Professor Buzzkill History Podcast

Did Gandhi say, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”? If he didn’t, where did it come from? The Bible? The Canadian House of Commons? Movie script writers? And is there something more signi...

25 Sep 20186min

Did Richard Nixon genuinely "concede" the 1960 Presidential Election to John Kennedy the day after the election, as so many commentators now tell us? Or did he qualify his remarks so much, and work so...

21 Sep 201820min

20th-century automobile travel was supposed to represent freedom, but what else did it represent? Professor Cotten Seiler from Dickinson College joins us to discuss the difficulties and hazards of tra...

19 Sep 201839min

For decades, a story flew around that Coke was originally full of coke, as in cocaine. The early developers of Coca-Cola stirred cocaine into its famous syrup, so the legend goes. Once mixed with ener...

14 Sep 20186min

Ada Lovelace is frequently called “the first computer programmer,” but is her story more complicated than that? In this Woman Crush Wednesday show, we give a brief overview of what she contributed to ...

12 Sep 201812min

Enigma, the German World War II message encoding machine, was famously cracked by British codebreakers led by Alan Turing. But were there more people involved? Buzzkillers in Dayton, Ohio, will be ver...

7 Sep 20184min

Journalist Mary Pilon joins us to discuss the history of the game Monopoly and its wonderful twists, turns, complications, and lawsuits! It all starts during The Depression and doesn't stop until the ...

4 Sep 201831min

A Viking horned helmet would have been very impractical, and perhaps dangerous, in battle, Buzzkillers. There is only one depiction of a horned helmet in ancient Nordic art, and it was probably ceremo...

31 Aug 20181min