Criminalia

Welcome to the final episode of Firebugs season, where we've been telling the stories of some of the most destructive blazes and those who set them throughout history. But it wasn't all about fires. T...

8 Aug 202331min

Some estimates suggest that as much as 50 percent of all artwork on the market today is likely forged or misattributed. It can be difficult to verify what is authentic and what is counterfeit, from ar...

8 Aug 20233min

In Old Icelandic,'hús-brenna' means 'house burning', and it was a form of homicide by arson used to settle a vendetta, and sometimes used during political conflicts in medieval Scandinavia. Its sole p...

1 Aug 202327min

Opposition to the British crown began years before the battles of the American Revolutionary War broke out in the Thirteen Colonies, and that opposition took many forms, like riots and boycotts. A Sco...

25 Jul 202333min

Rose Butler was a teenager performing domestic services for the Morris family of Manhattan when early one morning a small fire broke out. Though no one was injured, and the fire was quickly extinguish...

18 Jul 202329min

Between 1849 and 1851, peak years of the Gold Rush, San Francisco was almost entirely destroyed by fire seven times. And there was something about these fires, at least the majority of them, that seem...

11 Jul 202328min

Firefighters who set fires, officially called 'firefighter arsonists', may be small in number, but they definitely make an impact. While things like insurance fraud and covering up another crime are c...

4 Jul 202323min

The Bronx in the 1970s was a perfect storm of things going wrong in New York City: poor urban planning, white flight, budget cuts to municipal and social services, and discriminatory practices coverge...

27 Jun 202326min