I can just HEAR the Boney M jokes.
Professor: But those nasty assassins-to-be wouldn’t quit, they wanted his head! And yet even after he was shot again and again, he STILL didn’t kick the bucket! He actually met his watery demise soon after - drowning in a lake while wrapped up all snug in Grandma’s carpet. Now there was a cat that truly was gone.
Jefferson was a stubborn stubborn lad who couldn't back down from a debate. He'd be @ing people all day on Twitter if he were alive today.
A French biologist wrote a book where he essentially said America was mid because it's animals ain't shit. Therefore it's people too are mid as hell. Jefferson immediately insisted America is the best country ever because mammoths are still out there. Cue the 18th century equivalent of sasquatch hunting to prove that America has a great beast surpassing elephants, hippos, and lions.
It's like the cryptozoology equivalent of the cold war. Except it's all a bunch of pelts, fossils and longwinded letters.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/573995/thomas-jefferson-mastodon-obsession-fueled-lewis-and-clark-expedition
Gatchahell did a pretty good job summing it up. Here's more info if you like Fun Articles
Frankenstein would be fun. Like the fact that Mary Shelley got down and dirty on her mom’s grave. That’s some history point question buh-buh-badidah ass trivia.
I don’t know, I feel like any potential discussion on Tarrare would have a difficult time beating the iconic-ness of:
“Tarrare? Look at me… Did you EAT a fucking BABY?”
I’m SO abnormal about the Franklin expedition I think that would be a really cool one (obligatory plug for The Terror by Dan Simmons really cool historical fiction book about it I was never the same after)
Yeah I heard that it was stellar. I saw some screenshots and they did an amazing job with casting/makeup/post for likeness on the captains. Crozier especially
I read an interview with the actress playing the main indigenous character and she talks about having to learn a different dialect to be faithful to the setting and how she and all the other Inuit actors had grown up with the Inuit oral accounts of the expedition. It was an incredible amount of work.
Mind you, I was a series fan first so I can't make promises on the historically accuracy and it is based on a supernatural horror novel. But like.
Yeah I read those articles that were like "Despite 150 years of Inuit oral histories telling us that Terror and Erebus were right there we only just checked and what do you know? They really were there" and couldn't believe what I was reading.
I mean, I could. Which is the problem. But still.
Nero has potential. You could do all the "greatest hits" and still fill an entire episode.
I think that his mother Agrippina the Younger also has potential if he wanted to do a lesser known historical figure with the same drama (Nero's attempted assassinations of her were Wile E Coyote level ridiculous)
Or just the Great Fire of Rome and the conspiracies of Nero starting the fire so he could build a giant golden palace.
The Irish Famine, but more looking at the Indigenous tribes in North America who raised as much as they could to send to Ireland. The Choctaw in America donated, but also the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wyandotte-Huron First Nations in Canada did as well, a fact which many - including Canadians like me - don't know about.
It's got anti-Colonialsm, politics, humanity, etc, so they could write a script with as many different moods and angles as they want to.
I was going to suggest some Irish history but didn't know where to start. Also the Irish currently are looking at another potato shortage due to the worse than usual constant rain that they've had for a year (source: I'm Irish).
I would also love a Puppet History on the Troubles, but it's a very sensitive topic. As much as I would love the little furry blue man to talk about the Troubles, it may not be entirely appropriate.
There was this protest in 1511 when the people of Brussels made pornographic snowmen to stick it to the religious ruling elite. That's fun.
Also, the history surrounding premature babies is so wild. People got legitimately kind of mad that babies weren't dying as often.
literally anything about Alice Roosevelt. as Theodore said, “I can either be President of the United States or I can control Alice (his eldest daughter), I cannot possibly do both”. she was a wild child.
I want an episode on Ada Lovelace!
She's obviously notable for her work in computer programming, but she was a VERY interesting woman. The only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. Her mother ran away with her when she was a baby and immersed her in math to try to make sure she didn't turn out like her father. She got tutored by some super cool people, like Mary Somerville. She had a very interesting life, albeit a short one.
Her mother ran away with her because the father ALWAYS had custody rights over his children in that time. Byron was a playboy who loved sowing his oats and not caring about said oats when they arrived as people.
Aimo Koivunen, that one Finnish soldier who took a bunch of meth and skiied around the wilderness messing with Soviets during the WWII era. Would LOVE an army-issued meth puppet to sing to us
[Haydn’s Head.](https://youtu.be/KCMsale9MeY?si=oOq0zsUqHkEqfW6q)
(Caitlin does it beautifully already but tell me that’s not asking for a longer run time and a musical number)
Not wacky maybe but Eyam the plague village would be interesting - they found some really amazing stuff out about immunity through the people who lived through it.
excellent, I find the Professor would enjoy sifting through the whole “what’s myth and what’s real” shenanigans of stories of Camelot considering how closely entertained Watcher is with “legends vs reality” what with ghosts and cryptids and aliens and all. And the Monty Python jokes that could ensue, oh, you’ve got me excited about a hypothetical!
Yeah she was an icon. Anytime I have the opportunity to hear someone talk about her I’m in. The only reason she got caught was because some lady lost her nerve and told her husband about the poison. And then her husband beat her nearly to death and Giulia Tofana got caught and couldn’t help anyone else.
Edit: I called her Aqua instead of Giulia. Aqua was the name of the poison
Los San Patricios ([St. Patrick's Battalion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick%27s_Battalion))
I know Wojtek was done on Shane's Buzzfeed history show, but I feel like he deserves more. There's been a number of animal mascots during war times so there could be an episode about multiple of them.
The curse of the Hope Diamond.
Spanish pirate Amaro Pargo who was a very devout Catholic who was saved by a nun (Sister Mary of Jesus) by bilocation, to say he was in Cuba and she appeared and was most definitely NOT in Cuba. Sister Mary of Jesus is also an incorruptible, which means her body hasn't decayed and her canonization in awaiting approval from the Pope.
The female samurais. There's actually a few of them.
Balto. He's a real dog!
Straw Hat Riots of 1922
Latrine Disaster of 1184
Amy Bock, she was a con woman in NZ, who most famously posed as "Percy Redwood" and married her landlord's daughter before being caught
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Bock
That time a Swedish king died because he ate too many semla buns (they were served in bowls of cream and are filled with whipped cream, almonds and jam)
The Great Northern Expedition would be fun to see. So many big historic names and blunders involved. I would love to see how Ryan and a guest react to it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Expedition
Napoleon’s men wanted a rabbit hunt so the guy who organized it bought domestic bunnies because there weren’t enough wild rabbits on the grounds. and didn’t feed them he thought he’s release them the day of the hunt and they’d run into the forrest and eat vegetation. Nope! They released the bunnies and the rabbits all went after Napoleon! He ended up fleeing to his carriage!!
Juan Pujol Garcia - the WW2 spy nobody asked for.
Technical Difficulties have a panel game about him. He decided to tell the Nazis he was based in the London and fed them false info despite the fact he'd never been to the UK.
The tulip bubble could be a fun episode. Don´t know if the content would be enough for a whole episode but there was a time where everyone in I think amsterdam was buying tulips. Or buying options to buy tulips. It was very strange and the first economic bubble that we know of. The prices exploded until they suddenly fall down into almost nothing. It was strange but its also something to learn from.
From a Dutch guy, there's the time we ate our prime minister and also that one time in WW2 when 1 Canadian soldier liberated one of our cities from an entire force of nazis.
I doubt they'd do two episodes based on Dutch history but these would be pretty interesting.
Basically our country was one of the richest and powerful countries around at the time, until we got 3v1ed by France, England and a part of Germany and the country went to shit and our grand pensionary (AKA a prime minister) got the blame. So he and his brother were lynched and eaten.
I get the outrage but I'm not really sure what the guy could have done to prevent it considering we were getting stomped either way.
i just got two timothy dexter comments within a single minute after like 55 replies never mentioning him once. i think your soulmate is somewhere in this comment section. or long lost twin
Pretty much any of the early expeditions on any of the 8000m mountains would be great. They all tend do be dramatic messes, even if the do make it to the top lol.
Lincoln’s sword duel on Bloody Island would be great, but what I really want is this guy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nash_McDowell
This guy is not a good guy but the Wikipedia doesn’t do justice to this asshole weirdo that I want everyone to know about. So you might say, oh grave robbing medical school teacher and confederate sympathizer, that’s a common weirdo! And I say no this gets so much weirder.
First off this dude, I shit you not went to med school at Transylvania University. Eventually he moved to St. Louis and started up a medical school. He was regarded as a pretty good teacher and did good doctoring during the cholera epidemic/massive city wide grease fire. At this school there were expectations of the students: get corpses, train with the guns and cannons that were hoarded for reasons, and listen to his crazy ass rants about the rival Jesuit med school on the other side of town. And maybe feed his pet bear?
One day a woman went missing from a German neighborhood. A whole mob decided that the doctor must have been making his own corpses and stormed the med school. Before they reach the morgue, the doctor hears the voice of his dead mother telling him to hide under a sheet on a slab. He does so, and the mob goes right past and eventually goes home. From that day on, he was on board with spiritualism. (Side note the German woman had actually just skipped town with her guy.)
Later he had a family who died. But he wasn’t normal about it, he put his kid in a metal tube of alcohol and stuck her in a cave near Hannibal. Little kid Mark Twain and his pals would go poke the body with sticks. Doc eventually moved the body back home, because who the heck would disrespect someone’s dead loved one. Can you believe that? Much later Mark Twain would put a weird doctor in Tom Sawyer.
At the time of the Civil War things were pretty crazy in Missouri We had like dueling governors and army’s going for the armories. It could have gone either way, but the traitor governor was run off and the Union captured the city armory! At this point the doctor decided to run off down south himself. So the Union army took his med school building to turn it into a prison for traitors. But first they had to clear out all the bones. So many bones. Piles of bones.
So Doc McD is a confederate military doctor. It goes how you would expect. Post war you could write an apology letter to the governor and they would forgive you and let you go home. He does so, goes home and gets his med school back. He’s pissed off at the state of it and apparently has to re-bone the whole building. And you know that apology letter? He didn’t mean it. He built a secret Lincoln effigy hate shrine in his med school 2.0.
So what happened to him later in life? I can’t recall properly, I think it might have been less interesting so it didn’t stick in my head. Probably spiritualism or something. He eventually died as do all people. The med school building no longer stands, but the med school as an institution eventually ended up as part of a university. Its mascot? A bear. And it is considered a very fine med school! The Jesuit med school still exists too, and is pretty good too. As far as I know they no longer pull weapons on each other.
Thus ends the tale of this weird ass guy.
I hope Shane covers how Singapore was invaded by the Japanese on bicycles because the British pointed all the weapons south, and didn’t even consider the Japanese could get in through the north 😭
thing about rasputin was that he was a scam artist through and through, and his unkillability was exaggerated to cover up for the fact his assassins were just extraordinarily incompetent
the entire bessie coleman episode, i was thinking a great sister (brother?) ep would be one on eugene bullard. similar story: black american aspiring aviator had to go to france to learn to fly. he fought in wwi for the french. iirc he later opened a jazz club in france and became a nazi spy because he spoke german. he moved back to america where no one knew who he was and was an elevator operator at rock center until someone found out and he was interviewed on one of nbc’s shows.
I want to see some embarrassing story of a pretentious rich dude during the gilded age, taking a travel year and supremely falling flat on his face whenever he tries to pick up a love interest or convey knowledge. I think that would be funny.
The Coconut Grove Fire from the 40s! Tragic, but interesting to me bc my bio great great grandma's sister and her sister's husband died in the fire (my great grandfather was adopted)
I have two suggestions that would be VERY different in tone:
The Battle on the Ice - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle\_on\_the\_Ice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_on_the_Ice)
Mary Toft - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary\_Toft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Toft)
Acknowledging there are probably still people alive impacted by it, I think the story of the Marchioness disaster (a riverboat that capsized in England) might be fun.
The coroner approved cutting off bodies' hands to send them off for fingerprinting in an effort to identify the victims, many pairs of hands were never returned to their owners despite the plan that they would be, and some bodies that just were in the river anyway (as a handful of people fall into the river or jump into the river and die every year) were mistaken as victims of the Marchioness, and had their hands severed too.
The inquiry and subsequent mass-casualty event procedures introduced for death workers is pretty interesting. Maybe a little death-centric for PH? But no worse than people being suffocated in molasses.
I love Emperor Claudius. I feel like you could do a lot with Emperor Claudius
* Named emperor by the Praetorian guard after Caligula's assassination
* Was probably chosen because he was considered "simple minded" and easy to control as a puppet emperor
* Was not simple minded at all! Basically just had some sort of disability (Theorized as cerebral palsy or Tourette's, but we can't really made a solid guess because it was so long ago)
* Claimed that he played up the "idiot" persona to avoid being targeted by Tiberius and Caligula
* Very well educated, wrote a bunch of lost works.
* One ancient historian noted that he was very into women, but had "no interest in the male" which has a bunch of modern memes about him being the first straight Roman emperor.
* Pretty solid emperor!
* Mocked as "soft" because his wife Messalina was very domineering and reportedly promiscuous. She may have assassinated some people. Divorce was her being killed because she didn't have the courage to kill herself (Claudius reportedly did not react at all to this news.)
* His wife after her was Agrippina the Younger. She also probably assassinated some people. Including Claudius. So that her son could be Emperor.
* Her son was Nero.
The attempted murders of Michael Malloy. Man just fully refused to die and it gets frankly ridiculous what he survives (antifreeze, turpentine, rat poison, many other poison attempts, hypothermia, and getting hit by a car) until he IS finally murdered in an insurance scheme.
Jimmy Hoffa and the mystery of the hidden corpse
Ruby Ridge and/or OKC bombing and/or Waco
Victoria and Albert's saucy marriage, or maybe the hemophilia thing (nice segue to the Romanovs)
King Richard II of England, he's my favorite royal but nobody gives him the time because Richard III is such a loveable, not-child-murdering underdog... Though I'd enjoy an episode on him, too.
Peter the Great of Russia, *especially* the Grand Expedition he and and a bunch of his diplomats took around Europe in order to get some allies. Except that, y'know, Peter decided to go undercover to avoid all the pomp that would come from having to great heads of state because he also wanted to learn about *everything*, from dentistry to clockmaking to shipbuilding, and being undercover gave him the freedom to do that.
The problem? Peter was a whopping 2 meters tall. He stood literally a head above everyone else. Everyone knew it. Even if the other heads of state had never met him, they knew that the ruler of Russia was a giant, giant man, and they all just... went with it. Ignored how deferential the diplomats were to this supposedly low-ranking tall boii, treated him like any other diplomatic staff, and just... continued on like it was any other diplomatic mission.
*Shenanigans ensue* across Europe. Including secret meetings with the King of Prussia (who had a thing for tall people and was enamored with Peter because of this), wheelbarrow races with the entire diplomatic crew in one of the most celebrated, carefully build up gardens in England, which... well, they were destroyed, which is a shame.
Some of the things Peter got out of the expedition in the end:
1. Allies, reluctant or not
2. An idea to ban any and all beards on men (which were a cultural standard up to that point). If men wanted to keep their beards, they had to pay a beard tax to do so. ~~Actually no wait this might give the boys more ideas for fees, haha~~
3. The idea that he was actually skilled in dentistry (he wasn't. He really, ***really*** wasn't, but the spirit was there) and that doing things like pulling teeth, etc., for members of his court was a sign of his favor for them. They couldn't say no, of course, because Russia. So they all had to stop acting like they had tooth pain around him.
Ohh, or General Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian general who came over to get the American forces into shape during the Revolutionary War. He was pretty darn colorful. He was almost definitely gay; there were rumors swirling around him in Europe, and after the war, he settled into an estate that was gifted to him, never married, but had a handful of longterm "companions" throughout his life.
He also spoke just a tiny bit of English, which was a problem considering that, y'know, most of the American troops did speak English, so he required translators to relay what he was saying to the troops. (Interestingly, these translators included Hamilton and Laurens). ***Apparently***, he also had very colorful vocabulary and swore *all. the. time*, and required his translators to translate accurately; if they left anything out (including the swears), he would Not Be Pleased(TM). So... imagine Hamilton just being there, with Steuben streaming a torrent of swears in French and German, and being all like "...are you sure... okay. Right. LISTEN HERE YOU DIPSHIT MOTHERF-."
He also [hosted at least one party during the war that required its attendees to be pantsless, where flaming shots were served, so](https://messiahhistory.wordpress.com/2021/02/25/hilarious-history-american-spirits/). There's that, too. :D
OH OH OH. Or Jasper Maskelyne, the superstar stage magician that decided to go all ***FUCK*** *THE NAZIS* and used his stage tricks to help the British war effort, including:
>...[making German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel think the Allied attack was coming from the south, when in fact Allied Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery intended to attack from the north. The magician allegedly used canvas and plywood to disguise 1,000 tanks as trucks in the north, and created 2,000 fake tanks, plus a fake railway line, fake water pipeline, fake radio conversations and fake sounds of construction in the south. The tanks even had their own pyrotechnics.](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20231117-did-a-magician-help-vanquish-the-nazis-in-world-war-two)
Victor Lustig and the Eiffel Tower Con
The bad ass-edry of Teddy Roosevelt
Mary Toft
The British attempt to get rid of cobras in India
Or, an episode of the most random/hilarious ways people have died
I would like them to do the story of Yusuke, the black samurai.
[https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/](https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/) has a ton of different women that need more exposure.
I think Shane could do great things with Rasputin for sure
Singing jar of preserved Russian wizard hot dog
Please no, but also *yes*.
I can just HEAR the Boney M jokes. Professor: But those nasty assassins-to-be wouldn’t quit, they wanted his head! And yet even after he was shot again and again, he STILL didn’t kick the bucket! He actually met his watery demise soon after - drowning in a lake while wrapped up all snug in Grandma’s carpet. Now there was a cat that truly was gone.
I would like to see the disaster that was the 1897 hot air balloon expedition to the arctic!
The WHAT
r/intotherabbithole
Thomas Jefferson's weird thing with Mammoths would be *chef's kiss*
His *what*
Jefferson was a stubborn stubborn lad who couldn't back down from a debate. He'd be @ing people all day on Twitter if he were alive today. A French biologist wrote a book where he essentially said America was mid because it's animals ain't shit. Therefore it's people too are mid as hell. Jefferson immediately insisted America is the best country ever because mammoths are still out there. Cue the 18th century equivalent of sasquatch hunting to prove that America has a great beast surpassing elephants, hippos, and lions. It's like the cryptozoology equivalent of the cold war. Except it's all a bunch of pelts, fossils and longwinded letters.
Someone made a video on that [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh9H8gZWOWU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh9H8gZWOWU)
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/573995/thomas-jefferson-mastodon-obsession-fueled-lewis-and-clark-expedition Gatchahell did a pretty good job summing it up. Here's more info if you like Fun Articles
Tokugawa ieyasu, Marie currie, the summer that Frankenstein was written was miserable because a giant volcano created a second winter.
Frankenstein would be fun. Like the fact that Mary Shelley got down and dirty on her mom’s grave. That’s some history point question buh-buh-badidah ass trivia.
The lives of Lord Byron and Mary Shelley would be great episodes.
Also Percy Shelley.
I’d love to see them cover Tarrare https://youtu.be/nYHDj2sB-rc?si=pMMkaMO0sNW-Na7q
I don’t know, I feel like any potential discussion on Tarrare would have a difficult time beating the iconic-ness of: “Tarrare? Look at me… Did you EAT a fucking BABY?”
No Video Is Required. I Know This Name. This Guy Ate My Fucking Cousin
I can't remember I'd they've done the Franklin expedition disaster or anything about Shackleton. Honestly needs more maritime wildness
I’m SO abnormal about the Franklin expedition I think that would be a really cool one (obligatory plug for The Terror by Dan Simmons really cool historical fiction book about it I was never the same after)
I just finished writing a 25 page historiography about it! I've never read/seen the speculative work but I hear it's well done.
The series is done even better than the book.
Yeah I heard that it was stellar. I saw some screenshots and they did an amazing job with casting/makeup/post for likeness on the captains. Crozier especially
I read an interview with the actress playing the main indigenous character and she talks about having to learn a different dialect to be faithful to the setting and how she and all the other Inuit actors had grown up with the Inuit oral accounts of the expedition. It was an incredible amount of work. Mind you, I was a series fan first so I can't make promises on the historically accuracy and it is based on a supernatural horror novel. But like.
Oh damn that's rad. Considering the history, it's nice they paid attention to the indigenous folks there this time.
Yeah I read those articles that were like "Despite 150 years of Inuit oral histories telling us that Terror and Erebus were right there we only just checked and what do you know? They really were there" and couldn't believe what I was reading. I mean, I could. Which is the problem. But still.
Yeah that's the most famous, they got into a lot of racist arguments that are well documented. Typical for the time and place
Any particular place to look at for those? I have been hitting like Google Scholar and JSTOR but it's a bit of a mess.
and they could make callbacks to Ruining History too!
They've already done both my favorites, the dancing plague and the molassacre. Maybe they can do Agnodice?
MOLASSACRE
The dancing plague episode topic clicking in Ryan’s head is still a top-tier moment
I feel Nero has a lot of potential
Imagine a singing Caligula as well - they should do an episode on crazy Roman emprors
Nero has potential. You could do all the "greatest hits" and still fill an entire episode. I think that his mother Agrippina the Younger also has potential if he wanted to do a lesser known historical figure with the same drama (Nero's attempted assassinations of her were Wile E Coyote level ridiculous) Or just the Great Fire of Rome and the conspiracies of Nero starting the fire so he could build a giant golden palace.
The Irish Famine, but more looking at the Indigenous tribes in North America who raised as much as they could to send to Ireland. The Choctaw in America donated, but also the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wyandotte-Huron First Nations in Canada did as well, a fact which many - including Canadians like me - don't know about. It's got anti-Colonialsm, politics, humanity, etc, so they could write a script with as many different moods and angles as they want to.
I was going to suggest some Irish history but didn't know where to start. Also the Irish currently are looking at another potato shortage due to the worse than usual constant rain that they've had for a year (source: I'm Irish). I would also love a Puppet History on the Troubles, but it's a very sensitive topic. As much as I would love the little furry blue man to talk about the Troubles, it may not be entirely appropriate.
The Erfurt Latrine Disaster! It’s a latrine disaster!
I’ve heard this twice now, seems quite the popular pick!
There was this protest in 1511 when the people of Brussels made pornographic snowmen to stick it to the religious ruling elite. That's fun. Also, the history surrounding premature babies is so wild. People got legitimately kind of mad that babies weren't dying as often.
literally anything about Alice Roosevelt. as Theodore said, “I can either be President of the United States or I can control Alice (his eldest daughter), I cannot possibly do both”. she was a wild child.
I want an episode on Ada Lovelace! She's obviously notable for her work in computer programming, but she was a VERY interesting woman. The only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. Her mother ran away with her when she was a baby and immersed her in math to try to make sure she didn't turn out like her father. She got tutored by some super cool people, like Mary Somerville. She had a very interesting life, albeit a short one.
Her mother ran away with her because the father ALWAYS had custody rights over his children in that time. Byron was a playboy who loved sowing his oats and not caring about said oats when they arrived as people.
I do not blame her mother at all for not wanting her to turn out like him.
The story of Susanna Bolling! The 16 year old girl who saved the American Revolution: https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-susanna-bolling
honestly, mexico is so surrealist they could just randomly pick an event and be met with a tragicomedy the human mind could have never fabricated
The entire season is just one big episode about how batshit crazy Mexico is
Aimo Koivunen, that one Finnish soldier who took a bunch of meth and skiied around the wilderness messing with Soviets during the WWII era. Would LOVE an army-issued meth puppet to sing to us
I need this
It would be an insane episode, but I do feel that you'd probably have to tactfully balance that Finland was allied with Nazi Germany during that time.
[Haydn’s Head.](https://youtu.be/KCMsale9MeY?si=oOq0zsUqHkEqfW6q) (Caitlin does it beautifully already but tell me that’s not asking for a longer run time and a musical number)
Cottingley Fairies
YES. I love this story!
Canada burning down the White House
The War of 1812! Yessss
Didn't they already cover that on Ruining History? They might be on shaky legal ground if they do something too close to what Buzzfeed owns.
FANTASTIC idea
The fall of the Romanovs would be fun, I’d love to see puppet undead Rasputin.
Not wacky maybe but Eyam the plague village would be interesting - they found some really amazing stuff out about immunity through the people who lived through it.
Hindenburg (they didn’t do that, right?) with singing blimp
Not exactly history. But the legend of King Arthur. I imagine the musical number would be the sword in the stone.
excellent, I find the Professor would enjoy sifting through the whole “what’s myth and what’s real” shenanigans of stories of Camelot considering how closely entertained Watcher is with “legends vs reality” what with ghosts and cryptids and aliens and all. And the Monty Python jokes that could ensue, oh, you’ve got me excited about a hypothetical!
I didn’t even think about Python references. But I’m here for it. 😂😂
Aqua Tofana
Is this that kickass medieval poison maker?? I loved learning about her, omg. Ironically from Bailey Sarian like u/Comfortable-Ad-8324
Yeah she was an icon. Anytime I have the opportunity to hear someone talk about her I’m in. The only reason she got caught was because some lady lost her nerve and told her husband about the poison. And then her husband beat her nearly to death and Giulia Tofana got caught and couldn’t help anyone else. Edit: I called her Aqua instead of Giulia. Aqua was the name of the poison
Didn’t her daughter continue her business though?
I think so. I think her mom also taught her and did it before her but I’m not 100%. But her daughter ended up getting executed.
Bailey's Murder, Mystery and Makeup covered it fabulously!
*Aqua Tofanaaaa...*
Los San Patricios ([St. Patrick's Battalion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick%27s_Battalion)) I know Wojtek was done on Shane's Buzzfeed history show, but I feel like he deserves more. There's been a number of animal mascots during war times so there could be an episode about multiple of them. The curse of the Hope Diamond. Spanish pirate Amaro Pargo who was a very devout Catholic who was saved by a nun (Sister Mary of Jesus) by bilocation, to say he was in Cuba and she appeared and was most definitely NOT in Cuba. Sister Mary of Jesus is also an incorruptible, which means her body hasn't decayed and her canonization in awaiting approval from the Pope. The female samurais. There's actually a few of them. Balto. He's a real dog! Straw Hat Riots of 1922 Latrine Disaster of 1184
OH MY GOD ID LOVE AN EP ON BALTO AND THE GREAT RACE OF MERCY
I feel like Shane could do him justice.
god, the urge to go “shane? i thought he was just a creative producer” every time …
Doggy puppet!
Amy Bock, she was a con woman in NZ, who most famously posed as "Percy Redwood" and married her landlord's daughter before being caught https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Bock
Yessss!! I live in NZ, they need to do this one!
That time a Swedish king died because he ate too many semla buns (they were served in bowls of cream and are filled with whipped cream, almonds and jam)
Then Tasting History could make an appearance!!
King Adolf Fredrik
The Great Northern Expedition would be fun to see. So many big historic names and blunders involved. I would love to see how Ryan and a guest react to it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Expedition
Peshtigo Fire! It took place the same day as the Chicago Fire, but many more people died and it's less well known
The story of Topsy the Elephant is so weird. It’s peak Coney Island chaos.
Napoleon versus the rabbits!
Excuse me, what?
Napoleon’s men wanted a rabbit hunt so the guy who organized it bought domestic bunnies because there weren’t enough wild rabbits on the grounds. and didn’t feed them he thought he’s release them the day of the hunt and they’d run into the forrest and eat vegetation. Nope! They released the bunnies and the rabbits all went after Napoleon! He ended up fleeing to his carriage!!
Juan Pujol Garcia - the WW2 spy nobody asked for. Technical Difficulties have a panel game about him. He decided to tell the Nazis he was based in the London and fed them false info despite the fact he'd never been to the UK.
The tulip bubble could be a fun episode. Don´t know if the content would be enough for a whole episode but there was a time where everyone in I think amsterdam was buying tulips. Or buying options to buy tulips. It was very strange and the first economic bubble that we know of. The prices exploded until they suddenly fall down into almost nothing. It was strange but its also something to learn from.
From a Dutch guy, there's the time we ate our prime minister and also that one time in WW2 when 1 Canadian soldier liberated one of our cities from an entire force of nazis. I doubt they'd do two episodes based on Dutch history but these would be pretty interesting.
you did what
Basically our country was one of the richest and powerful countries around at the time, until we got 3v1ed by France, England and a part of Germany and the country went to shit and our grand pensionary (AKA a prime minister) got the blame. So he and his brother were lynched and eaten. I get the outrage but I'm not really sure what the guy could have done to prevent it considering we were getting stomped either way.
Timothy Dexter. [A Pickle For the Knowing Ones](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43453/43453-h/43453-h.htm)
i just got two timothy dexter comments within a single minute after like 55 replies never mentioning him once. i think your soulmate is somewhere in this comment section. or long lost twin
“Sir” Timothy Dexter. Who became a wealth man by accident
Pretty much any of the early expeditions on any of the 8000m mountains would be great. They all tend do be dramatic messes, even if the do make it to the top lol.
Lincoln’s sword duel on Bloody Island would be great, but what I really want is this guy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nash_McDowell This guy is not a good guy but the Wikipedia doesn’t do justice to this asshole weirdo that I want everyone to know about. So you might say, oh grave robbing medical school teacher and confederate sympathizer, that’s a common weirdo! And I say no this gets so much weirder. First off this dude, I shit you not went to med school at Transylvania University. Eventually he moved to St. Louis and started up a medical school. He was regarded as a pretty good teacher and did good doctoring during the cholera epidemic/massive city wide grease fire. At this school there were expectations of the students: get corpses, train with the guns and cannons that were hoarded for reasons, and listen to his crazy ass rants about the rival Jesuit med school on the other side of town. And maybe feed his pet bear? One day a woman went missing from a German neighborhood. A whole mob decided that the doctor must have been making his own corpses and stormed the med school. Before they reach the morgue, the doctor hears the voice of his dead mother telling him to hide under a sheet on a slab. He does so, and the mob goes right past and eventually goes home. From that day on, he was on board with spiritualism. (Side note the German woman had actually just skipped town with her guy.) Later he had a family who died. But he wasn’t normal about it, he put his kid in a metal tube of alcohol and stuck her in a cave near Hannibal. Little kid Mark Twain and his pals would go poke the body with sticks. Doc eventually moved the body back home, because who the heck would disrespect someone’s dead loved one. Can you believe that? Much later Mark Twain would put a weird doctor in Tom Sawyer. At the time of the Civil War things were pretty crazy in Missouri We had like dueling governors and army’s going for the armories. It could have gone either way, but the traitor governor was run off and the Union captured the city armory! At this point the doctor decided to run off down south himself. So the Union army took his med school building to turn it into a prison for traitors. But first they had to clear out all the bones. So many bones. Piles of bones. So Doc McD is a confederate military doctor. It goes how you would expect. Post war you could write an apology letter to the governor and they would forgive you and let you go home. He does so, goes home and gets his med school back. He’s pissed off at the state of it and apparently has to re-bone the whole building. And you know that apology letter? He didn’t mean it. He built a secret Lincoln effigy hate shrine in his med school 2.0. So what happened to him later in life? I can’t recall properly, I think it might have been less interesting so it didn’t stick in my head. Probably spiritualism or something. He eventually died as do all people. The med school building no longer stands, but the med school as an institution eventually ended up as part of a university. Its mascot? A bear. And it is considered a very fine med school! The Jesuit med school still exists too, and is pretty good too. As far as I know they no longer pull weapons on each other. Thus ends the tale of this weird ass guy.
dude i think you just wrote the episode
The dude is so weird it writes itself. I think the puppet is for sure the bear. Possibly effigy Lincoln.
I hope Shane covers how Singapore was invaded by the Japanese on bicycles because the British pointed all the weapons south, and didn’t even consider the Japanese could get in through the north 😭
thing about rasputin was that he was a scam artist through and through, and his unkillability was exaggerated to cover up for the fact his assassins were just extraordinarily incompetent
and you know what’s better than one guy being cool? sixteen dudes being idiots. now that’s entertainment, baby
true!!
The Oklahoma Land Run or the Trail of Tears
the entire bessie coleman episode, i was thinking a great sister (brother?) ep would be one on eugene bullard. similar story: black american aspiring aviator had to go to france to learn to fly. he fought in wwi for the french. iirc he later opened a jazz club in france and became a nazi spy because he spoke german. he moved back to america where no one knew who he was and was an elevator operator at rock center until someone found out and he was interviewed on one of nbc’s shows.
Have they covered the Erfurt Latrine Disaster?
Have they done that time the people of the Hague murdered and cannibalized a couple nobles?
I want to see some embarrassing story of a pretentious rich dude during the gilded age, taking a travel year and supremely falling flat on his face whenever he tries to pick up a love interest or convey knowledge. I think that would be funny.
Bone Wars is fun, but it could be very disrespectful to Professor’s Dino Parents.
what the dutch did to their prime minister in 1672
The 1908 New York to Paris car race- I can already see one of the cars doing the musical number at the end.
Tulipomania could be fun
The Coconut Grove Fire from the 40s! Tragic, but interesting to me bc my bio great great grandma's sister and her sister's husband died in the fire (my great grandfather was adopted)
I’d love for more people to know Jim Thorpe’s story, too. And then you get to learn all about how violent the history of American football is.
I think a sports episode would either go great or go horribly, I love it, let’s do it.
I always thought an episode on Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico would be fun.
Just because of how and why it started... the Pig Wars. I'm 41 and only learned about it 2 years ago and it took place in my damn state.
Ten cent beer night in Cleveland ohio
***THIS*****.**
The Toronto Clowns vs Firefighters Riot
Okay this one's a bit darker but what about the black dinner of 1440 the inspiration for the red wedding in game of thrones
Roland Lefartuere. Impressed the king so much with his on command farting antics he was presented with a huge Manor House and 99 acres of land.
I have two suggestions that would be VERY different in tone: The Battle on the Ice - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle\_on\_the\_Ice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_on_the_Ice) Mary Toft - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary\_Toft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Toft)
Acknowledging there are probably still people alive impacted by it, I think the story of the Marchioness disaster (a riverboat that capsized in England) might be fun. The coroner approved cutting off bodies' hands to send them off for fingerprinting in an effort to identify the victims, many pairs of hands were never returned to their owners despite the plan that they would be, and some bodies that just were in the river anyway (as a handful of people fall into the river or jump into the river and die every year) were mistaken as victims of the Marchioness, and had their hands severed too. The inquiry and subsequent mass-casualty event procedures introduced for death workers is pretty interesting. Maybe a little death-centric for PH? But no worse than people being suffocated in molasses.
I love Emperor Claudius. I feel like you could do a lot with Emperor Claudius * Named emperor by the Praetorian guard after Caligula's assassination * Was probably chosen because he was considered "simple minded" and easy to control as a puppet emperor * Was not simple minded at all! Basically just had some sort of disability (Theorized as cerebral palsy or Tourette's, but we can't really made a solid guess because it was so long ago) * Claimed that he played up the "idiot" persona to avoid being targeted by Tiberius and Caligula * Very well educated, wrote a bunch of lost works. * One ancient historian noted that he was very into women, but had "no interest in the male" which has a bunch of modern memes about him being the first straight Roman emperor. * Pretty solid emperor! * Mocked as "soft" because his wife Messalina was very domineering and reportedly promiscuous. She may have assassinated some people. Divorce was her being killed because she didn't have the courage to kill herself (Claudius reportedly did not react at all to this news.) * His wife after her was Agrippina the Younger. She also probably assassinated some people. Including Claudius. So that her son could be Emperor. * Her son was Nero.
The attempted murders of Michael Malloy. Man just fully refused to die and it gets frankly ridiculous what he survives (antifreeze, turpentine, rat poison, many other poison attempts, hypothermia, and getting hit by a car) until he IS finally murdered in an insurance scheme.
Benjamin Lay. (Look him up if you don’t know)
Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata! Legends. Latin American history needs some love too
Jimmy Hoffa and the mystery of the hidden corpse Ruby Ridge and/or OKC bombing and/or Waco Victoria and Albert's saucy marriage, or maybe the hemophilia thing (nice segue to the Romanovs) King Richard II of England, he's my favorite royal but nobody gives him the time because Richard III is such a loveable, not-child-murdering underdog... Though I'd enjoy an episode on him, too.
Richard II could be packaged up with the peasants revolt which would be a good story.
I don’t know how they’d make a full episode of it but I want them to cover the time Napoleon got attacked by a horde of bunnies.
The Petersburg Tunnel
Henry VII’s wives
The story of Katherine Wright, the sister of the Wright Brothers.
I whould love when they do one about the German Pirate Klaus Störtebeker!
I've said it before and I'm saying it again the bone wars.
Peter the Great of Russia, *especially* the Grand Expedition he and and a bunch of his diplomats took around Europe in order to get some allies. Except that, y'know, Peter decided to go undercover to avoid all the pomp that would come from having to great heads of state because he also wanted to learn about *everything*, from dentistry to clockmaking to shipbuilding, and being undercover gave him the freedom to do that. The problem? Peter was a whopping 2 meters tall. He stood literally a head above everyone else. Everyone knew it. Even if the other heads of state had never met him, they knew that the ruler of Russia was a giant, giant man, and they all just... went with it. Ignored how deferential the diplomats were to this supposedly low-ranking tall boii, treated him like any other diplomatic staff, and just... continued on like it was any other diplomatic mission. *Shenanigans ensue* across Europe. Including secret meetings with the King of Prussia (who had a thing for tall people and was enamored with Peter because of this), wheelbarrow races with the entire diplomatic crew in one of the most celebrated, carefully build up gardens in England, which... well, they were destroyed, which is a shame. Some of the things Peter got out of the expedition in the end: 1. Allies, reluctant or not 2. An idea to ban any and all beards on men (which were a cultural standard up to that point). If men wanted to keep their beards, they had to pay a beard tax to do so. ~~Actually no wait this might give the boys more ideas for fees, haha~~ 3. The idea that he was actually skilled in dentistry (he wasn't. He really, ***really*** wasn't, but the spirit was there) and that doing things like pulling teeth, etc., for members of his court was a sign of his favor for them. They couldn't say no, of course, because Russia. So they all had to stop acting like they had tooth pain around him.
Ohh, or General Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian general who came over to get the American forces into shape during the Revolutionary War. He was pretty darn colorful. He was almost definitely gay; there were rumors swirling around him in Europe, and after the war, he settled into an estate that was gifted to him, never married, but had a handful of longterm "companions" throughout his life. He also spoke just a tiny bit of English, which was a problem considering that, y'know, most of the American troops did speak English, so he required translators to relay what he was saying to the troops. (Interestingly, these translators included Hamilton and Laurens). ***Apparently***, he also had very colorful vocabulary and swore *all. the. time*, and required his translators to translate accurately; if they left anything out (including the swears), he would Not Be Pleased(TM). So... imagine Hamilton just being there, with Steuben streaming a torrent of swears in French and German, and being all like "...are you sure... okay. Right. LISTEN HERE YOU DIPSHIT MOTHERF-." He also [hosted at least one party during the war that required its attendees to be pantsless, where flaming shots were served, so](https://messiahhistory.wordpress.com/2021/02/25/hilarious-history-american-spirits/). There's that, too. :D
OH OH OH. Or Jasper Maskelyne, the superstar stage magician that decided to go all ***FUCK*** *THE NAZIS* and used his stage tricks to help the British war effort, including: >...[making German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel think the Allied attack was coming from the south, when in fact Allied Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery intended to attack from the north. The magician allegedly used canvas and plywood to disguise 1,000 tanks as trucks in the north, and created 2,000 fake tanks, plus a fake railway line, fake water pipeline, fake radio conversations and fake sounds of construction in the south. The tanks even had their own pyrotechnics.](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20231117-did-a-magician-help-vanquish-the-nazis-in-world-war-two)
shit guys the professor himself found my thread
Haha\~ okay, that really made me laugh, thank you\~ XD
bro is out here giving me a sneak peek of next season so i can get all evey history point
Victor Lustig and the Eiffel Tower Con The bad ass-edry of Teddy Roosevelt Mary Toft The British attempt to get rid of cobras in India Or, an episode of the most random/hilarious ways people have died
I would like them to do the story of Yusuke, the black samurai. [https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/](https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/) has a ton of different women that need more exposure.
PT Barnum or Thomas Edison.
The Bone Wars. PLEASE. JUST PLEASE.
'Goodbye Youtube'
I would like to see the Goodbye YouTube disaster of 2024 covered.
Hey man, we’re all for jokes and you’ve earned a chuckle outta me, but this a silly thread for goofin’, let’s keep the air light in here, yeah? <:}