You Are A Weirdo (with Historian Doug Sofer, Ph.D.)

What parts of today’s world would freak out folks who lived during the U.S. Civil War? In this first-ever interview-based episode* of the You Are A Weirdo history podcast, we ask a real-life U.S. Civil War historian that exact question! Join host Doug Sofer as he chats with Aaron Astor about such topics as today’s professional military, the size and scope of government, air conditioning, sports betting, and college football. Doug and Aaron also play the inaugural version of a new history game called “Clionic Connections.” Sure, it's a good way to foster a fascinating conversation about history, but it's also an excuse for Doug to play unnecessary sound effects. Check it out! -- * Technically speaking, this one is actually the second overall interview-based episode. The first one from Season One involved someone who's been dead for 124 years or so. You'll have to listen to the intro for details. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

There once was a jolly fellow with a red nose who lived in London; historical documents mention something about a certain "S. Clause." Then, in 1833, he and his mates disappeared without a trace. Finding out what happened to him has something to do with the environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, and with heroic efforts to restore the River Thames to its former glory. Listen and you’ll discover hordes of angry servants—who may have never existed in the first place. Find out why London was so stinky. Hear the actual words of a small-town vicar who was extra. And contemplate the least effective public health poster campaign in history. This episode is a continuation of the previous episode called “History Is in Your Nature—and Vice-Versa,” but feel free to start with this one and you’ll be fine. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Take a walk on the wild side with your historian host as we unearth some of the big-picture insights of environmental history. Forage in the wilderness, stroll around a giant pie, and hear about what ancient folks did for a living. You’ll also find out why you can’t build enormous pyramid-like buildings without things like beer, bread, kings, priestesses, and pants. And you’ll discover how an ancient, fantastical story about magical beasties and a man who lives like a gazelle can still help us to understand some genuine things about the real past. Most important, learn why you need history in order to really understand humanity’s connections to the natural environment. You can find the sources for this episode along with lots of other good stuff at findyourselfinhistory.com . Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

It bears repeating that we live in strange times. Take, for instance, duplication technology. Today, no matter who you are, you can draw an image or scribble out some text, and copy it as many times as you’d like. Yet when we consider that copying tech in historical perspective, we discover that this ability is new. For most of the human past, only wealthy elites could clone massive stacks of duplicated materials. Printing has been around for a surprisingly long time, but easy access to portable copying technology is a clear sign of the peculiarity of the present-day. Join your favorite professional historian on a journey around the globe—to Indonesia, Iraq, China, Germany and Virginia—and find out about how the arts and sciences of duplication have changed over the centuries, and how that journey teaches us about our fundamentally odd world. Along the way, you’ll get to hear a professional historian’s expert audio simulation of a copying technique that dates back nearly 40,000 years. And you’ll hear shocking statements about Thomas Jefferson’s elbows. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Which is more valuable: diamonds or water? The seems obvious, but splash some holy water into the mix and you’ll see that this answer is a lot messier than you might at first think. Join your new favorite historian-podcaster guy on a journey through time and around the world to better understand why holy water defies most economic logic. Along the way you’ll discover about why people in the diamond industry have mangled the English language. You’ll have an epiphany about how the laws of supply and demand don’t really apply to the Moscow River. You’ll meet multiple condescending British travel writers. And, as always, you’ll find out that plunging into the past helps you to better comprehend the strangeness of now. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Did the framers of the U.S. Constitution set up the country’s government to be a republic or a democracy? Some folks have surprisingly strong opinions on this question, often with good reason. Yet the words republic and democracy have very similar meanings, so what’s the big deal? The answer has to do with the ways that the historic founders of the USA thought about history—specifically the histories of the democracies and republics that came before them. To make things even more confusing, the Constitution’s authors got some of their history secondhand, through one of their favorite political philosophers, Charles Montesquieu (1689–1755), who had some very specific—and surprising—things to say about republics and democracies. Check out this episode to learn why many people of the past would find many of our present-day political debates on this topic to be especially odd. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Anticipation. It's so thick you can scoop it out of the air with a soup spoon. Yes my friends, Season Two of the award-imagining You Are A Weirdo podcast is coming soon. If this dramatic trailer is any indication, it's going to be epic. Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

In the time it takes you to put on just one elbow pad, you can access hundreds of cutting-edge news articles from all around the globe. Yet making sense of international events can be tricky. To really get it, you need to understand something about historical context. Take for example the present-day situation between the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan. Right now, early June 2023, there’s a steady flow of news about rising economic, political, and military tensions connected to the island. But how did we get to this point? What are the stakes? Why does there seem to be so little room for compromise when it comes to Taiwan? To answer those questions, you need to understand the history of China and Taiwan from the fall of China’s Qing Dynasty through the post-Cold War period. This episode provides a short overview of that complex history and gives you some ideas of where to find additional resources. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Understanding the historical rise of mass media is not just about the tech. It’s also about how people used—and abused—those new ways of communicating with the public. That picture becomes clearer when you realize that new innovations in amplification and broadcasting coincided closely with the rise of nationalism in the Western world. Successful nationalist movements in Italy and Germany ushered in new two modern countries by the end of the 1870s. In the first half of the 20th century, those countries’ dictators used new mass-media technology to amplify not just their voices, but their personalities. In so doing, they passed themselves off as larger-than-life figures who claimed to speak for their entire nations. This episode explores how the convergence between nationalism and industrial mass-media helped prop up these two totalitarian dictatorships, suppressing other voices in the process. Investigating this history allows us to reflect on the nature of nations, how new ways of communication can be disorienting, and how being savvy about the history of media can help to keep you grounded. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

You’re presumably reading this description because you like to listen to podcasts. And you can listen to podcasts because clever people invented loudspeakers a century-and-change ago. And loudspeakers were not possible without the invention of electronic amplifiers. Which were not possible without vacuum tubes. Which are a lot like light bulbs. What was it like to experience electronically amplified sound for the first time? Did it set crowds of people into hysterical panic? Why or why not? Why were there so many innovations in audio tech at around the same time between the 1870s and 1930s? What is a magnavox and what does it have to do with Magnavox-with-a-capital 'M'? Why did the Great Grape Juice Waterfall of 1915 never, in fact, actually take place? These and many other fascinating interrogative sentences appear in this episode! Plug in now to learn more about how electronic amplification transformed the world into the weird place it is today. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

We take for granted our present-day ability to make ourselves as obnoxiously loud as we want to be. Yet being able to pump up the volume of an individual voice—to make it so deafening that it can easily reach all 140,000 ears of a stadium full of 70,000 people—is a brand-new development in the big picture of the human past. Vibe with your favorite professional historian on this sonic journey through thousands of years. This amped-up episode brings you around the world, from the cities of ancient Greece and the Yucatán peninsula, through the expansive countryside of North America. Experience how Europe’s Scientific Revolution ultimately changed humans’ relations with sound itself. And discover some of the different, creative, occasionally bizarre ways through which people tried to raise their voices for the thousands of years prior to electronic amplification. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Studying history can help you become a better, more informed leader. Yet a lot of so-called advice from 'history' out there tends to oversimplify the historical record. History is big and complex; reducing this enormous field to a bunch of digestible soundbites makes it appear small and simple. So what would happen if we tried to follow historical leadership advice without picking and choosing examples or separating those select tidbits from their original contexts? Would that advice still make sense? In this episode we answer that very question. And we discover that the real lessons of history are deeper, richer, messier and stranger—and far more profound—than some folks would have you believe. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Who’s your daddy? In most societies throughout most of recorded human history, your answer to that question would be the primary determinant of who you were allowed to be. A community in which your prestige and your birth-status determine who you are is what’s called a society of orders. But as a person of the present, you are disorderly. This episode begins with an irritating experience in the waiting room at your local DMV. But then we explore the controversy in the early United States around a group called the Society of the Cincinnati. Many political leaders feared it might represent the beginning of a new American aristocracy that would undermine the new republic. To discover why this seemingly innocent club for Revolutionary War veterans and their families concerned so many U.S., we accompany Thomas Jefferson to France and learn why living in an absolutist monarchy changed his mind about the Cincinnati. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Today, bananas are just a delicious, fruity fact of life. But being able to buy these curvy, golden delicacies in places where it’s too cold to grow them is actually a very recent development in the big picture of human history. Understanding the banana's past actually tells us a lot about the modern world—about economics, politics, technology, and even why we keep getting annoying popup ads for magical fruit-based cures. Join your favorite professional historian on this golden, slightly curved voyage through time, from the ancient Indian Ocean region through the present-day Western world. Discover how the banana has been adored throughout the ages. Explore why this fruit was once feared as a threat to civilization itself. And find out why bananas are as much a part of the Industrial Age as more obvious products like steel or petroleum. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

When you’re online, you meet all kinds of people. You play games with them, you LOL at their jokes, or care-emoji-hug them when they’re feeling especially sad-emoji. But within the broader context of the human past, these are brand-spanking-new ways of interacting with other members of your species. How did communication become so disembodied these days—literally separated from our human bodies? In this episode, we explore different ways that people have connected to one another over time, and investigate the historical roots of today's long-distance communication. In the process, we learn how our current ways of interacting with one another are simultaneously connected and disconnected from those who preceded us. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

How did tea become British when tea plants usually grow in far-away places like India or China? This history of this leafy beverage travels thousands of miles over thousands of years. It’s a story of human brutality and suffering on a global scale, but also of innovation and increasing connection among the peoples of earth. We even explore the origins of Southern sweet tea. At the end, you'll discover why that seemingly innocent teabag comes with strings attached. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Shuffle enough random songs and you're certain to hear singers who are no longer among the living. Before 1877, hearing voices of the dead would have been a supremely blood curdling experience. Yet we weirdos of today routinely listen to the sounds of the departed; we usually don’t even think about it. The invention of the phonograph fundamentally changed that aspect of the human condition, and altered how human-made sounds could travel through both space and time. Understanding how people reacted to this technology when it first arrived can reveal something important about who we’ve become. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

You might think you have a totally normal sense of humor, but then you hear a joke from the past and it sounds like it came from some other dimension. That's when you realize once again that your normal can be another person's weird. Join your new favorite podcaster-historian host on this journey through space and time, and open your mind to myriad manners of mirth-making. Along the way, you'll meet some fancy-pants anthropologists, a hungry international traveler, a possibly crazy dude from Kansas, some talking animals, a U.S. Senator, and a gassy Sumerian, among many others. You'll also find out far more about lusty sea creatures than you'd ever thought possible from a history podcast. Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

You take a totally normal trip to the supermarket to buy some totally normal meat. But what you purchase comes in a geometric shape that looks nothing like the animal that it originally came from. In this episode, we learn that modern meat-buying is utterly bizarre when compared to the meat-acquisition experiences of virtually all humans for virtually all of our species' past. Discover how and when our animal products turned into disks. And cylinders. And cubes. And oozy concentrates. And--hot soda? Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com ! Support the show Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.