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PODCAST

History Buffoons Podcast

Bradley and Kate

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.comReach out to us at: historybuffoonspodcast@gmail.com

history

All Episodes

88:23

The Duty of Candour: The 1989 Hillsborough Disaster...

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/04/14

Ninety-six people died at Hillsborough in 1989, but the shock isn’t only the disaster itself. The part that keeps twisting the knife is what came next: an official story that didn’t match what families and survivors lived through, years of “accidental death” language that felt like a shrug, and institutions that seemed more focused on protecting themselves than facing the facts. We walk through the long arc of the aftermath using the Hicks family as our through-line, especially Trevor and Je...

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27:59

The Origin of Weird: The Mechanical Messiah - John...

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/04/09

A decent, hard-working reformer walks into the 1850s, discovers spiritualism, and decides electricity can save the world. That’s not a metaphor. We’re telling the true story of John Murray Spear, a Universalist minister and outspoken abolitionist who believed people and systems could be redeemed, then took that same hope and aimed it at building a literal mechanical messiah. We talk through why spiritualism was so contagious in mid-19th century America: the Fox sisters, seances as social eve...

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66:25

"Help Us Brucie!": The 1989 Hillsborough Disaster...

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/04/07

Ninety-six people die at a football match, and the first story many hear is that the fans caused it. That tension between what happened and what powerful people claimed happened is why we finally sat down to tell Part 1 of the Hillsborough disaster with the care it deserves. We start with the Hicks family, lifelong Liverpool FC supporters traveling to Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield for the 1989 FA Cup semifinal. Through Jenny Hicks’s account, we track the day’s key failures in crowd manag...

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53:47

Ethical Conundrum: Would You Rather

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/03/31

Kate’s running on a cold, Bradley’s trying to fill in, and somehow that turns into one of our most chaotic History Buffoons hangouts yet. It starts with a Wisconsin detour to Rebellion Brewing Company in Cedarburg, where we meet great people, taste a lineup of beers, and fall hard for a vanilla porter that has no business being that smooth. Then we flip the switch into a rapid-fire “would you rather” game pulled from our weird history catalog, and the questions get uncomfortably real. Would ...

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28:16

The Origin of Weird: Weird City Laws

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/03/26

High heels with a permit. Bigfoot with legal protection. A city rule that basically turns snowballs into “missiles.” We grab a stack of real municipal codes and ordinances that are still on the books and ask the only reasonable question: how is this still a law? We’re Bradley and Kate, and we keep it fast, weird, and surprisingly informative. We break down what these strange laws actually say, where they came from, and why they were written in the first place. A lot of the funniest “bizarre ...

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41:06

Flamma Lamma Ding Dong: Flamma The Gladiator

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/03/24

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 offered freedom four separate times. And he turns it down. Every. Single. Time. We walk through what that record actually means in Roman gladiator combat, including why the “fight to the death” myth falls apart once you understand how expensive fighters are ...

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47:48

Several Shoulders: The Molotov Cocktail

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/03/17

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 Winter War, when the Soviet Union invades Finland in late 1939 and discovers that “overwhelming force” doesn’t mean much on narrow roads, in deep drifts, at brutal temperatures. We break down why Stalin wants a buffer zone near Leningrad, how negotiation...

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20:54

The Origin of Weird: Thalidomide Babies

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/03/12

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 birth defects that followed, tracing how a single oversight in early pregnancy testing reshaped medicine, regulation, and public trust. We walk through the crucial developmental window—roughly weeks three to eight after conception—when limbs, ears, and...

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52:39

Life After Death: Henrietta Lacks

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/03/10

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 cancer, and the fateful moment when doctors at Johns Hopkins sent a tiny sample to George Gey’s lab. Those cells refused to die. Labeled HeLa, they divided at extraordinary speed, unlocking reproducible experiments that accelerated virology, genetics, onc...

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74:41

Today's Winds-day: The Dust Bowl

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/03/03

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 the plow”—turned the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl, and how people fought their way back. We start with the sales pitch that lured settlers west: the Homestead Acts, cheap tractors, and World War I wheat prices that made plowing up native prairie feel ...

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19:32

The Origin of Weird: Anne Greene, Life After Hanging

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/02/26

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 medical practice collided—and explore how a single breath unraveled the era’s certainty about death, guilt, and divine will. We walk through the culture of the gallows, where executions doubled as entertainment and moral theater, and the legal pipeline t...

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38:57

Fahrenheit 451: Mary Bowser

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/02/24

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 Davis’s household and feed critical intelligence to the Union. We set the stage in Civil War–era Richmond, a city powered by enslaved labor and blinded by its own assumptions. Enter Elizabeth “Bet” Van Lew, the abolitionist mastermind behind the Richmond U...

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53:13

Long Urban Hair: Julie d’Aubigny

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/02/17

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 under the gaze of Louis XIV. Along the way she loved boldly, dressed as she pleased, and treated the law like a suggestion. When a forbidden romance led to a convent heist and a fire, officials sentenced “Sir D’Aubigny” to death by flame, unaware the outl...

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17:52

The Origin of Weird: The Oakville Blobs

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/02/14

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 began to ripple through the community. We retrace Oakville’s strangest weather report and follow the breadcrumbs from first responders and ER visits to shaky lab work, vanishing samples, and the tangle of theories that followed. We start with the on-the...

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57:27

Scooby Doo of Scotland: The Black Dinner of 1440

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/02/10

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 Douglases beheaded under the crown’s roof—an unforgivable breach of hospitality that rippled across the realm. We follow the power lines behind the spectacle: how the Black Douglases rose through land, war, and royal marriages to rival the throne; why Ch...

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71:49

Classic Scurvy: The Belgica Expedition

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/02/03

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, part scientific milestone, and a cautionary tale about leadership at the edge of the map. We start with the chaotic launch and a crew stitched together from Belgium, Norway, and beyond. Storms slam the decks. A young sailor is swept into black water. ...

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31:31

The Origin Of Weird: Atomic Bombs Fall on North...

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/01/29

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 Cold War alert flight turned into one of the closest brushes with accidental nuclear detonation in U.S. history. We walk through the tense chain of events: the fuel leak, the low-altitude emergency approach, and the violent structural failure that scatter...

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68:16

Tutankhamun’s Money: Howard Carter

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/01/27

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 “wonderful things.” From Carter’s early days as a teen draftsman in the Valley of the Kings to the disciplined process of photographing, stabilizing, and cataloging more than 5,000 artifacts, this story is equal parts grit, science, and obsession. We ...

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65:14

Encephal-in-Silence: Dr. Oliver Sacks

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/01/20

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 into the late 1960s, when Dr. Oliver Sacks reached for a radical idea: use L‑Dopa, the new Parkinson’s drug, to unlock minds stilled for decades. Leonard opens his eyes, speaks, walks, and even plays piano. Joy floods the ward. Then the pendulum swings—ti...

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26:56

The Origin of Weird: Corporal Wojtek the Bear

History Buffoons Podcast ·

2026/01/15

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 ammunition at Monte Cassino. What starts as a glimmer of hope for displaced soldiers grows into a frontline legend that lifted morale, inspired resistance, and left a symbol stitched onto uniforms: a bear hauling a shell. We walk through the chance encounter in...

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126 results

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