This episode of history in Nazi Germany is a great example of just of effective a protest coming from people with privilege actually is.

It also challenges the idea that of the evil leader or regime forcing its will on the people and the people are helpless to stop it or that they didn’t willingly participate in it. The people of Germany willingly participated in the rise of nazis and made it possible for them to commit such horrible crimes.

Saint Nicholas is not Santa Claus, but he’s now inescapably bound up with Santa’s story and identity. Nicholas was the bishop of Myra, a town in what we no call Turkey, and we don’t have any surviving sources about him from his lifetime. The first major biography we have of Nicholas dates from 800s, centuries after his death, and stories about him are likely fictional or exaggerated. Those stories tell of a man who expelled demons, stayed executions, slapped the Christian heretic Arius (pictured below) and showed great generosity to his fellow citizens of Myra.

Slavery in the United States did not end all at once. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, the last enslaved persons in the United States didn’t know they were legally free until June 19th, 1865 when the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas. That day, which became known as “Juneteenth,” has been recognized as a holiday by numerous African-American communities throughout the U.S. since 1865. While it’s still not an official federal holiday, it is recognized as a state holiday by over forty U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Being buried alive was one of the most common phobias of the Victorian era. Fear of premature interment in a coffin inspired the creation of the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial, an Edgar Allan Poe short story about fear of being buried alive, and safety coffins designed to let in air and light and, in the event of early burial, allow the still-living person contact with the outside world.

William Shakespeare seems to have hated hedgehogs. We don’t quite know why, but it could have something to do with how the tiny animal is depicted by the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. Special Thanks to Jamie Jeffers of The British History Podcast and Miles Stokes of Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men for providing voicework for this episode.

Nearly every English-language movie has a disclaimer in the credits that says something like “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” Obviously this isn’t true. Historical epics, biopics, and other movies are clearly based on real people. Why does this disclaimer pretend otherwise?

The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with Rasputin.

Alvin Schwartz is best known for traumatizing children with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. However, one of Schwartz’s most terrifying tales for kids is from a different book, In a Dark, Dark Room and other Scary Stories. The story The Green Ribbon frightened an entire generation of schoolchildren with a narrative about a woman who wore a green ribbon around her neck every single day of her life… because it was keeping her head on.

Schwartz was a folklorist, and his stories all had antecedents in other works or in oral tradition. The Green Ribbon dates back to at least 1824, with Washington Irving’s short story The Adventure of the German Student. Several other versions of the story exist, all of which feature a ribbon-wearing woman whose head only stays on because of a thin layer of fabric.

I think the host’s theories about this story in relation to men and their difficulties with their partner’s past pairs well the Lover’s Vow story in the Tales from the Darkside movie.