
The Origin of Weird: Thalidomide Babies
A tiny pill promised calm nights and easier mornings, then left a generation of families asking how a “safe” sedative could cause so much harm. We unravel the thalidomide story from its meteoric rise as a gentle sleep aid to the global wave of ...
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Episode 34
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20:54
Life After Death: Henrietta Lacks
A routine biopsy. An unstoppable cell line. A legacy that reshaped medicine while raising questions we still struggle to answer. We tell the story of Henrietta Lacks—her life in Virginia and Maryland, her fight against an aggressive cervical ca...
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Episode 84
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52:39
Today's Winds-day: The Dust Bowl
A wall of dust a mile high. Coffee that tasted like soil. Kids coughing through the night while parents sealed windows with wet sheets. We dive into the Dirty Thirties to trace how a wheat boom, a drought, and one very bad idea—“rain follows th...
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Episode 83
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1:14:41
The Origin of Weird: Anne Greene, Life After Hanging
A servant is hanged before a crowd, declared dead, and sent to the university as a cadaver. Then a faint gasp stops the scalpels. We follow Anne Greene’s astonishing survival in 1650 Oxford—where public justice, scarce cadavers, and emerging me...
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Episode 33
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19:32
Fahrenheit 451: Mary Bowser
A servant who wasn’t supposed to notice anything noticed everything. We dive into the astonishing, under-told story of Mary Bowser—a Black woman born enslaved in Richmond—who used education, nerve, and perfect cover to spy inside Jefferson Davi...
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Episode 82
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38:57
Long Urban Hair: Julie d’Aubigny
A sword in one hand and an aria on her lips—Julie D’Aubigny refused to live small. We follow her wild arc from a court-trained tomboy who mastered the rapier to a fugitive busking in taverns, then to a contralto who conquered the Paris Opera un...
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Episode 81
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53:13
The Origin of Weird: The Oakville Blobs
The sky shouldn’t do this. Just after midnight, a quiet Washington town found itself coated in clear, jelly-like blobs that smeared across windshields, clung to grass, and sent neighbors searching for answers as nausea, headaches, and vertigo b...
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Episode 32
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17:52
Scooby Doo of Scotland: The Black Dinner of 1440
A royal feast inside Edinburgh Castle promised safety, friendship, and a reset between a child king and the heirs of Scotland’s most powerful clan. Instead, the Black Dinner of 1440 delivered a brutal omen, a midnight judgment, and two young Do...
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Episode 80
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57:27
Classic Scurvy: The Belgica Expedition
A wooden ship locked in Antarctic ice for 13 months. A captain who wouldn’t turn back. A doctor who broke the rules and saved the crew with the world’s least appetizing “medicine.” We tell the raw, human story of the Belgica—part survival epic,...
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Episode 79
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1:11:49
The Origin Of Weird: Atomic Bombs Fall on North Carolina, 1961 Goldsboro Incident
A midnight breakup over rural North Carolina. Two hydrogen bombs sheared from a disintegrating B-52. And one small switch that kept the East Coast from waking to a mushroom cloud. We dive into the Goldsboro incident of 1961, where a routine Col...
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Episode 31
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31:31
Tutankhamun’s Money: Howard Carter
A nervous hello, a lime beer, and then a sand-choked staircase that changed history. We pull back the curtain on Howard Carter’s last-chance bet with Lord Carnarvon and the painstaking, high-stakes work that turned a flicker of candlelight into...
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Episode 78
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1:08:16
Encephal-in-Silence: Dr. Oliver Sacks
A forgotten epidemic turned people into “living statues,” and one composite patient—Leonard—shows what it means to be awake, alive, and trapped. We trace encephalitis lethargica from its eerie rise to its unexplained disappearance, then step in...
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Episode 77
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1:05:14
The Origin of Weird: Corporal Wojtek the Bear
A starving cub on a mountain trail becomes a brother in arms on one of World War II’s toughest fronts. We tell the full, rarely believed story of Wojtek—the Polish bear who learned to salute, drank beer with the unit, and carried live ammunitio...
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Episode 30
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26:56
Son of a Wealthy Aristocat: James Smithson
A British scientist born in France, dead in Italy, and never once a visitor to America quietly set the stage for the world’s largest museum complex. James Smithson’s curious will, his wayward heir, and a windfall that shocked Washington launche...
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Episode 76
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58:30
Irena's List: Irena Sendler
A forged ID, a nurse’s armband, and a will that never broke. We share the astonishing real story of Irena Sendler, the Polish social worker who smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and buried their true names in glass jars be...
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Episode 75
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52:08
The Origin of Weird: 1904 Olympic Marathon
What happens when a world-stage marathon is staged like a dare? We head back to the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis and trace a course lined with heat, dust, and a shocking lack of common sense. With temperatures near 90 degrees, one lonely water st...
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Episode 29
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17:45
Buffoons Reminisce
What do a goat mayor, a corpse on trial, and a coconut SOS have in common? They all made our year of storytelling outrageous, insightful, and way more fun than history class ever was. We mark the end of the year by quizzing each other on the wi...
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Episode 74
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1:03:37
In This Our Life: Hattie McDaniel
A nightclub mic no one expected to be open. A maid’s uniform worn to an audition. An ovation that shook the room while the system kept her at the far wall. Hattie McDaniel’s life reads like a ledger of impossible choices—yet it’s also a map of ...
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Episode 73
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1:21:03
The Origin of Weird: Timothy Dexter
A fortune built on bed warmers, coal, stray cats, and whale bones shouldn’t exist, yet Timothy Dexter kept cashing in. We jump into the outrageous life of a leather apprentice turned millionaire who wagered on “worthless” Continental currency, ...
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Episode 28
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29:17
Quaker Beard Man: James VI and I
A baby crowned in a cradle. A teenage king kidnapped by his own nobles. A husband sailing into lethal storms to bring home his bride—and returning convinced that enemies could conjure weather. Our latest deep dive follows James VI of Scotland, ...
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Episode 72
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1:01:31
1-800-TYPHOID: The Oregon Trail Part Two
Hope can fit inside a covered wagon, but so can heartbreak. We trace the Sager family’s 1844 push toward Oregon—from a baby born on the prairie and a nine-year-old’s leg crushed under a wagon wheel to typhoid, orphanhood, and a desperate bid fo...
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Episode 71
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1:13:15
The Origin of Weird: The Anti Pope Schism
Power doesn’t just shape history—it picks the chair. We dive into the Western Schism, when Europe faced not one but multiple popes, and legitimacy became a battlefield of theology, politics, and personality. From Rome to Avignon to a seaside fo...
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Episode 27
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39:39
Chimney Cricket: Oregon Trail Part One
A 2,000-mile promise of “free land” sounds irresistible—until you’re walking beside a creaking wagon at two miles per hour, guarding flour from river water and praying cholera spares your camp. We’re pulling the curtain back on the real Oregon ...
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Episode 70
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1:35:45