Did Catherine the Great really die having sex with a horse?

No. But the stranger question is: where did that story come from and why did anyone believe it?

In the first installment of a new series on Historical Rumors, we’re going back to eighteenth-century Russia to look at the woman behind one of history’s most persistent and outrageous legends.

Catherine’s real life hardly needed embellishment. Born a minor German princess, she came to Russia as a teenager, overthrew her husband, seized the throne, ruled an empire for more than three decades, corresponded with some of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, expanded Russia’s territory, and yes, had a very real and very public succession of lovers.

Those relationships helped create a sexual reputation that Catherine’s political enemies were already weaponizing during her lifetime. But the infamous horse story is much harder to trace than you might expect. In fact, recent scholarship raises the possibility that the version so many of us have heard may be far more modern than Catherine herself.

So where does a historical rumor like this begin? How does it change over time? And how does a woman with one of the most consequential reigns in European history become remembered for something that never happened?

This is Untangling Historical Rumors Pt.1: Catherine the Great.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

British Museum. An Imperial Stride! April 12, 1791. Satirical print. British Museum Collection.

British Museum. The Northern Bugga Bo. April 14, 1791. Satirical print. British Museum Collection.

Carretta, Vincent. “‘Petticoats in Power’: Catherine the Great in British Political Cartoons.” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 1 (1994).

Catherine II, Empress of Russia. Mémoires de l’Impératrice Catherine II. Project Gutenberg.

Catherine II, Empress of Russia. Nakaz [Instruction to the Commission for the Compilation of a New Code]. 1766–67. Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. Digitized by the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library.

de Madariaga, Isabel. Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

Menchinger, Ethan. “Contemporary Ottoman Views of Catherine the Great.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 1 (2019): 84–100.

Solly, Meilan. “The True History Behind ‘The Great’ and Catherine the Great.” Smithsonian Magazine, May 15, 2020.

Voltaire Foundation. “Launching CatCor: Towards a Digital Edition of the Letters of Catherine the Great.” December 16, 2021.

Zitser, Ernest A. “The Myth of Catherine the Great and the Horse: A Critical Review of the Historiography.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 25, no. 1 (2024).

For more than six hundred years, societies have created institutions designed to rescue, protect, discipline, and reform children. Foundling hospitals took in abandoned infants. Houses of refuge promised to save children from crime and poverty. Reform schools claimed they could turn troubled boys and girls into productive adults. And eventually, residential treatment centers and therapeutic programs promised something more modern: treatment.

Many of these institutions represented genuine progress. Many helped children. But across centuries, remarkably similar problems kept appearing behind their walls.

In this episode, we trace the history of institutionalizing children from Renaissance Florence to nineteenth-century reformatories, the notorious Dozier School for Boys, and today's residential treatment industry. Along the way, we look at buried graves, children confined without committing crimes, allegations of abuse that went ignored for decades, and modern systems where regulators can still struggle to determine who is responsible for keeping children safe.

Because the most unsettling part of this history isn't simply that institutions sometimes failed.

It's how often the conditions that allowed those failures to happen survived the reforms meant to fix them.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Sources and Further Reading: 

Historical Foundations and Foundling Institutions

Houses of Refuge, Reformatories, and “Incorrigibility”

Development of Modern Child Protection

Dozier School for Boys

These are especially important for the forensic investigation, historical records, cemetery research, survivor material, and the discrepancy between the earlier official burial accounting and what archaeologists subsequently located.

Synanon, Therapeutic Communities, and Behavior Modification

Modern Residential Treatment and the Troubled-Teen Industry

Psychology and Institutional Structure

Additional Book Mentioned in the Episode

Today, Elvis Presley is the King of Rock and Roll. Jackie Robinson has an entire day dedicated to him across Major League Baseball. Mary Tyler Moore is remembered as one of the most influential women in television history.

But before they became icons, they became arguments.

In this episode, we explore what these three remarkably different people shared and why their stories followed such a similar path. Along the way, we'll examine the psychology behind cultural change, why societies often resist new ideas before eventually embracing them, and how a single visible person can accelerate that process.

Because history isn't just shaped by the people who change culture. It's also shaped by the culture that decides, often reluctantly, it's ready to change.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Sources and Further Reading: 

Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink. “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change.” International Organization 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 887–917. https://doi.org/10.1162/002081898550789

Armstrong, Jennifer Keishin. “Two Men and an Independent Woman.” Television Academy, April 23, 2014. Accessed July, 2026. https://www.televisionacademy.com/features/news/features/two-men-and-independent-woman.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. “Table 2. Employment Status of the Civilian Noninstitutional Population 16 Years and Over by Sex, 1970–2008 Annual Averages.” In Women in the Labor Force: A Databook, 2009 Edition. Accessed June, 2026. https://www.bls.gov/cps/wlftable2.htm.

Jost, John T. A Theory of System Justification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13qfw6w.

Jost, John T., Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Brian A. Nosek. “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo.” Political Psychology 25, no. 6 (2004): 881–919. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00402.x.

Kuran, Timur, and Cass R. Sunstein. “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation.” Stanford Law Review 51, no. 4 (April 1999): 683–768. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229439.

Library of Congress. “Breaking the Color Line: 1940 to 1946.” In Baseball, the Color Line, and Jackie Robinson. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/collections/jackie-robinson-baseball/articles-and-essays/baseball-the-color-line-and-jackie-robinson/1940-to-1946/.

Library of Congress. “‘The Jackie Robinson Story.’” In Baseball, the Color Line, and Jackie Robinson. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/collections/jackie-robinson-baseball/articles-and-essays/baseball-the-color-line-and-jackie-robinson/the-jackie-robinson-story.

Major League Baseball. “Jackie Robinson Day.” MLB Together. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.mlb.com/mlb-together/jackie-robinson-day.

Moore, Mary Tyler. Interview by Diane Werts. The Interviews: An Oral History of Television. Television Academy Foundation, October 23, 1997. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/mary-tyler-moore.

Moore, Mary Tyler. “Mary Tyler Moore: The ‘Fresh Air’ Interview.” Interview by Terry Gross. Fresh Air. Rebroadcast by WUNC, May 26, 2023. https://www.wunc.org/2023-05-26/mary-tyler-moore-the-fresh-air-interview.

National Park Service. “Guide to National Historic Landmarks by State: Tennessee.” Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalhistoriclandmarks/guide.htm.

PBS. “Elvis Presley.” Culture Shock: Flashpoints—Music and Dance. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/music/elvis.html.

Television Academy. “Foundation Archive: Mary Tyler Moore.” Emmy Magazine, May 17, 2017. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.televisionacademy.com/features/emmy-magazine/articles/foundation-archive-mary-tyler-moore.

Zajonc, Robert B. “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 9, no. 2, pt. 2 (1968): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025848.

In this episode of This, Again, we pull back the curtain on the hidden infrastructure that made American independence possible. From communication networks and local committees to supply chains, intelligence operations, diplomacy, and the ordinary people whose names rarely appear in history books, we explore how a revolution was held together long before it was won. Because history remembers the cannon fire. But the real miracle may be that the cannonballs showed up at all.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Primary Sources

Founders Online. National Archives and University of Virginia Press. Accessed July 2, 2026. https://founders.archives.gov/.

Commager, Henry Steele, and Richard B. Morris, eds. The Spirit of 'Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995.

Boyle, Joseph Lee. Writings from the Valley Forge Encampment of the Continental Army: December 19, 1777–June 19, 1778. 2 vols. Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2001.

Bray, Robert C., and Paul E. Bushnell, eds. Diary of a Common Soldier in the American Revolution, 1775–1783: An Annotated Edition of the Military Journal of Jeremiah Greenman. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

Secondary Sources

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967.

Breen, T. H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Chernow, Ron. Washington: A Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2010.

Ferling, John. Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Raphael, Ray. A People's History of the American Revolution. New York: New Press, 2001.

Rose, Alexander. Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring. New York: Bantam Books, 2006.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Kathleen DuVal, Independence: The Revolutionary War in the Lives of Ordinary Americans, 1763–1789 (2024).

Government and Archival Resources

Founders Online. National Archives and University of Virginia Press. https://founders.archives.gov/.

Library of Congress. "American Revolution: A Resource Guide." https://www.loc.gov/collections/.

National Archives. "The Declaration of Independence." https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration.

National Park Service. "Valley Forge National Historical Park." https://www.nps.gov/vafo/.

National Park Service. "Yorktown Battlefield." https://www.nps.gov/colo/.

Central Intelligence Agency. Intelligence in the War of Independence. Center for the Study of Intelligence. Intelligence in the War of Independence - CIA.

Who gets to be believed?

A fake doctor performs surgery without a medical degree. A fossil hunter makes discoveries that reshape science but struggles to be taken seriously. A physician uncovers a lifesaving medical practice, only to be ignored by much of the medical establishment.

This week, we explore the strange and often uncomfortable gap between expertise and credibility. Why do some people earn trust they haven't earned, while others struggle to be heard despite being right? From impostors and overlooked experts to the psychology of authority itself, this episode examines how humans decide who deserves to be believed.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Semmelweis, Ignaz. The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. Translated by K. Codell Carter. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983 (original publication 1861).

Carter, K. Codell. Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995.

Nuland, Sherwin B. The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.

Semmelweis, Ignaz. The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. Translated by K. Codell Carter. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

Best, M., and D. Neuhauser. "Ignaz Semmelweis and the Birth of Infection Control." Quality and Safety in Health Care 13, no. 3 (2004): 233–234.

https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/3/233

Nuland, Sherwin B. The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.

Carter, K. Codell. Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignnaz Semmelweis. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995.

Gillispie, Charles Coulston, ed. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 12. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975. Entry: "Semmelweis, Ignaz Philipp."

Emling, Shelley. The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Torrens, Hugh. Mary Anning of Lyme Regis: Fossilist. Bournemouth: British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1995.

Goodhue, Thomas W. Fossil Hunter: The Life and Times of Mary Anning (1799–1847). Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, 2004.

Crichton, Robert. The Great Impostor. New York: Random House, 1959.

After every assassination, the same questions seem to follow. How did this happen? Why wasn't it prevented? What warning signs did people miss?

From William McKinley in 1901 to John F. Kennedy in 1963, Ronald Reagan in 1981, and Shinzo Abe in 2022, each attack exposed vulnerabilities that suddenly seemed obvious in hindsight. Security systems changed. Procedures evolved. New lessons were learned.

But what if the deeper story isn't about the attacks themselves?

In this episode, we explore how societies learn from catastrophe, why institutions often become experts at preventing the last disaster, and what psychologists call the availability heuristic: our tendency to focus on the risks we can easily imagine while overlooking the ones we can't.

Because the future rarely arrives in the form we expect.

And sometimes the most important blind spots are hiding inside assumptions that feel perfectly reasonable today.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Sources and Further Reading:

William McKinley

Merry, Robert W. President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Library of Congress – William McKinley Papers

Miller, Scott. The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century. New York: Random House, 2011.

John F. Kennedy

Blaine, Gerald, and Lisa McCubbin. The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence. New York: Gallery Books, 2010.

President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964.

National Archives:

Ronald Reagan

Wilber, Del Quentin. Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum

Shinzo Abe

BBC News – Shinzo Abe assassination coverage

https://www.bbc.com/news/62095447

National Police Agency of Japan

Psychology, Risk & Organizational Learning

Availability Heuristic

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. "Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability." Cognitive Psychology 5, no. 2 (1973): 207–232.

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9

High Reliability Organizations

Weick, Karl E., and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. Managing the Unexpected: Sustained Performance in a Complex World. 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015.

Publisher:

Normal Accident Theory

Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7srgf

Organizational Failure & Challenger

Vaughan, Diane. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo22781921.html

Horizon Scanning & Future Risk

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Enhancing Horizon Scanning and Foresight Capacity of the Federal Government. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2020.

Free Full Report:

Black Swan Events

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. 2nd ed. New York: Random House, 2010.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/176226/the-black-swan-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb/

This week on This, Again, we look at three figures from the 1600s whose stories became cleaner, simpler, and easier to pass down over time:

Galileo becomes the ultimate symbol of science versus religion, even though the reality was tangled up in politics, ego, public pressure, and institutional instability.

Pocahontas becomes a romantic bridge between worlds, despite the fact that much of her life survives only through English interpretation, political messaging, and a story later generations softened into something easier to emotionally live with.

Newton becomes the image of effortless genius, reduced to an apple falling from a tree, while the obsessive, competitive, deeply complicated person underneath that myth slowly fades into the background.

But this episode isn’t really about “debunking” history.

It’s about asking why stories evolve this way in the first place.

Do we simplify history because we’re trying to manipulate people? Or because human beings naturally remember stories better when they feel emotionally organized and easy to carry forward?

And at what point does simplification stop being an introduction… and quietly become the final version?

This episode explores historiography, memory, narrative psychology, and the uncomfortable reality that most of us were probably taught the first layer of history… without ever being brought back for the second one.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Galileo

Pocahontas

Newton

Historiography / Philosophy / Historical Memory

What would it take to be labeled insane?

In 1887, Nellie Bly checked herself into a New York asylum to find out. She got in with surprising ease. Getting out was something else entirely.

Nearly a century later, David Rosenhan ran an experiment to see if anything had changed. Healthy people walked into psychiatric hospitals, claimed to hear a single voice, and were admitted. Once inside, they acted completely normal. It didn’t matter.

This episode follows both investigations from the inside and looks at what they revealed about how systems make decisions and why those decisions are so difficult to reverse.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Mad-House. New York: Ian L. Munro, 1887.

Rosenhan, D. L. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179, no. 4070 (1973): 250–258.

Grob, Gerald N. The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Scull, Andrew. Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Spitzer, Robert L. “On Pseudoscience in Science, Logic in Remission, and Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Critique of Rosenhan’s ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places.’” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 84, no. 5 (1975): 442–452.

Zimbardo, Philip G. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906.

Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

In 1962, a group of schoolgirls in Tanganyika began laughing and could not stop. The episode spread to multiple schools, eventually forcing closures and affecting hundreds of students.

More than four centuries earlier, in 1518, residents of Strasbourg took to the streets and danced for days at a time. Contemporary accounts describe exhaustion, collapse, and a response from local authorities shaped by the medical beliefs of the time.

During the industrial era in Europe and the United States, physicians documented similar patterns in factories and schools. Groups of workers developed symptoms such as fainting, tremors, and nausea without a clear environmental or biological cause.

In that same year, 1962, a U.S. textile factory experienced what became known as the June Bug Epidemic. Workers reported being bitten by an unseen insect. Investigations found no physical cause, but the symptoms spread through proximity and shared interpretation.

More recently, clinicians have documented a rise in rapid-onset tic-like behaviors in adolescents, many of whom were exposed to similar content online.

This episode looks at these cases side by side, not as isolated events, but as examples of a recurring pattern. Under certain conditions, behavior, emotion, and even physical symptoms can move through groups in ways that feel personal, but are not entirely individual.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic (1962)

Rankin, A. M., and P. J. Philip.

Hempelmann, Christian F.

Dancing Plague of Strasbourg (1518)

A Time to Dance, a Time to Die

Waller, John.

Backman, E. Louis.

Industrial Era / Factory & School Outbreaks

Bartholomew, Robert E., and Simon Wessely.

Micale, Mark S.

Robinson, Harriet Hanson.

June Bug Epidemic (1962, United States)

Kerckhoff, Alan C., and Kurt W. Back.

(Accessible summary of case)

Modern Case: Functional Tic-Like Behaviors (COVID Era)

Pringsheim, Tamara, et al.

Müller-Vahl, Kirsten R., et al.

Paulus, Walter, et al.

Tourette Association of America.

Psychology & Mechanism (Supporting Framework)

Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson.

Engert, Veronika, et al.

Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Laila Craighero.

Provine, Robert R.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1986.tb00611.x

In May 1536, Anne Boleyn was still Queen of England.

Seventeen days later, she was executed.

This episode looks at how that kind of collapse is even possible.

Anne’s rise wasn’t just personal. Her marriage to Henry VIII forced England to break with the Catholic Church, reshaped the law, and required oaths of loyalty across the country. By the mid-1530s, she had become tied to the most disruptive political and religious changes of the era.

When pressure built around succession, legitimacy, and reform, the system didn’t slow down or reassess. It moved quickly. Charges were brought. Trials were held. Executions followed.

This episode examines that moment not just as a Tudor story, but as a pattern.

What happens when someone stands at the center of power and becomes the most visible part of a system under strain?

To answer that, we follow the same pattern beyond Tudor England. The downfall of Thomas Cromwell shows how proximity did not protect even the people building the system. The 1954 security hearing of Robert Oppenheimer shows how removal can shift from execution to loss of access while serving a similar function. And modern corporate examples show how leadership removal can signal control even when deeper issues remain unresolved.

This is not a story about whether Anne Boleyn was guilty.

It is a story about how systems respond under pressure, and why the person closest to power can become the fastest way to prove that something has been done.

Attribution Notes:

Follow This, Again on Instagram: @thisagainshow

This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

(Search “Anne Boleyn 1536” within this: these are actual state papers)