Softcore History
by Softcore History
A podcast for the casual fan of history. The Wikipedia reader. The kids who grew up with a dad who watched the same 10 hours of World War II specials on The History Channel. Join Dan Regester, Rob Fox, and a weekly guest as they tastefully insert themselves into the past. The only thing we don’t show is our research.
Episodes
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The Enfield Poltergeist
In 1977, in North London, a single British mother and her four children begin experiencing violent supernatural events. The poltergeist attacked the children, the mother, and multiple credible witnesses who showed up after the disturbances were reported to the police and the press. Eventually…
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The Blackbird of Chernobyl
Today we talk about a modern cryptid story claiming that a large, dark, winged humanoid creature—similar to West Virginia's Mothman—was spotted by workers and residents near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant shortly before the April 26, 1986 disaster. Subscribe to the...
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The Stabbing Ghost | The Amherst Mystery
It's Nova Scotia, Canada. 1878. An 18-year-old girl named Esther Cox has a traumatic experience. Soon after, a poltergeist starts tormenting her. Dozens of witnesses watch over the course of months as she's stabbed with pins and knives wielded by no one. Matches are lit and dropped to try to burn...
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Lizzie Borden Had An Axe
The unsolved murders of Andrew Borden and his wife Abby Gray in 1892 have become a bit of American myth and legend. Andrew's daughter Lizzie was the only suspect in the vicious hatchet killings in Fall River, Massachusetts but was acquitted after a botched investigation and trial. We talk about…
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Will America Fall Like Rome? (ft. Jeremy Ryan Slate)
Host of "The Roman Pattern" Jeremy Ryan Slate joins the show to talk about the parallels he sees between Rome's fall and America's current place in history. Subscribe to the Softcore History Patreon for hundreds of hours of extra history content…
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Combat Of The Thirty
After a Duke refuses to clearly name an heir on his deathbed, a family feud breaks out in Brittany in the midst of the 100 year war. It all culminated into a tournament between the rivaling factions where a 30 on 30 battle royal took place for no real reason outside of hate for the other side....
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The Time An Immigrant Took The President's Job
Kyle Bandujo, host of the "From Phenom to Farm" and "Big Screen Sports" podcasts, joins the show to discuss the illiterate Polish immigrant who President Grover Cleveland paid to take his place in the Civil War after our (then future) Commander in Chief was drafted in 1863. The man's name was...
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The Original Lindsay Clancy
Constance Fisher was a 20th century mother and paranoid schizophrenic who drowned her three children on two separate occasions. You didn't read that wrong. She repeated the same murder on another set of three kids -- killing six in total -- after she was released from a mental asylum and her...
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David and the Goliath-Sized Pile of Foreskin
One of the most famous stories of the Old Testament is David's slaying of the Philistine giant Goliath. But, that's not even the most impressive thing David did. After taking down Goliath David, at the behest of King Saul, killed and harvested the foreskin of 200(!!!) Philistine soldiers. Somehow...
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Germany Bombed The Statue of Liberty?
Jack Mandaville joins the show to talk about a forgotten terrorist attack on American soil that helped push the US into war. Subscribe to the Softcore History Patreon for hundreds of hours of extra history content including episodes like this, listener voicemails,...
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Modern Serial Killers Have Nothing On The Middle Ages
Forget Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy. Forget Jack the Ripper. One serial killer in 16th-century Germany was so prolific and horrifying that he puts all our modern true crime subject matter to shame. Peter Niers confessed to taking the lives of over 500 victims, both while robbing and looting as a...
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The Orphan Who Became A Globetrotting Mining Tycoon And US President
Herbert Hoover is remembered as a total bozo whose term in office is defined by the Great Depression. But, Herbie lived an insanely eventful and rewarding life before and after his time at the White House that included stops in Australia, China, and England. Subscribe to the…
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TV’s Greatest Pervert
Bob Crane was known best for his titular role on the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. But behind the scenes the man was a s*x addicted freak who filmed nearly every one of his conquests, carried personal p*rn on him at all times, and had nearly nightly gang bangs. And it may have cost him his life.…
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The King Addicted To Gooning
Christian VII of Denmark is a relatively unknown monarch from the 1700s, save for one thing — he loved cranking it. The gooning addiction got so bad his advisors had to hide it from King George III of Great Britain so the monarch would allow his sister to marry the Danish king. Christian was also...
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When Cross-Dressers Took Down The Spartans
In 379 BC, exiled government officials from Thebes devised a plan to retake the city-state from their Spartan captors. It involved a seven man military crew who disguised themselves as high end prostitutes for a winter banquet to assassinate the Spartan governors and military leaders and rally…
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Why Bastille Day Is Stupid
Much like the French Revolution as a whole, the event that kicked it all off, the Storming of the Bastille, was a sh*tshow that was in no way about what everyone involved claimed it was about. And, as was tradition during the French Revolution, it resulted in the pointless deaths of innocent...
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The Peg Legged Playboy Who Helped Write The Constitution
Gouverneur Morris was an American statesman, framer of the Constitution, and one of the most under appreciated Founding Fathers of the United States. He also had a peg leg, loved messing around with married women, became the minister of France during the Reign of Terror where he actively rode for...
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The Massacre At Frank Lloyd Wright's Love Cottage
The most famous architect in American history might have been agenius, but he was also a real piece of sh*t. After his wife refusedto grant him a divorce, Frank Lloyd Wright ran away to Europe withanother married woman. The love affair was one of the biggest socialscandals of the early 20th…
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History's Bad Dads
We cover three of history's worst famous fathers who had very different parenting styles. Subscribe to the Softcore History Patreon for hundreds of hours of extra history content including episodes like this, listener voicemails, movie watch-alongs, and weekly bonus episodes.…
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The World Cup's Most Violent Match Ever
In 1962, World Cup host Chile was set to play Italy in their final group stage match. Both sides needed a win to advance to the knockout stage. What ensued, thanks to a pair of Italian newspaper articles calling host nation Chile "backwards," "illiterate," and "full of prostitutes," was less of a...
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Major League Wife Swap
In 1973, the strangest trade broke out between two New York Yankees teammates. This is the career defining story of both Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich. Subscribe to the Softcore History Patreon for hundreds of hours of extra history content including episodes like this, listener...
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The Man Who Inspired Saving Private Ryan's Gnarliest Moments
Staff Sergeant Ray Lambert hit Dog Green Sector of Omaha Beach with the first wave on D-Day. He was a medic. His job was to save, not kill. But that fact did not prevent him from taking an absolute BEATING on the beach that day. Despite multiple horrific wounds throughout the morning, he never...
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How The Green Mountain Boys Broke Benedict Arnold
The capture of Fort Ticonderoga early in the American Revolution was a crucial, if militarily uneventful, victory early in America's fight for independence. The capture cut British Canada off from the 13 colonies and supplied important heavy artillery to force the British out of Boston. And it…
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The Time We Almost Nuked The Moon
After the launch of Sputnik, the U.S. needed a response to show they had not fallen behind the Soviets during the Cold War. The Air Force put together a top-secret, very real plan under the name Project A119 to detonate a nuclear bomb on the surface of the moon for the rest of the world to see....
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UFO Files: The Hatfields and McGoblins
The recent release of the UFO Files left out arguably the most exciting human vs. extraterrestrial encounter in American history: when a group of backwoods Kentucky rednecks spent an August night in 1955 fighting off a dozen goblin-like aliens with a shotgun and a rifle from inside their humble...
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The Horny Emperor Who Loved To Cosplay
Zhu Houzhao took over the Ming Dynasty at just 14. He was more interested in women, drinking, and pretending to be a soldier than actually running China. He left his royal court in the hands of his eunuch friends as he hung out in his "Leopard Quarter" all day getting wasted with his exotic…
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This is What Happens When A Woman Takes Power
The Assyrian queen Semiramis is one of the most notorious rulers in ancient history. Not just because she was a woman ruling a violent, male-dominated society. And not because she competently ruled the massive empire for years. Mostly, it turns out, because there were some WILD stories about her,...
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The American That Made Hating The Pope Cool
Lewis Charles Levin was a 19th century Jewish American politician, newspaper editor, and conspiracy theorist who believed that Irish immigrants were soldiers of the Catholic Church sent by the Pope to cause division in our nation. He became a congressman for the state of Pennsylvania and was a...
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The Horniest Soldiers In American History
As American soldiers liberated France, they had one thing on their mind: Boning. It turns out that the GIs who were landing in Normandy and fighting in the hedgerows were at least partly motivated by the fact that they were convinced Francewas going to be their own personal Panama City Beach…
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How The Navy Got Its... Reputation
In 1919, rumors were swirling that a naval base in Newport, Rhode Island, was rife with immoral (gay) behavior. In response, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt commissioned a sting operation. Send fresh, young sailors into the base to honeytrap men into having sex with them. What...
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The Worst Person To Ever Live Bracket
We put together a 68 person March Madness bracket of some of the most evil and despicable humans to ever grace this planet and decide who is the worst of all time.Subscribe to the Softcore History Patreon for hundreds of hours of extra history content including episodes like this, listener...
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New Orleans' Murderous Hooker
When you think about prostitutes and serial killers, you generally assume the former is being killed by the latter. But in the case of Bridget Fury, the former IS the latter. Fury was infamous in antebellum New Orleans for killing Johns who didn't pay, mutilating rival ladies of the night, and…
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The Starting 9 For Hell’s Baseball Team
With the MLB season about to start we pick our starting nine for Hell’s baseball team — the most talented and least moral person at every position in MLB history, dead players only. We also pick the All-Heaven starting nine and decide who would win between the two. Subscribe to the Softcore…
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This Is Sparta!
King Xerxes launched a second invasion of Greece in 480 BC to avenge his father's failures a decade before. The massive Persian army of over 100,000 men was met by Leonidas and his force of 300 Spartans (and roughly 7,000 other soldiers) at a pass in Thermopylae. This three day stand turned the...
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The Pacific Theater Was A Nightmare
Maybe we don't talk about the Pacific Theater in World War 2 as much as we should because we don't want to acknowledge how gross it actually was. The Battle of Peleliu is arguably the best example of how foul it was. Unspeakable war crimes, temperatures exceeding 110 degrees, crabs eating dead...
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The King Of Louisiana
Huey Long was one of the most radical and powerful politicians in American history. Between his time as both the governor of Louisiana and senator he completely steamrolled his enemies and changed the state entirely during the Great Depression.Subscribe to the Softcore History Patreon for…
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The Japanese Ate A Lot of People In WW2
The Japanese committed a lot of war crimes in World War II but cannibalism wasn’t one of them, though only because cannibalism wasn’t technically a war crime because no one thought to make a rule against it. Still, Imperial Japanese soldiers practiced cannibalism more than you would think, and…
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The Devil Worshipping American Intelligence Officer
Michael A. Aquino Jr. was an American military officer, specialist in psychological warfare, Nazi admirer and Satanist priest who started his own religion. This is the story of the Temple of Set.Subscribe to the Softcore History Patreon for hundreds of hours of extra history content including...
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The Greatest Aerial Combat Win Ever
Captain Royce Williams will receive the Medal of Honor soon, for a secret he kept for 50 years — that during the Korean War, badly outnumbered and outgunned, he took on and defeated 6 Soviet MiGs by himself despite the fact that the Soviet Union was not an official combatant in the Korean War....
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America's Shady History With Saudi Arabia
The minute President Roosevelt stepped foot on the USS Quincy to meet with Ibn Saud on the Bitter Lake, he changed the course of America's future in the Middle East. We dive deeper into the complex and often rocky relationship the United States has had with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Subscribe…
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The Meanest Mormon in History
Porter Rockwell was many things. A man with three wives and twenty-one children, a lawman, and one of the OG Mormons. But above all he was the early Mormon church’s muscle. Their enforcer. And he had no compunction about killing for church leaders like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.Subscribe to...
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The Man Who Wrongly Thought He Could Fly
Franz Reichelt was an Austrian born tailor who became obsessed with the idea of creating a wearable parachute for pilots and aviators. This passion was only fueled by the many peers who doubted his invention and it ultimately led to a day of destiny at the Eiffel Tower in 1912.Subscribe to the...
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Left Handers Are The Most Oppressed People In Human History
Rob, a southpaw survivor of human society’s systemic left-handedness oppression, breaks down all the horrible ways basically every civilization throughout human history has demonized, ostracized, and genocided left-handers. Subscribe to the Softcore History Patreon for hundreds of hours of extra...
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The Last Viking
Harald "Hardrada" Sigurdsson was a Viking mercenary in the Byzantine Varangian Guard and eventual King of Norway who threw his hat in the ring to conquer England in 1066. He lived an extraordinary life traveling far and wide participating in campaigns against Muslim Caliphates, Bulgarian rebels,...
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The Spy Who Shagged BP
Moe Berg was a defense-first journeyman catcher for the Dodgers, White Sox, Indians, and Red Sox who faced the likes of Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio. He also had multiple Ivy League degrees and was such a trusted spy for the OSS during World War II that FDR personally sent him on missions. But…
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The Eggnog Riot
Jefferson Davis was a malcontent long before the American Civil War. The Eggnog Riot or Grog Mutiny was an 1826 drunken Christmas rebellion by dozens of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point including the future President of the Confederate State of America firmly in the midst of the...
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Flying Drunk At Pearl Harbor
U.S. Army Air Corps pilots Kenneth Taylor and George Welch had a few days off in tropical paradise and decided to let loose at an officer Christmas party. They parlay that into an all night poker game before eventually getting to bed -- three sheets to the wind -- at around 7 am...December 7th,...
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Who Was The Best General Of All Time?
This is a free preview of the content we offer on the Softcore History Patreon.It is the best way to support Dan and Rob and keeps the podcast going.Subscribe to the Softcore History Patreon for hundreds of hours of extra history content including episodes like this and sports shows on the higher...
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The Geriatric Masshole Who Murdered Redcoats
Samuel Whittemore fought in the American Revolution. He fought despite the fact that he was born in 1696. At 78 years old, Whittemore, who'd already served in two wars prior to the American Revolution, ambushed a British unit, completely by himself. Why? Because the man was A) a fierce patriot...
About this show
A podcast for the casual fan of history. The Wikipedia reader. The kids who grew up with a dad who watched the same 10 hours of World War II specials on The History Channel. Join Dan Regester, Rob Fox, and a weekly guest as they tastefully insert themselves into the past. The only thing we don’t show is our research.
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Softcore History