Super Buzzkiller Prof Philip Nash joins us to examine the many myths surrounding Adolf Hitler’s rise from Chancellor to the outbreak of World War II. These include: how Nazi Germany functioned; the myth of purely tyrannical dictatorship; and the myth of an efficient, orderly dictatorship. We also explore Hitler’s genuine popularity, and explain the destructive…
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Civil War Buzzkillers have been after me for months and months to put this commonly-heard legend to rest. To put it to bed, so to speak! So here goes. Union General Joseph (“Fightin’ Joe”) Hooker was one of the most fascinating generals of the American Civil War. (And that was a war with some real…
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So you think you know all about Genghis Khan, the 13th century Mongol who built an enormous empire by slaughtering millions? But much of what you know is either exaggerated or just plain untrue. He was unmistakably brutal, but not as brutal as you may think. Listen to our interview with Professor John Giebfried, an…
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Hello again, Buzzkillers. In this week’s mini-myth, we tackle Isaac Newton’s famous apple – an object we all heard about in grade school that allegedly hit Sir Isaac Newton on the head some time in 1666, causing him to have a sudden epiphany about the universal law of gravitation. So, did Sir Isaac really discover…
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Super Buzzkiller Prof Philip Nash joins us to examine some of the zillion myths surrounding Adolf Hitler and his early years. We discuss the myth of his brutal childhood and youthful poverty, the complicated story of his service in World War I (and the ways in which he wrote about it later in Mein Kampf),…
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There is no denying that Michelangelo’s frescos on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome are masterpieces, but did the great artist actually paint the ceiling while lying on his back on a scaffold high in the air? Well no, Buzzkillers, but this is one case where the truth is actually more amazing than…
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“Ring Around the Rosie” has been a popular nursery rhyme for a very long time. Many of us learned it when we were children. But we often hear people claim that the rhyme is traceable to the time of the Black Death, and that each line is a morbid reminder of the horrors of Bubonic…
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The Academy Award-winning film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, is about British prisoners of war during World War II who are forced by their Japanese captors to help build a railway bridge connecting Burma and Siam. One of the characters in the film is a British officer named Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson (played by Alec…
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In our day, the silk top hat is associated almost exclusively with cartoonish caricatures of hackneyed old magicians and robber baron Monopoly men, but through the late 18th to mid 20th centuries, the top hat was common headwear for pretty much all well-heeled gentlemen. Fashion trends come and go, but this one lasted for at…
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Like most Americans, I suppose I assumed that Jesse Owens was the only African-American athlete at the 1936 Olympic Games. All the documentaries I remember seeing didn’t say that directly, but they focused solely on Owens and gave that impression. A new documentary, Olympic Pride, American Prejudice not only shows that there were 18 African-American…
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