Barely Historical

Opera has everything: drama, sex, ridiculous costumes, murder—and apparently, a deeply concerning amount of testicle removal.

This week, Jo and Amanda are getting into castrati, the male singers who were castrated as boys to preserve their high singing voices. And somehow, that definition is only the beginning of the weird shit.

We’re talking about the Catholic Church’s complicated involvement, Italy’s suspicious epidemic of musically gifted boys with “hernias,” what actually happened during the procedure, and the absolutely brutal gamble families were making when they decided their kid might just be the next opera superstar.

And for the boys who actually made it? Things get even weirder. Fame. Money. Royalty. Sex-symbol status. Because apparently eighteenth-century Europe looked at all of this and said, make him the romantic lead.

Plus, we test how cultured we actually are with opera terms and eventually hear the only known recordings of an actual castrato—which exist because this practice lasted way more recently than either of us expected.

Come for the opera. Stay for the suspicious hernias.

Let’s ruin the past.

The city needed someone to carry out its justice, so it hired a guy, made him essential, and then treated him like a walking biohazard. This week we ruin the executioner: specifically Franz "Meister Frantz" Schmidt of Nuremberg, who killed almost 400 people, treated something like 15,000 patients as an unlicensed healer, and spent his retirement personally petitioning the Holy Roman Emperor so his kids could get married without the shame following them.

What we cover:

• Why "dishonorable trades" existed and why they were hereditary (spoiler: nobody applied for this job, it just landed on you)

• Franz's first solo hanging at 19, and what "adroitly" meant as a job review

• The insane precision expected of an executioner and what happened if he screwed it up

• The weirdly bureaucratic version of mercy that existed inside all this cruelty

• Franz's medical side hustle, which somehow dwarfed his execution work

• Corpse medicine, briefly, because it's genuinely its own episode

• How a man who did exactly what the state asked of him for 45 years spent the rest of his life trying to prove his own family wasn't dangerous

Games this episode:

• Dishonorable trade or just kind of gross?

• Why would we be executed?

5 Fast Facts at the end, because we always have more than we have time for.

Coming soon: a corpse medicine bonus episode. Human fat, powdered skull, the English gallows-hand tradition. All of it.

Sources:

• The Executioner's Journal, trans. Joel F. Harrington

• Joel F. Harrington, The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century

• Richard Ward, "A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse"

The Pony Express is one of the most famous legends of the American West—but apparently, Jo and Amanda knew almost nothing about it.

This week on Barely Historical, we're getting into the real history of the Pony Express: the teenage riders racing mail across nearly 2,000 miles, the isolated station workers who actually kept the operation running, the surprisingly expensive cost of sending a letter, and why the entire Pony Express lasted only about 18 months.

Then things get significantly less wholesome with Jules Beni and Jack Slade, a feud involving stolen horses, attempted murder, and a Wild West legend about a severed ear becoming a souvenir.

Plus, Fact or Folklore, Smash or Pass: Pony Express Edition, and the discovery that the Pony Express was not actually the U.S. Postal Service—which Jo probably should have known after being married to a postal worker for 19 years.

Horses. Mail. Teenagers. Outlaws. Questionable geography. Possibly an ear.

Follow Barely Historical

Hosts: JoLynne & Amanda

Produced by Barely Historical

Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/cw/BarelyHistorical⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Contact: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Tagline: Let’s ruin the past.

In late 1953, Swanson had ten refrigerated train cars full of unsold Thanksgiving turkey and no plan. A salesman named Jerry Thomas, not a chef, not a food scientist, looked at 260 tons of poultry and said what if we put it on a tray with little compartments like the airlines use.

Nobody in that room thought they were about to start a national argument about what it means to be a wife. They thought they were about to move some turkey.

This week we get into how a frozen tray became a referendum on women's worth, why grown men mailed complaint letters to a poultry company instead of talking to their spouses, and how the exact same product got rebranded twenty years later for newly divorced dads.

In this episode:

• Turkey or Trivia, where JoLynne learns what daytime TV was actually built around
• Why the woman in the ad wears red (it's the logo, she's part of the branding)
• The 1955 radio jingle where husbands brag to other husbands about their wives' shopping
• Print ads that treated Dad near a stove as a temporary emergency
• Cold War or Just a Cold Dinner, featuring Nixon, Khrushchev, and a kitchen as capitalist propaganda
• The Hungry-Man pivot, divorce rates, and how the stigma just found a new person to land on
• Laura Shapiro's Something From the Oven and Betty Friedan showing up a decade late to say she never got the free time anyway

Also discussed, at length, and with no apologies: how to clean a microwave that lives above your stove, fathers whose entire culinary range was bean with bacon soup, the mac and cheese served without the cheese, why old stoves were better than yours, Lean Cuisine as a weight loss plan, truck stop gift shops, Home Depot hot dogs, and the barre class we walked out of because we were the only two dressed correctly.

Timestamps
00:00 Ten train cars of turkey
02:00 Turkey or Trivia
07:00 Part one: congratulations, you've outsourced your job back to yourself
13:30 Part two: men write strongly worded letters about peas
19:50 Cold War or Just a Cold Dinner
24:45 Part three: from housewife helper to bachelor chow
31:30 What actually changed, and what didn't
37:50 Five fast hits
43:45 So what did we learn

Share this with three people: your uncle who thinks a home-cooked meal is a personality trait, your coworker who still hasn't forgiven the microwave, and that one friend who's had a Hungry-Man four nights this week and does not want to discuss it.

Follow the show, leave a review, and come tell us what to cover next. Bonus episodes live on Patreon, where we are considerably filthier. Victorian sex toys is coming.

Let's ruin the past.

Syphilis is one of those diseases you think you know about until you actually learn its history. Then it gets significantly worse.

In this episode of Barely Historical, Jo and Amanda dive into the horrifying, bizarre, and occasionally absurd history of syphilis, from its mysterious origins and the infamous “French disease” to the brutal symptoms, disfigurement, neurological damage, and treatments doctors threw at patients before modern medicine figured out what the hell to do.

We play Fact or Folklore, covering everything from bizarre historical treatments to the infamous skull lesions associated with advanced syphilis. We also get into how the disease was blamed on different countries and populations, the Columbian theory, and how historical ideas about disease became tangled up with colonialism, racism, and xenophobia.

Then things get darker.

We talk about mercury treatments, the long-term stages of untreated syphilis, famous historical figures who may or may not have had it, and eventually the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, one of the most appalling examples of medical exploitation and racism in American history.

And because this is Barely Historical, we're also going to make jokes about sex, prostitution, questionable historical hygiene, Christopher Columbus being a little bitch, and Jo becoming a self-appointed “syphilologist.”

Warning: this episode gets dark, graphic, gross, and very NSFW.

This is the history of syphilis they definitely didn't teach you in sex ed.

Barely Historical | History, but make it unhinged.

Postmortem Photography | The Internet's Been Lying to Us

In 1867, a photographer walked into a Philadelphia parlor, set up a tripod next to the sofa, and photographed a woman who had died the day before. Her husband had brushed her hair and put her wedding ring back on her finger. He paid three dollars, about a week's wages, and kept that photo on the mantle for the rest of his life.

That is Victorian postmortem photography. And you have it completely wrong in your head, because the internet got there first.

No corpse kickstands. No eyeballs painted on eyelids. No dead uncles propped up in the family portrait. Half the photos going viral as postmortem are not even dead people. What is actually left is quieter, sadder, and somehow funnier.

This week we cover what 1868 actually smelled like, why a life expectancy of 32 does not mean what you think it means, and what really happened when someone died in your house. Amanda drags JoLynne through all five myths, including the metal stand that would have tipped over instantly under a body and the rule of thumb that ruins every viral TikTok: if the person looks alive, they are alive.

Plus Queen Victoria laying out her dead husband's clothes every morning for forty years, sleeping next to a plaster cast of his hand, and getting buried with a photo of her Scottish attendant hidden under a bouquet so her son would not see. An entire department store dedicated to sadness, including mourning underwear. A Boston photographer selling ghost portraits with a complimentary Benjamin Franklin. And the deeply uncomfortable realization that we still do all of this. We just use Canva now.

Two games this episode: Mourning Etiquette or Cult Onboarding, and Spirit Photography Scam or Modern Wellness Grift.

Content note: this one deals with grief, infant loss, and death in the home. We handle it the way we handle everything, which is badly and with jokes, but the jokes

Did Lizzie Borden really kill her father and stepmother, or did America turn an acquitted woman into its first true crime celebrity?

In 1892, two brutal hatchet murders shocked Fall River, Massachusetts. But the real story isn't just about the crime. It's about how newspapers, public obsession, and nonstop speculation transformed Lizzie Borden into one of America's first viral figures, long before social media ever existed.

This week, we're diving into:

• The infamous Lizzie Borden murders
• Why the evidence still divides historians
• The family drama, money, and motives behind the case
• How sensational headlines created America's first true crime obsession
• The nursery rhyme that outlived the trial
• Whether Lizzie Borden became America's first influencer

Along the way, we also discuss guilty-or-not murder cases, Victorian medicine, why everyone deserved indoor plumbing, and how we'd probably survive exactly zero days in 1892.

Whether you think Lizzie was guilty or innocent, one thing is certain: America has been obsessed with her for more than 130 years.

Follow Barely Historical for weekly episodes where we ruin the past one story at a time.

Follow Barely Historical

Hosts: JoLynne & Amanda

Produced by Barely Historical

Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/cw/BarelyHistorical⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Contact: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Tagline: Let’s ruin the past.

The World Cup is supposed to bring the world together. Instead, its history includes dictators, corruption, stolen trophies, political propaganda, murder, and one very good dog named Pickles.

In this episode of Barely Historical, Amanda and Jolynne dive into the unbelievable true stories behind the world’s biggest sporting event. From the first World Cup in Uruguay to Mussolini’s propaganda tournament, Argentina’s Dirty War, Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God,” FIFA scandals, and the tragic murder of Andrés Escobar, this is the history they definitely didn’t teach in gym class.

Along the way, the girls also prove they know almost nothing about soccer… and somehow that’s part of the fun.

Show Notes

In this episode we cover:

• The shocking murder of Colombian player Andrés Escobar after the 1994 World Cup.
• How the very first World Cup in 1930 almost started international chaos.
• Why dictators loved hosting the tournament.
• Mussolini’s influence over the 1934 World Cup.
• The incredible story of Pickles the dog finding the stolen World Cup trophy.
• Diego Maradona, the “Hand of God,” and the Goal of the Century.
• Argentina’s 1978 World Cup during the Dirty War.
• FIFA corruption, bribery, and the 2015 arrests.
• Qatar, migrant worker controversy, and the 2022 World Cup.
• Five unbelievable World Cup facts you probably haven’t heard.

What You’ll Learn

• Why the World Cup has a surprisingly dark history.
• How politics and sports have been intertwined for nearly a century.
• Why the original World Cup trophy disappeared forever.
• How one soccer mistake became one of history’s greatest tragedies.
• Why millions still fall in love with the game despite everything surrounding it.

Follow Barely Historical

Instagram: @barelyhistoricalpod

Email: [email protected]

If you enjoyed this episode, share it with your favorite history nerd, sports fan, or friend who thinks soccer is just “people running around for 90 minutes.”

Forget the eagles and the Boston Tea Party. This 4th of July we're chasing the stories hiding next to the story.

Amanda and JoLynne hand out America's most cursed historical awards, dig into the presidents who behaved badly, and cover the ones who literally would not stay in the ground.

On the docket: Andrew Jackson killing a man after taking a bullet to the chest, William Henry Harrison drinking sewage water, Zachary Taylor possibly murdered by summer snacks, Jack Daniel dying because he stubbed his toe on a safe, Warren G. Harding's horrifyingly horny letters (yes, he named it Jerry), JFK's staffers Fiddle and Faddle, and the Chicago counterfeiting ring that tried to steal Abraham Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom.

Plus games, gossip, and way too many exhumed presidents.

Follow Barely Historical

Hosts: JoLynne & Amanda

Produced by Barely Historical

Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/cw/BarelyHistorical⁠⁠⁠⁠

Contact: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Tagline: Let’s ruin the past.

What happens when one family tree becomes less of a tree… and more of a wreath?

This week on Barely Historical, we’re tackling one of the internet’s most infamous families: the Whittakers of West Virginia. But instead of treating them like a punchline, we wanted to understand how they got there.

We dig into over a century of Appalachian history, coal country, geographic isolation, poverty, and the family relationships that turned an already-complicated genealogy into something that left even us completely confused.

Along the way we cover:
• Why identical twins made the genetics even more complicated
• What “double first cousins” actually means
• Coal camps, company stores, and why so many families never left the hollers
• The Battle of Blair Mountain and the brutal realities of Appalachian mining life
• Why this story is ultimately about isolation and lack of opportunity, not just genetics

Plus, Amanda and Jo repeatedly lose track of the family tree, accidentally invent new family members, and discover that trying to explain this genealogy without a whiteboard is nearly impossible.

If you’ve only ever seen viral clips of the Whittakers, this episode explores the history behind the headlines and the people behind the internet’s fascination.

Sources referenced in this episode:

Soft White Underbelly

West Virginia Mine Wars Museum

National Coal Heritage Area

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

If you enjoyed this episode, follow Barely Historical wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and come hang out with us on social media for bonus content, behind-the-scenes fun, and even more bizarre stories from history.