For the Love of History - world history, women’s history, weird history

A quiet fishing town. Cats dancing themselves to death on the wharf. And a company that knew exactly why. This is what happens when companies choose profit over people. This week we're covering the Minamata incident: how a chemical company called Chisso spent decades dumping mercury into the waters of Minamata Bay, poisoning fish, animals, and eventually thousands of people,...

For 2,500 years, her tattoos were invisible, hidden beneath mummified skin until infrared imaging revealed what no one knew existed. In this episode, we dive into the world of Scythian tattoos, tracing the history of the Pazyryk people, a nomadic culture from the Eurasian steppe, through one of archaeology's newest and most fascinating fields: tattoo archaeology. From the di...

Japan gave us The Great Wave. It also gave us 34 feet of fart scroll! 💨

When archivists at Waseda University unrolled a 34-foot Edo-period scroll, they expected samurai, landscapes, or elegant courtly scenes. What they got was 10 meters of pure, unhinged fart battle art, and it's one of the most fascinating windows into feudal Japanese culture ...

What if the pill you believed would save your life was slowly killing you?

In the third century, the most powerful ruler in human history, Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, was secretly drinking mercury. His court alchemists called it the Elixir of Immortality. He called it hope. History calls it the thing that killed him.

In this episode of For the Lov...

Men invented high heels. Men made them a power symbol. Then men decided women should wear them instead. Classic.

In this episode of For the Love of History, we're uncovering the surprisingly bloody, surprisingly spicy history of high heels — and it starts not in a shoe store, but on a Persian battlefield.

From the cavalry soldiers of the Safavid Empire who used ...