History Buffoons Podcast

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 ...

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 agg...

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 id...

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 cadave...

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 in...

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...