HISTORY This Week
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HISTORY This Week
This week, something big happened. You might have never heard of it, but this moment changed the course of history. A HISTORY Channel original podcast, HISTORY This Week gives you insight into the people—both famous and unknown—whose decisions reshaped the world we live in today. Through interviews...
Nýlegir þættir
284 þættir
How LEGO Rebuilt the Toy Itself
October, 1955. In living rooms across Denmark, children tear open the box of a brand-new toy: the LEGO System in Play. Inside are plastic bricks, a pr...
Stalin’s War on Genetics
October 11, 1955. Nearly three hundred of the Soviet Union’s top scientists sign a secret letter demanding the removal of one man: Trofim Lysenko. For...
The Bone Wars
October 4, 1915. President Woodrow Wilson designates Dinosaur National Monument as a national historic site. That’s a big deal, right? There must’ve b...
When Nintendo (and Mario) Rescued Video Games
September 27, 1986. You’re a kid in the mid-80s. You get home from school, flip on the TV, and see something strange: a commercial where a giant egg h...
The First Lady Who Tamed the Bull Moose
September 14, 1901. Midnight in the Adirondacks. A pounding knock at the door jolts Theodore and Edith Roosevelt awake. William McKinley is dead. Hour...
Presenting: The C-Word
With every episode, Lena Dunham and Alissa Bennett take you on a historical deep dive into the life of a woman society dismissed by calling her mad, s...
An Astronomer Hunts a KGB Hacker
September 10, 1986. It’s just before 8am when Cliff Stoll’s pager jolts him awake. A computer at Lawrence Berkeley Lab has flagged a problem: a tiny 7...
Shaving Russia
Sept 5, 1698. Tsar Peter the Great of Russia returns home from a year-long European tour. When noblemen, religious figures, and friends gather to welc...
José Cuervo Rebuilds a Tequila Empire
August 28, 1920. In the town of Tequila, fireworks burst overhead as people celebrate Mexico’s independence. Then… gunshots. Malachías Cuervo, heir to...
The True Winnie-the-Pooh
August 24, 1914. A train pulls up to the lumber town of White River, Ontario, carrying a regiment of Canadian troops on board. On the tracks where the...
Egypt’s Last Hieroglyph and the Fiery Archbishop of Alexandria
August 24, 394. On the walls of a fading Egyptian temple, a priest carves what will become the last known hieroglyph in history. At the same moment, i...
The Shark Attacks That Made Us Fear the Water
August 15, 1915. American diplomat J. T. Du Bois publishes a letter in The New York Times. It’s not about diplomacy or foreign affairs. This letter is...
When Nazis Killed Nazis in the Middle of America
August 7, 1943. Off the coast of Venezuela, a Nazi U-boat is under siege. For nine days, it’s hunted by Allied aircraft across the Caribbean, until it...
Barbie for President!
July 29th, 1992. The Baltimore Sun runs a feature about a surprise candidate in the upcoming presidential race: Barbie. The 11.5-inch icon of girlhood...
Anarchists, Lovers, and the Birth of the FBI
July 23rd, 1892. Henry Clay Frick is one of America’s leading industrialists. To Alexander Berkman, he’s one of America’s leading villains. Berkman is...
Solving a Royal Murder Mystery | Philippa Langley Investigates the Princes in the Tower
July 17, 1674. During renovations at the Tower of London, construction workers digging beneath a stone staircase make a chilling discovery—two child-s...
Operation Mincemeat Revisited | Episode + Bonus Interview with Natasha Hodgson
When we first aired "Operation Mincemeat" back in 2020, it was a daring WWII thriller that felt almost too wild to be true. Now, it’s not just history...
Superman Takes Flight
July 7, 1938. Superman has the villain in his grasp. They soar through the air, then slam into the ground. This villain wants to start a war. Our hero...
The Colosseum Becomes a Wonder | A Conversation with Barry Strauss & Alison Futrell
July 7, 2007. In a dramatic ceremony featuring pop stars, fireworks, and smoke cannons, the Colosseum is named one of the seven new wonders of the wor...
The Forgotten Mentor Who Inspired Louis Armstrong
June 28, 1928. Louis Armstrong is in the studio recording what he hopes will be another hit. His career is on the rise, but he’s not a household name...
The Mutiny of Henry Hudson
June 22, 1611. It’s been a long, cold winter. Henry Hudson and his crew have been stranded in the Canadian Arctic for months, living on the ice in woo...
"Have You No Decency, Sir?"
June 9, 1954. Senator Joseph McCarthy has accused the United States Army of having communists within its midst. After rising to power during a time of...
Jumping Off a High Dive on a Horse (While Blind)
June 14, 1938. It’s 8:30 PM at Lake Worth Casino in Fort Worth, Texas. All eyes are on a huge high-dive platform, 40 feet in the air. And at the top?...
Inside the Nazis’ Supernatural Obsession | A Conversation with Historian Eric Kurlander
June 4, 1941. Reinhard Heydrich transmits a message to all regional governors in the Third Reich: prepare for “action against occult teachings.”
...
How the Whitman Murders Redefined the American West
May 30, 1855. Five thousand Native Americans come to Walla Walla to negotiate a treaty. However, it’s not exactly a fair negotiation – the territorial...
A Vicious Beating on the Senate Floor
May 22, 1856. Charles Sumner isn’t worried about making friends in the Senate. His rhetoric is inflammatory, almost intentionally. He’s an ardent abol...
A Teenage Girl Saves France
May 16, 1920. Tens of thousands of people surround St. Peter’s Basilica to honor Joan of Arc, a French peasant girl who died nearly five hundred years...
McDonald’s Before McDonald’s
May 15, 1940. It’s opening day. San Bernardino, California is a city on the rise, and to meet this new demand for cheap, good food, two brothers have...
Cinco de Mayo’s Civil War Connection
May 5, 1862. The French have landed in Mexico. Napoleon III wants to conquer the country and assert France’s imperial dominance in the Americas. In hi...
America’s Cold War Obsession with Greenland
April 27, 1951. The United States has been putting pressure on Denmark for a long time. Because the small European kingdom has something the Americans...
Trailer: America's Cold War Obsession with Greenland
HISTORY This Week returns with new episodes this Monday! We're kicking things off with a look at America's longtime fascination with Greenland, and ho...
A Concubine Rises to Rule China
April 27, 1856. In Beijing’s Forbidden City, one of the emperor’s consorts, a woman named Cixi, has given birth to a son – the emperor’s first heir. T...
Introducing: What We Spend
Imagine if you could ask someone anything you wanted about their finances. On What We Spend, people from across the country and across the financial s...
"Houston We’ve Had a Problem” (feat. Captain Jim Lovell)
April 14, 1970. Apollo 13 is a quarter million miles from Earth, speeding towards the Moon, when a sudden explosion rocks the ship. Against all odds,...
The Titanic’s First and Last Voyage
April 10, 1912. As the RMS Titanic pulls away from a crowded port on the south coast of England, it almost crashes. Just in time, it’s able to turn of...
148 Tornadoes in 18 Hours
April 3, 1974. Across America, many people wake up this morning thinking it will be a normal day. But in the next 24 hours, almost 150 tornadoes will...
Was Ethel Rosenberg A Spy?
March 29, 1951. The world is waiting for the jury’s verdict. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg have been accused of spying for the Soviet Union, conspiring t...
Revenge of the Ronin
March 20, 1703. Today, almost fifty men, scattered around the city of Edo, Japan, are waiting to die. They’re all former samurai who had served the sa...
Six Men, Two Bombs, One Grave Injustice
March 14, 1991. The Birmingham Six have been in prison for 16 years. Each of these six Irishmen was found guilty of 21 counts of murder back in 1975 –...
Introducing: Campus Files
College holds a mythic place in American culture, but behind the polished campus tours and glossy brochures lies a far more complicated reality. Each...