Sidequests

Keith Conrad

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History

Uncovering the strange, overlooked stories hidden in history’s odd corners. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1d ago

The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part Seven - Iceberg Right Ahead

Episode 7 of our ten part series The Titanic Disaster covers the last day. Sunday, April 14 — church services in the morning, elegant dinners in the evening, ice warnings arriving all day and going mostly unacted upon. Then, at 11:39 PM, Frederick Fleet sees a dark shape ahead. He rings the bell three times, grabs the telephone, and delivers the four words that ended an era: “Iceberg right ahead.” The free episode covers the full day — the warnings that accumulated and were set aside, the wireless operator who was too busy sending passenger messages to deliver the most critical ice report to the bridge, the final dinner parties, and the collision itself. Then the aftermath: passengers making snowballs from ice chips on the forward deck while, below the waterline, six compartments were already flooding. Thomas Andrews calculating the mathematics. Captain Smith learning there were over a thousand people aboard with no lifeboat space. The evacuation beginning — too slow, too late, with boats launching half-empty into the dark. The premium episode goes deeper on the four figures whose decisions shaped everything: Frederick Fleet, William Murdoch, Jack Phillips, and Edward Smith. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

16 min
3d ago

The Year Without A Summer

A volcano no one had heard of explodes. The sun goes pale. And somehow humanity responds with monsters and bikes. This Sidequest looks at 1816 — the Year Without a Summer. Famine in Ireland. Food riots in France and Germany. Mass westward migration out of New England as families abandoned farms that simply wouldn’t grow anything. Religious revivals. Apocalyptic panic. And in a villa on a cold, gray Lake Geneva, a group of writers stuck indoors by relentless storms who decided to pass the time with a ghost story contest. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

9 min
5d ago

Operation Cornflakes

By 1945, the Allies had tried nearly everything to undermine Nazi Germany from the inside. Leaflets dropped from planes. Radio broadcasts. Forged documents. And then someone in the Office of Strategic Services — the forerunner to the CIA — had an idea that was either brilliant or completely unhinged, possibly both. What if they weaponized the mail? This week's Sidequests covers Operation Cornflakes: the Allied psychological operation that used bombed mail trains, counterfeit Nazi postage stamps, and fake German newspapers to slip anti-Nazi propaganda directly into the hands of ordinary German citizens — delivered, unknowingly, by actual German postal workers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

8 min
May 22

The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part Six - Life At Sea

Episode 5 of our ten-part series onThe Titanic Disaster takes place entirely before anything goes wrong. It’s Friday and Saturday, April 12 and 13. Ireland is 300 miles behind. America is still three days ahead. The engines are warming up — 386 miles Thursday to Friday, 519 miles Friday to Saturday, 546 on Sunday before the iceberg ends the count. The ship is a self-contained world of 2,208 people, and for these two days, everything is working exactly as designed. The free episode covers life across all three classes, Thomas Andrews walking the decks with his notebook cataloguing minor imperfections, and the orchestra playing its scheduled concerts — six times daily, from morning classical to evening ragtime — unaware that Sunday night would require a very different kind of performance. The premium episode goes deeper into four stories the free version can only touch: the professional gamblers preying on first-class passengers, the children aboard and what happened to them, the crew’s world below decks, and what the ship meant to the 706 third-class immigrants who boarded with everything they owned. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

17 min
May 21

The War of the Whiskers

Before telegrams and treaty negotiations, before summits and press conferences, European diplomacy played out in royal courts where every detail was scrutinized — including, with surprising frequency, what was growing on your face. This Sidequest covers the War of the Whiskers: the era when a clean-shaven diplomat could cause an international incident, when ambassadors were quietly briefed on the “facial hair climate” of the courts they were assigned to, and when at least one Austrian envoy was reassigned from St. Petersburg because he refused to grow a beard to satisfy Tsar Nicholas I. It sounds absurd. It was also completely real. In 19th-century Europe, facial hair wasn’t fashion — it was national identity, political allegiance, and diplomatic signal all at once. Prussian soldiers wore bold mustaches as symbols of martial discipline. Napoleon III’s waxed imperial whiskers set the tone for what a loyal French subject should look like. British soldiers returned from the Crimean War with full beards and sparked a national debate about heroism versus discipline. When a British envoy to the Ottoman Empire refused to grow the long curled mustache standard among officials there, it was whispered in diplomatic circles that he might have made more progress if he’d simply picked up a razor and worked in the other direction. The press dubbed the growing tension the War of the Whiskers, circulating caricatures of ambassadors armed not with swords but with combs and beard oil. It was satire — but satire with a point. Grooming had become strategy. Image had become policy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

8 min
May 19

Let's Learn About the Thucydides Trap

In the fifth century BC, Athens was rising. Wealthier, more powerful, more ambitious than it had ever been. And Sparta — the dominant military power for generations — was watching, and growing afraid. What happened next gave us one of the most important ideas in the study of power and conflict: the Thucydides Trap. The historian Thucydides watched Athens and Sparta drag each other into a 27-year war that devastated the Greek world, and he asked not what triggered it, but what caused it. His answer was deceptively simple: it was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this instilled in Sparta. Not aggression. Not ambition. Fear. This week’s Sidequests unpacks the Thucydides Trap… for no reason in particular. It’s the recurring pattern in which a rising power challenges an established one, fear takes hold on both sides, and the structure of rivalry pulls nations toward conflict that neither side necessarily wanted. The Peloponnesian War. Rome and Carthage. Britain and Germany before World War I. The same pattern, different centuries, similar outcomes. Two sides that both lost more than they could have gained by avoiding the fight. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

14 min
May 15

The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part Five - Queenstown

Episode 5 of our ten-part series onThe Titanic Disaster follows the ship to her final port: Queenstown, Ireland, April 11, 1912. One hundred twenty Irish emigrants board, carrying everything they own and leaving behind everything they know. Seven passengers disembark, including a Jesuit priest named Francis Browne whose telegram-ordered departure would save his life and preserve the most comprehensive photographic record of the ship’s interior that would ever exist. Then the anchors come up, Ireland disappears below the horizon, and the Atlantic opens ahead. The free episode covers the approach to Queenstown, the Irish emigrants who boarded and where they were going, Father Browne’s photographs and the seven words that saved his life, and the final departure, the moment the last link to Europe was severed and the ship turned west toward whatever was waiting. The full premium episode goes deeper on Queenstown itself, the Ireland those emigrants were leaving, the lost mail that went down with the ship, and the music of third class in those final days before the iceberg. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

15 min
May 14

The 200-Year Fight Over Washington's Monuments

The monuments on the National Mall feel timeless. Inevitable. As if they rose from the earth fully formed.. of course the Washington Monument is there, of course it looks like that, of course the Lincoln Memorial anchors the western end of the Mall with the Reflecting Pool stretching out before it. None of it was inevitable. All of it was a fight. This week’s Sidequests traces the 200-year argument over how America builds its monuments, and what those arguments reveal about a country that has always been uncomfortable with its own desire for grandeur. Republics aren’t supposed to build like empires. But they also want to be taken seriously. That tension has been present since L’Enfant unrolled his plans in 1791, and it hasn’t been resolved since. Every monument on the Mall tells two stories. The first is the story it commemorates. The second is the story of how America chose to build it and that second story has always been messy, slow, contentious, and democratic. Maybe that process is part of what makes them American. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

15 min

See All (22)

Uncovering the strange, overlooked stories hidden in history’s odd corners. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Creator

Keith Conrad
Years Active

2K
Episodes

22
Rating

Clean
Show Website

Sidequests

Sidequests

Episodes

The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part Seven - Iceberg Right Ahead

The Year Without A Summer

Operation Cornflakes

The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part Six - Life At Sea

The War of the Whiskers

Let's Learn About the Thucydides Trap

The Sinking of the RMS Titanic: Part Five - Queenstown

The 200-Year Fight Over Washington's Monuments

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