Fake news about the past is fake history.
Did Hugo Boss design the Nazi uniforms?
Did medieval people think the world was flat?
Did Napoleon shoot the nose off the Sphinx?
*Spoiler Alert* The answer to all those questions is no.
From the famous quote 'Let them eat cake' - mistakenly attributed to Marie Antoinette - to the apocryphal horns that adorned V ... Show More
Yesterday
Sari Hanafi, "Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
In an era of deepening polarization, Sari Hanafi examines how social scientists often reproduce the very injustices they seek to challenge, taking entrenched positions while dismissing alternative perspectives. He introduces the concept of symbolic liberalism - a contradiction in ... Show More
50m 5s
Mar 10
Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress
Fifty years of changemaking and reform haven't fixed Congress—what does that reveal about American democracy? In Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress, Maya Kornberg chronicles the efforts of congressional reformers over the last fifty years and document ... Show More
54m 54s
Mar 10
Stephen Lee Naish, "Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency" (Lever Press, 2026)
Movies open a window into our collective soul. In Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency (Lever Press, 2026), Stephen Lee Naish guides us through recent cinematic phenomena that reflect/refract our contemporary political existence. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independen ... Show More
1h 9m
Nov 2022
Unearthed! Autumn 2022, Part 2
<p>The second part of our autumn list of things that were unearthed in the recent past includes potpourri, repatriations, shipwrecks, medical finds, Viking items, and books and letters.</p> <p><strong>Research: </strong></p> <ul> <li>Abbott, Dennis. “Archaeologists unearth skelet ... Show More
41m 18s
Feb 2023
Medieval Leaders and Queens: Aethelfled, Hildegard & Jadwiga.
<p>Aethelfled, a warrior queen who crushed the Vikings, Jadwiga, the first Queen Regent of Poland and Hildegard of Bingen, an 11th-century polymath abbess who became a 20th-century feminist icon and saint. Art and cultural historian Dr Janina Ramirez joins Dan on today's episode ... Show More
36m 47s
Dec 2023
Nazi Germany: the myth of the innocent bystander
In 1945, after defeat in the Second World War, many Germans claimed to have known nothing about what had happened to their fellow Jewish citizens – and with that, the idea of the ‘innocent bystander’ was born. But just how true was this claim? Delving into a rich archive of perso ... Show More
37m 18s
Sep 2022
The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe
<p>Marilyn Monroe. She's got to be one of the most famous people of all time, hasn't she?</p><br><p>But what happens when an investigative war reporter dedicates years of his life to finding out who <em>real</em> Marilyn was, interviewing hundreds of people who knew her, from her ... Show More
40m 19s
Feb 2019
Love, Hate, and Sex from the History of Science
<p>This Valentine's Day we could have just brought you some sappy love stories from science's past. But instead we offer you three tales of lust, loneliness, betrayal, pettiness, and not one, but two beheadings.</p> <h2>Credits</h2> <p>Hosts: <a href="file:///profile/alexis-j-ped ... Show More
38m 34s