HISTORY This Week The HISTORY® Channel

April 1, 2023. In honor of April Fools’ Day, we give you three historical tales of the bluff and the bamboozle. An autumn day in 1726, when an English peasant gives birth to something mysterious … and furry. Mets spring training in 1985, as the world meets an otherworldly baseball player with a superhuman arm. Finally, the summer of 1835 in NYC, when a scrappy start-up of a newspaper starts a frenzy about its exclusive: there’s life on the moon! Along the way, we’ll learn what it takes to pull off a convincing hoax. And how we can avoid being duped ourselves!
Special thanks to our guests: Karen Harvey, professor of cultural history at the University of Birmingham and author of The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England; Jay Horwitz, former PR director and current VP of Alumni Relations for the New York Mets; and Matthew Goodman, author of The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York.


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March 25, 1911. It’s quarter to five on a Saturday—closing time at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Someone on the cutting room floor lights a cigarette… that ignites a pile of scraps. Over the next fifteen minutes, hundreds of workers scramble to escape the top floors of this ten-story building by smoke-filled stairwell, crammed elevators, and an overloaded fire escape. 146 of them don’t make it out. How was this tragedy set in motion years before the fire itself? And how did reforms passed in the wake of the fire change the workplace for all of us?

Special thanks to our guests: Kat Lloyd, vice president of programs and interpretation at New York's Tenement Museum, and David Von Drehle, author of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.

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March 17, 1828. The celebrated clown, Joseph Grimaldi, rises from his sickbed. Once London’s most energetic performer, he’s gradually been crippled by decades of pratfalls and acrobatics. He can barely manage the short walk to Sadler’s Wells theater, where he’s about to star in a final show. Grimaldi dresses backstage as if he’s in a daze, burdened by a lifetime of personal sorrows. And yet, when the curtain rises, he’ll summon the old strength. He’ll entertain this last of his countless audiences and send them home happy – unlike the clown himself. Who was Joseph Grimaldi? And how did he blend humor, irreverence, and humanity to fundamentally change comedy?
Special thanks to our guests, Andrew McConnell Stott, author of The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian, and Naomi Shafer, Executive Director of Clowns Without Borders USA.

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March 10, 1949. Defendant Mildred Gillars arrives at a courthouse to hear her verdict. To trial-watchers, she’s known as Axis Sally—the American woman who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin during World War II. In taunting tones, she spent years pushing anti-Semitic and anti-Allies messages aimed at weakening the morale of American soldiers. But Gillars insists that she’s misunderstood, even innocent. That she’s an artist, she loves her country, and was forced to do what she did… or die. How did a struggling actress from Maine become a potent weapon of the Nazis? And is there a way to understand the choices that she made?
Special thanks to our guests, Richard Lucas, author of Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany, and Michael Flamm, professor of history at Ohio Wesleyan University. Thanks also to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress.

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A new History Channel podcast, American Football is the untold tale of the rough-and-tumble origins of the National Football League. Produced and presented by Michael Strahan and narrated by actress and pro football enthusiast Kate Mara, this podcast reaches back into the past to explain the dirty, bloody, and tumultuous beginnings of America's most popular sport.
In this first episode, the sport of American football begins as a stand-in for war – a place where young men at elite colleges could prove their mettle fighting on the gridiron.

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March 2, 1969. French pilot André Turcat takes to the skies above Toulouse-Blagnac airport. He’s flying an odd-looking plane: long and slender with triangular wings and a bent-down nose like a bird of prey. It’s called the Concorde – a jet designed to move supersonic flight from military to civilian use. If it works, paying passengers will be able to cross continents and oceans at fantastic speeds while sipping glasses of champagne. The crowd below watches, mesmerized, as Turcat puts the plane through its paces. Concorde aces the test and now, as they say, the sky’s the limit. How did this space age technology, born of the Cold War, usher in one of the most glamorous eras of commercial flight? And what caused it to come to an end? 
Special thanks to our guest, Mike Bannister, author of Concorde: The Thrilling Account of History’s Most Extraordinary Airliner. Thanks also to the folks at the Brooklands Museum.


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