History to Sleep Through

Latest episodes

• The History of Halloween

  October 26, 2026 · 46 min

  Before the pumpkin, there was the turnip. In Ireland and Scotland, faces were carved into turnips and set beside the house, and the jack-o'-lantern took its name from Stingy Jack, a man who tricked the Devil. This episode follows the night…

• The Crippen Case

  October 12, 2026 · 54 min

  On the last evening of January 1910, four people played cards in a rented house in north London. One of them, the music hall singer Cora Crippen, was never seen again. The American doctor Hawley Crippen, his typist Ethel Le Neve travelling…

• Shackleton's Endurance, Part 3: The Return

  September 28, 2026 · 45 min

  Twenty-two men waited on Elephant Island for four and a half months, living under two upturned boats, while Shackleton tried four times to reach them. Life on the island, the ships he borrowed and begged for, and how the expedition ended…

• Shackleton's Endurance, Part 2: The Whistle

  September 28, 2026 · 50 min

  After the ship went down, 28 men camped on the drifting sea ice for five months, then took to three lifeboats and reached Elephant Island. From there, six of them sailed a 22-foot boat 800 miles to South Georgia, and three of those six…

• Shackleton's Endurance, Part 1: The Drift

  September 28, 2026 · 50 min

  In January 1915 the Endurance was frozen into the ice of the Weddell Sea, and she never sailed again. How the expedition was paid for, how the ship was built and the crew chosen, the long winter aboard, and the slow drift that left 28 men…

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