Do you want to know what a bonus show sounds like? Merry Christmas! This is about the weird origins of April Fool's Day, but surprisingly you can't explore that without going into Christmas and New Year's, they're all the same magical animal.

By the way, do you know why New Year's Day is always exactly a week after Christmas? Have fun with that.

This is old enough that you've probably forgotten it. Tonight (December 5th) is Krampusnacht. Which means that it's the only time of the year when I'm justified in reseeding this show about Krampus, the terrifying German Christmas monster.

The slapstick tragedy that is the Gunpowder Plot, one of the dumbest things that has ever happened.

So it turns out that to talk about the Gunpowder Plot, you need to do over an hour of stuff to lay the groundwork for the Gunpowder Plot. In the beginning...in 1517 Martin Luther staples an essay to a church, leading to millions of deaths for dumb reasons. These are those reasons.

You all know there's no such thing as curses. Sure. You all know there's no such thing as the Curse of the Pharaoh. But you may not know just how brazen the lie is.

It's part of the history podcasting contract that you have to cover this topic eventually, so here you go, the infamous "Murder in the Cathedral."

If you're not familiar with the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire then you're probably not expecting the Guy Ritchie level of dark comedy that actually happened. Or the sheer volume of craziness involved. Whatever level of crazy you're thinking, double it and add 30, like you're doing a fahrenheit conversion.

My favourite episode of The Simpsons is packed with a lot of very niche political references. Here's why it's so funny. Also, it's always worth exploring how everything is Ronald Reagan's fault. Because it is.

"The history of popes is too boring." Is it? A pope goes to war with Germany because he had too much sex, there's a skeleton lawyer, two - TWO - wizards, and a little something called THE JOUST OF WHORES!

Why do people seem to think that the library of Alexandria was the only library in the ancient world?