History in Five Minutes Podcast

Gather around the campfire, children, and learn about the most ghoulish story from America’s pioneer days. What really happened to the party led by George Donner and his brother Jacob when they set out for California in 1846?

  References to acts of cannibalism are sprinkled throughout many religious and historical documents, such as the reports that cooked human flesh was being sold in 11th-century English markets. But the world’s first cannibal incident reported by multip...

  It is the most gruesome activity that a human can do. It is the most ancient of taboos. Stories of the Donner Party, Jamestown, and the Franklin Expedition make for ghost stories today. But the real question is not why cannibalism occurs in humans.

  If you’ve seen the 1960 Spencer Tracy movie Inherit the Wind, you know about the Scopes Monkey Trial. In this real-life 1925 case, John Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any...

  According to legends of the Middle Ages, knights used the chastity belt on their wives as an anti-temptation device before embarking on the Crusades. When the knight left for the Holy Lands on the Crusades,

  “George Washington was the First President of the United States.” This is the most basic fact that an American school child can learn. But he wasn’t the first. Nor the second. He was actually the ninth president of the United States.

  Depending on which account you hear, Columbus was either the bravest explorer of the early Renaissance or a mass murdered who subjected the indigenous population of the new world to death or slavery. Learn in this episode how Columbus was both and ne...

  Rome didn’t fall in 476 when Romulus, the last of the Roman emperors in the west, was overthrown by the Germanic leader Odoacer, who became the first Barbarian to rule in Rome. Nor did it fall in 1453 when the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople....

  Few episodes in history are so misunderstood as the condemnation of Galileo. His trial has become a stock argument to show the fundamental clash between science and dogmatism. Turns out the whole affair was actually a giant clash of egos,

  Why do Americans celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks? Are we trying to take the National Anthem as literally as possible, creating “Bombs Bursting in Air”? Or is there another reason? Much of the trappings of the Fourth of July date back to R...