You Are A Weirdo (with Historian Doug Sofer, Ph.D.)

What parts of today’s world would freak out folks who lived during the U.S. Civil War? In this first-ever interview-based episode* of the You Are A Weirdo history podcast, we ask a real-life U.S. Civil War historian that exact question! Join host Doug Sofer as he chats with Aaron Astor about such topics as today’s professional military, the size and scope of government, air conditioning, sports betting, and college football.

Doug an...

There once was a jolly fellow with a red nose who lived in London; historical documents mention something about a certain "S. Clause." Then, in 1833, he and his mates disappeared without a trace. Finding out what happened to him has something to do with the environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, and with heroic efforts to restore the River Thames to its former glory.

Listen and you’ll discover hordes of angry ...

Take a walk on the wild side with your historian host as we unearth some of the big-picture insights of environmental history. Forage in the wilderness, stroll around a giant pie, and hear about what ancient folks did for a living. You’ll also find out why you can’t build enormous pyramid-like buildings without things like beer, bread, kings, priestesses, and pants. And you’ll discover how an ancient, fantastical story about magica...

It bears repeating that we live in strange times. Take, for instance, duplication technology. Today, no matter who you are, you can draw an image or scribble out some text, and copy it as many times as you’d like. Yet when we consider that copying tech in historical perspective, we discover that this ability is new. For most of the human past, only wealthy elites could clone massive stacks of duplicated materials. Printing has been...

Which is more valuable: diamonds or water? The seems obvious, but splash some holy water into the mix and you’ll see that this answer is a lot messier than you might at first think. Join your new favorite historian-podcaster guy on a journey through time and around the world to better understand why holy water defies most economic logic. Along the way you’ll discover about why people in the diamond industry have mangled the English...

Did the framers of the U.S. Constitution set up the country’s government to be a republic or a democracy? Some folks have surprisingly strong opinions on this question, often with good reason. Yet the words republic and democracy have very similar meanings, so what’s the big deal? The answer has to do with the ways that the historic founders of the USA thought about history—specifically the histories of the democracies and republic...

In the time it takes you to put on just one elbow pad, you can access hundreds of cutting-edge news articles from all around the globe. Yet making sense of international events can be tricky. To really get it, you need to understand something about historical context.

Take for example the present-day situation between the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan. Right now, early June 2023, there’s a steady flow of ...

Understanding the historical rise of mass media is not just about the tech. It’s also about how people used—and abused—those new ways of communicating with the public. That picture becomes clearer when you realize that new innovations in amplification and broadcasting coincided closely with the rise of nationalism in the Western world. Successful nationalist movements in Italy and Germany ushered in new two modern countries by the ...

You’re presumably reading this description because you like to listen to podcasts. And you can listen to podcasts because clever people invented loudspeakers a century-and-change ago. And loudspeakers were not possible without the invention of electronic amplifiers. Which were not possible without vacuum tubes. Which are a lot like light bulbs.

What was it like to experience electronically amplified sound for the first time? Did it ...

We take for granted our present-day ability to make ourselves as obnoxiously loud as we want to be. Yet being able to pump up the volume of an individual voice—to make it so deafening that it can easily reach all 140,000 ears of a stadium full of 70,000 people—is a brand-new development in the big picture of the human past.

Vibe with your favorite professional historian on this sonic journey through thousands of years. This amped-up...

Studying history can help you become a better, more informed leader. Yet a lot of so-called advice from 'history' out there tends to oversimplify the historical record. History is big and complex; reducing this enormous field to a bunch of digestible soundbites makes it appear small and simple.

So  what would happen if we tried to follow historical leadership advice without picking and choosing examples or separa...

Who’s your daddy?

In most societies throughout most of recorded human history, your answer to that question would be the primary determinant of who you were allowed to be. A community in which your prestige and your birth-status determine who you are is what’s called a society of orders.
But as a person of the present, you are disorderly.
This episode begins with an irritating experience in the waiting room at your local DMV...

Today, bananas are just a delicious, fruity fact of life. But being able to buy these curvy, golden delicacies in places where it’s too cold to grow them is actually a very recent development in the big picture of human history. Understanding the banana's past actually tells us a lot about the modern world—about economics, politics, technology, and even why we keep getting annoying popup ads for magical fruit-based cures.

Join ...

When you’re online, you meet all kinds of people. You play games with them, you LOL at their jokes, or care-emoji-hug them when they’re feeling especially sad-emoji. But within the broader context of the human past, these are brand-spanking-new ways of interacting with other members of your species. How did communication become so disembodied these days—literally separated from our human bodies? In this episode, we explore differen...

How did tea become British when tea plants usually grow in far-away places like India or China? This history of this leafy beverage travels thousands of miles over thousands of years. It’s a story of human brutality and suffering on a global scale, but also of innovation and increasing connection among the peoples of earth. We even explore the origins of Southern sweet tea. At the end, you'll discover why that seemingly innoce...

Shuffle enough random songs and you're certain to hear singers who are no longer among the living. Before 1877, hearing voices of the dead would have been a supremely blood curdling experience. Yet we weirdos of today routinely listen to the sounds of the departed; we usually don’t even think about it. The invention of the phonograph fundamentally changed that aspect of the human condition, and altered how human-made sounds co...

You might think you have a totally normal sense of humor, but then you hear a joke from the past and it sounds like it came from some other dimension. That's when you realize once again that your normal can be another person's weird.

Join your new favorite podcaster-historian host on this journey through space and time, and open your mind to myriad manners of mirth-making. Along the way, you'll meet some fan...

You take a totally normal trip to the supermarket to buy some totally normal meat. But what you purchase comes in a geometric shape that looks nothing like the animal that it originally came from. In this episode, we learn that modern meat-buying is utterly bizarre when compared to the meat-acquisition experiences of virtually all humans for virtually all of our species'  past.

Discover how and when our animal product...