Welcome to Naked History, the podcast that peels back the polished layers of the past to reveal the weird, wild, and wonderful truths beneath. Hosted by historian Dyllan Gasaway, this show dives into the untold tales, strange coincidences, and overlooked events that shaped the world. From volcanic eruptions that sparked literary masterpieces to strange coincedences, absurd inventions, historical what-ifs, and the mystery of it all, you've found the right place.
Welcome to Naked History, the podcast that peels back the polished layers of the past to reveal the weird, wild, and wonderful truths beneath. Hosted by historian Dyllan Gasaway, this show dives into the untold tales, strange coincidences, and overlooked events that shaped the world. From volcanic eruptions that sparked literary masterpieces to strange coincedences, absurd inventions, historical what-ifs, and the mystery of it all, you've found the right place.
On this week’s Naked History: Debrief, we chase two New Year’s traditions to their logical conclusion: the Times Square Ball Drop and Y2K.
First, we pull the glittery curtain back on the Ball Drop—how a falling orb became the world’s loudest “NOW,” and how it traces its DNA to old-school public time signals used to synchronize clocks (and keep ships from getting lost). Then we pivot into the late-90s panic we all remember: Y2K, the two-digit shortcut that turned into a planet-wide debugging marathon and why it was a real risk, how it got fixed, and why “nothing happened” is sometimes the sound of a crisis being successfully prevented.
Plus This Week in History (Jan 5–11): Golden Gate Bridge groundbreaking, Galileo’s Jupiter moons, New Mexico statehood, the Battle of New Orleans, the League of Nations, the first insulin injection, and more.
Hit play, grab your party hat, and let’s rip the fig leaf off time.
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What if a government could delete a week… and your life just had to keep going? In this episode of Naked History, we follow the world’s messiest “calendar patch notes”, from Rome’s bonus months and Julius Caesar’s brutal reboot, to the Gregorian fix that made entire dates vanish and left historians doing footnote gymnastics for centuries. Along the way, we untangle why New Year’s Day didn’t always land on January 1, how “Old Style / New Style” created double birthdays, and why the modern world still fights about time at the level of seconds, time zones, and the International Date Line.
Losing Days is a fast, funny tour through the uncomfortable truth: the calendar isn’t nature—it’s a negotiation.
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In this Debrief, we peel back the tinsel and take a closer look at the 1914 Christmas Truce—what it was, what it wasn’t, and why it still haunts the way we talk about war and humanity. We dig into how the story became a modern symbol (sometimes cleaner than the historical record), why the truces were real but uneven, and what those fleeting hours tell us about ordinary people stuck inside an extraordinary machine.
Then we close with This Week in History (Dec 22–27)—Beethoven premieres fate itself, Dostoevsky survives a last-second reprieve, “Silent Night” debuts, the BBC finds its voice, Kwanzaa begins, and Darwin sets sail on the Beagle.
Happy holidays to everyone—Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Solstice, and Happy New Year. And remember: sometimes the most powerful history isn’t the shout… it’s the pause.
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On Christmas 1914, scattered pockets of British and German soldiers stepped onto the frozen mud of no-man’s-land to exchange carols, cigarettes, and—sometimes—brief handshakes before the guns resumed. This episode separates symbol from history: why a truce was even possible (proximity, weather, shared music), where it actually happened (patchy, mostly British sectors), what men did with the pause (burials, small swaps, joint prayers), and how HQs shut it down in 1915. We read letters and unit diaries, interrogate the “football match” myth, and follow the story’s afterlife in ads and film without sanding off the mud. A fragile ceasefire, measured in hours—proof that agency can exist inside a machine.
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Radar, Reindeer & the Real Magic — Naked History: Debrief
NORAD’s most wholesome “wrong number” becomes a continent-wide ritual. We deep-dive the 1955 Sears misprint that rang CONAD’s hotline, the quick-thinking of Col. Harry Shoup, and how the bit scaled to NORAD’s phones, satellites, jets, and Santa-cams—with thousands of volunteers turning a watch floor into a story room for one night.
Then we zoom out: why Christmas magic isn’t a hat or a hex code of red—it’s the hush when a room decides to be kind (and how to design small rituals that actually stick). Plus This Week in History (Dec 8–14): first Nobels, Marconi’s “S,” and Amundsen at the Pole.
Q of the Week: What’s your favorite Christmas carol—and why? Drop it in the episode Q&A !
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A bishop with a secret ledger. A wassail-soaked host. A horned shadow with bells. A poem that mapped rooftops. Nast’s North Pole. An ad man who standardized the smile. In this holiday deep dive, we trace how St. Nicholas, Sinterklaas, Father Christmas, Krampus, Clement Moore, Thomas Nast, and Coca-Cola all helped “build” the Santa we recognize—plus how race, representation, and global variants complicate the picture. Cozy, curious, and very true.
We clock real message-per-minute speeds (why 30 seconds changes a battlefield), show how code lists evolved with “change sheets,” and walk through the improv rules talkers used when the word list ran out. We play with the phonetic layer (your “ant–arrow–bear” matters more than you think),
Then a quick This Week in History (Nov 24–30): Macy’s first parade as immigrant street theater, two space picks that reset expectations, and the era of competing Thanksgivings. We close with a compact compare—human code vs. machine crypto—minus the math headache. Takeaways you can use: how to design comms that fail gracefully, and a tiny drill to build your own family phonetic.
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A garbled radio net. A pinned patrol. Then a burst of language the enemy can’t read, and the ridge breathes again.
In this episode of Naked History, Dyllan traces how Indigenous languages became wartime armor: from WWI trench telephones with Choctaw and Cherokee speakers to the Marine Corps’ WWII Navajo/Diné code. An elegantly simple, two-layer system (alphabet stream + word list) built for speed under fire. We break down how the code actually worked (in plain English), why seconds beat cipher wheels, and what it looked like on Bougainville, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, and on D-Day with the Comanche net at Utah Beach.
Then: the long silence after victory, declassification, uneven recognition, and the present-tense work inside Native nations to teach, archive, and live these languages. No gadget worship, just people, memory, and design choices that saved lives.
Tease: Next main: Saints, Krampus & Coca-Cola: how Saint Nicholas sails from Myra to Manhattan and ad men wrap December in velvet.
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A quick myth tune-up for your table. We trace the Macy’s Parade from 1924 street pageant to broadcast spectacle (plus those wild early balloon “releases”), debunk the presidential turkey pardon origin (hello, 1989), and set cranberry sauce in its real timeline (sugar scarcity → 1796 recipe → canning age). Correction corner: who actually washed the plates in 1621? The sources don’t say.
“This Week in History” (Nov 10–16) brings snappy nods to the USMC’s founding, Armistice/Veterans Day, and Laika’s sobering milestone. Then we get into some Menu Archaeology—pumpkin & mince pie evolutions and the eternal regional side-dish wars.
Next main: “Code Talkers”: the language that won battles.
What if the “first Thanksgiving” wasn’t a beginning, but an ending? In this episode, host Dyllan pulls the camera back on the 1621 harvest encounter and the world around it: the 1616–19 epidemics that shattered New England’s coastal communities; Massasoit’s (Ousamequin’s) high-stakes diplomacy; and Tisquantum (“Squanto”) as a captive-turned-broker navigating survival and suspicion. We read the receipts—Winslow’s Mourt’s Relation, Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation—to see what 1621 actually was (wildfowl, venison, 90 Wampanoag men, very few English women) and what it wasn’t (“a Thanksgiving” in the later religious sense).
From the Pequot War’s 1637 “thanksgiving” proclamation to Sarah Josepha Hale, Harper’s/Nast, and Lincoln’s 1863 decree, we follow how a harvest party became a nation-binding ritual—then how the 20th and 21st centuries layered parades, football, canned cranberries, Friendsgiving, and counter-memory. No guilt tours here—just grown-up gratitude with context, practical ways to honor Native presence today, and a wider frame that can hold joy and truth at once.
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On our cozy post-credits commentary: the bits that didn’t fit and the sources we owed you. We dig into Hill of Ward archaeology, dumb suppers, witch bottles and concealed shoes, will-o’-the-wisp science, black-cat adoption myths, Then “This Week in History” (Oct 27 – Nov 1): from the NYC subway and Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds panic to Luther’s door moment and Houdini’s last Halloween. Lanterns lit; receipts included.
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A cinematic walk through Halloween’s real origin story and no, it didn’t start with party stores. From Samhain (SAH-win) bonfires and fair-folk diplomacy to Allhallowtide bells, soul cakes, immigrant porch rituals, jack-o’-lanterns (hi, Stingy Jack), and the Hollywood mask rack that redefined October. This is the braid that held communities together when the light got short.
Expect archaeology, folklore, church calendars, trick-or-treat’s paper trail, black-cat PR, graveside candles, and why the monsters keep changing outfits to stay relevant. We light the dark, feed the living (and symbolically the dead), and practice being neighbors one fun-size treaty at a time.
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Salem burned its sanity in 1692 — and centuries later, we’re still feeling the heat.
In this Naked History: Debrief, Dyllan digs deeper into the chaos behind the witch trials: the economic feuds, the accidental survivors, the accused animals (yes, even a dog), and the bizarre system where confessing to witchcraft actually saved your life.
Plus: exploring the echoes of Salem in McCarthy-era America, and a fresh This Week in History that proves hysteria isn’t confined to one century.
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In 1692, Salem, Massachusetts turned neighbor against neighbor, suspicion into spectacle, and bad courtroom procedure into mass executions. For three terrifying months, the town was convinced the Devil had set up shop in New England, and everyone from outspoken tavern keepers to church-going grandmothers ended up on the gallows.
This 40 minute plunge into paranoia, Puritanism, and pancake-flat justice covers every twist of the witch hunt. From the strange fits of a minister’s niece, to judges who thought “spectral evidence” was good enough, to the poor souls who stood defiant at the noose, we’ll follow the entire saga in detail. Expect fiery sermons, courtroom drama, vengeful neighbors, and a sheriff who probably still haunts Salem to this day.
It’s tragic, it’s absurd, it’s the Salem Witch Trials, the original American horror story. Follow along, laugh nervously, and remember: the scariest monsters in history usually wore robes, not horns.
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Violet Jessop survived three ship disasters, but on the Britannic she came terrifyingly close to becoming history thanks to its spinning propellers. In this Debrief, we dive into that narrow escape, the unbelievable story of Arthur John Priest, the “unsinkable stoker”, and Wenman Wykeham-Musgrave, who survived three torpedoed ships in a single day.
Plus, a “This Week in History” rundown for Sept. 29–Oct. 4, and a tease for our upcoming Salem Witch Trials episode to kick off spooky season.
She was a stewardess, a nurse, and, unintentionally, one of the luckiest (or unluckiest) sailors in history. Violet Jessop survived the collision of the Olympic, the sinking of the Titanic, and the explosion of the Britannic, three disasters that should have ended her life but didn’t.
Because sometimes history’s greatest survivors aren’t captains or millionaires, they’re the people pouring tea, changing linens, and quietly doing their jobs while the world goes down around them.
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Boston’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919 has lived in history as both tragedy and punchline—but how much of what you’ve heard is true? In this Naked History: Debrief, we sort the fact from fiction: Was it really an anarchist bomb? Was the wave forty feet high? And could people really have just jogged away? Along the way, you’ll hear about cadets wading into syrup to save lives, a cleanup that took 87,000 worker hours, and the bizarre choice to paint a leaking tank brown to hide the drips.
It’s the sticky aftermath of the main episode—quirky details, myth-busting, and a few groans for good measure.
In 1919, Boston’s North End was hit by a 25-foot wave of molasses when a massive storage tank burst, flooding the city in sticky chaos. Join host Dyllan Gasaway on Naked History as we uncover the tragedy, the lawsuits, and the strange legacy of one of America’s weirdest disasters.
Step back behind the curtain for our Year Without a Summer Debrief episode!
How did the eruption of Mt. Tambora usher in a new kind of art? How did it contribute to the Tour de France? How does it have a connection to darker part of history?
All these questions and more answered along with a trip through time for This Week in History on this weeks episode!
This is the story of The Year Without a Summer.
A time when the sun didn’t rise right, the crops didn’t grow, and the world’s weather went completely off-script. A time of frost in June, snow in July, famines, riots, cholera—and also… the birth of horror literature, the invention of the bicycle, and one very depressed Lord Byron.
So put on your best Victorian overcoat, pack a famine-friendly snack, and let’s dive into 1816—when the skies went dark, the cold didn’t stop, and humanity got a reminder that nature doesn’t always check in first.