Countries inside countries, cities inside cities, dogs and cats working together...what is this madness? This week, we're tackling a world shaped in odd ways by war, medieval treaties, and drunk cartographers. 

Special thanks to Aceinet for the musical contribution.

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President Abraham Lincoln commissioned the United States Secret Service to safeguard the country's financial infrastructure from the scourge of counterfeit currency. They've been protecting presidents since Theodore Roosevelt and, since Truman's time, assigning them weird nicknames like Rawhide and Searchlight. Their code name for Jimmy Carter's budget director was Dumbo. They also have aliases for buildings, aircraft, cars, actors, and even a hotel. On this week's show, we're getting to the bottom of that.

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In the concluding episode of our mini-series on WW1, we're talking about one of those rare times in history when goodwill and humanity triumphed in a place where you'd least expect to find it. In this case, the brutal trenches of the western front. On that first Christmas, men on both sides spontaneously gave up the fighting for one day.

Thanks to Gregor Quendel for the string arrangement of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and Casonika for the piano carols.

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The writer Jean Dutourd called it "the greatest event of the twentieth century." Was he talking about the moon landing? The moonwalk? Nope. In 1914, the French army urgently needed to get troops to the Marne river valley, just 30 miles away from Paris, to stop the rapidly advancing Germans from besieging the city. In desperation, they turned to the city's taxis. What followed is now known as the Miracle of the Marne. And this week, we're talking about it.

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It was called the war to end all wars, which is perhaps the dumbest thing said by anyone about anything. But then, pretty much everything about the first World War is kind of dumb. The dumb network of alliances that made it inevitable. The dumb royal who took a vacation in the one city on Earth that hated his guts. His dumb driver who took a wrong turn. The dumb anarchist who shot the dumb royal. Really, the only smart thing about World War I is this podcast that talks all about it. This is the first of a three-parter about the war that didn't end all wars, brought to you by the podcast to end all podcasts.

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Da-da-da-dum...it's probably the most famous musical opening in history. But...why? How did Beethoven's Fifth Symphony become so much more well known than the Fourth or the Sixth? On this week's show, learn about the piece of music that helped end World War 2, was covered by Chuck Berry, and is currently floating through interstellar space.

Thanks to Gregor Quendel for the piano arrangement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in C Minor featured in this episode. 

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Aristotle classified living things by how much air, water, earth, or fire they possessed. The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance brought us animals, vegetables, and minerals. It took a former cobbler's apprentice named Carl Linnaeus to give us the current system that organizes every living thing on earth. This week's show talks about how that's done--and gives us a pretty cool mnemonic to remember it by. 

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Leo Tolstoy didn't consider War and Peace a novel. Sure, there's a story in there about a bunch of families told through the backdrop of a (spoiler!) war, but there's so much more in those 587,000 words that we might have to spend a little more than five minutes talking about all of it. 

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Happy Labor Day! As you (hopefully) get to enjoy some time off, take in a football game, and put away your white clothes, stop in and learn how two unrelated guys with the same name, a couple of riots, and President Grover Cleveland gave us a day to celebrate our hard work.

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Broadway began as a Native American trail carved into the swampland of Manhattan island and today runs almost thirty miles from lower Manhattan to Westchester County. But Broadway is so much more than a street. In this episode, we cover the 400 years it took for Broadway to become America's theater capital...in about 5 minutes.

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