History on Fire: A Year in Review

I started History on Fire back in 2015. It quickly grew bigger than I could have imagined, and even won an iTunes award in the new podcasts category. By 2019 I received a life-changing offer that was too good to pass, so for three years most new episodes of the podcast were behind a paywall, but all the old ones plus a couple of new ones per year were still free for everyone. A little over a year ago, I brought History on Fire again out of paywalls. To this day, I still receive messages from people who don’t know that the podcast is freely available. Clearly, I can only blame myself for not having done a good enough job letting people know, despite posting about it on social media on a regular basis for this past year.

So, in this newsletter, I’d like to shine the spotlight on some of the stories I covered on History on Fire since July 2022. Altogether, I have released 9 brand new episodes, plus 12 more that used to be behind paywalls (and, as such, are new for the majority of listeners).

The new episodes were:

Episode 92 Jujitsuffragettes with Attitude is a story about suffragettes in early 1900s England learning jiujitsu and fighting with the police against the backdrop of the women’s rights movement.

Episode 93 The Beast of Gevaudan explores the mystery of an unidentified animal killing peasants and terrorizing the countryside in 1760s France.

Episode 94 The Last Crow Chief and Episode 95 Tom Le Forge, The Real ‘Dances with Wolves’ are two tales about the Crow tribe: one about the last war chief of the Crows, Joe Medicine Crow, who fought in WWII, and the other about Tom LeForge, an Anglo-American who lived with the Crows in the second half of the 1800s.

Episode 96 The Wildest Man You Have Never Heard Of: Thomas Morton tells the life of a man who created a colony that challenged Puritan supremacy in the 1600s in New England by eliminating servitude, encouraging religious freedom, and establishing friendly relations with Native tribes.

In Episode 97 The Psychology of Power in History I get to have a conversation with Aziz Al-Doory (History of Westeros podcast) about a central theme in history: the drive that makes individuals struggle for power. In particular, we debate the question of why so many people have become addicted to a struggle that seems to be antithetical to having a good life.

Episode 98 Machine Gun Blues is the first History on Fire episode dedicated to a Brazilian story—this particular one is about the most famous outlaw operating in Brazil in the early 1900s. Much like the Old West in the 1800s in U.S., the backcountry of North-Eastern Brazil was a rough place where disputes were often settled with guns. Extreme wealth inequality, and a lack of opportunities to climb out of poverty, pushed many people toward criminality. Lampiao was the most legendary of them all.

Episode 99 and 100 Thug Life: Benvenuto Cellini is a two-part series about the life of Benvenuto Cellini. Italian artists from the Renaissance often lived lives that would make Biggie or Tupac blush. Cellini was wilder than all of them. This is quite possibly my favorite new series that I had a chance to work on this past year.

And this is a list of the previously paywalled episodes released since July 2022.

Episode 48 Give Me Back My Legions! This is the second and final part of a series about the clash between Rome and Germanic tribesmen about 2,000 years ago. It’s bloody and intense. The news of what happened (along with a severed head delivered by a courier) threw Emperor Augustus in a deep depression. Bonus points for how this event may be tied to the creation of the English language.  

Episode 49 The Father of Martial Arts: Jigoro Kano and Episode 50 Philosophers and Thugs are a series about how one man invented modern martial arts, finding a purpose for them at a time when most people considered them anachronistic and irrelevant. What 22-year old Kano started in some spare rooms in a Buddhist temple was going to affect the lives of millions of people. This story is about martial arts, but is also about much more.  

Episode 51 A Life for a Whistle: Emmett Till and The Birth of the Civil Rights Movement is about the murder of Emmett Till and how this is connected to the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.

Episodes 52 and 53 had already been published so the next ones are…

Episodes 54-58 Sitting Bull form the longest series I have ever recorded. It starts as a biography of Lakota leader Sitting Bull. It ends up covering the Ghost Dance movement. And it concludes with the 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee. It’s a very emotionally intense series.

Episodes 59-60 Fear and Loathing in Mongolia is about Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, aka The Bloody White Baron, an independent warlord during the Russian civil war who, in 1920, led his own private army, a multi-ethnic horde of nomadic steppe warriors, to conquer the capital from Mongolia.

Episode 61 Raiders in the Night is the story of one of the most daring missions in the history of WWII: a behind-enemy-lines raid to free some POWs who were about to be executed by the Japanese army in the Philippines. Rarely are war stories feel-good stories. But this may be the exception to the rule.   

Episode 62 Plagues, Mystery and Dancing is my latest release (likely within a few hours from this post) and tells of one of the weirdest events ever: the dancing plague. On July 14, 1518, in Strasbourg, thousands of people began dancing compulsively to the point of many of them dying of heart attacks. In this episode, I explore the mystery of what exactly happened and what caused this ‘dancing plague’.

I’d love to think that you will find all this work worthy of your subscription to History on Fire. It’s free on whatever platform you listen to podcasts.  Here’s one of the options: History on Fire on Apple

And while you are at it, it’d be sweet if you could also subscribe to the History on Fire Youtube channel