Episodes

Sir Christopher Wren was officially appointed architect for the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral on 2nd December, 1697, though in truth he had been advising on it for some years already. Three decades later the celebrated British architect had produced a building that broke radically with the past, even if his original plans had to […]

Rerun. Thousands of beer barrels were emptied into the streets across Lancashire on 1st December, 1900 – when it finally dawned on people that the cheap stout they’d been drinking with years was in fact contaminated with arsenic.  Over 6,000 victims were poisoned, mostly across Manchester and Salford, thanks to the practice of padding out

On 30th November, 1803 a surgeon called Dr Francisco Javier de Balmis left Spain at the head of the world’s first ever international public health expedition.  His ship was bound for the New World, supplied with smallpox vaccines. But the vaccines weren’t in syringes or in vials, they were inside the 22 orphans who were

Shortly after US president John F. Kennedy was shot dead, the Warren Commission was convened on 29th November, 1963 to answer the question on everybody’s lips: who did this and why? The shooting of America’s young president was a moment of trauma for many Americans, but when the commission returned its findings, most people were

Towards the end of 1983, frenzied parents battled with one another in stores across the US in a desperate bid to buy their children the toy of the moment, the Cabbage Patch Kid. The so-called Cabbage Patch Riots culminated on 28th November 1983 at a Zayre department store in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, when a melee broke

Elián González was just five years old when he was found clinging to an inner tube off the coast of Florida on 25th November, 1999. His mother, step-father, and all the other Cuban migrants who had been attempting to cross to the United States with him were lost at sea. Elián’s future then became a

Rerun. It took over three million years to find her. But palaeontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray uncovered the remains of ‘the Lucy Fossil’ – a previously undiscovered species of pre-human – in Hadar, Ethiopia on 24th November, 1974. Despite the find’s massive significance, the event was not greeted with untrammelled joy by all their

The ‘Nickel In The Slot Player’ – the world’s first jukebox – made its debut at the Palais Royale Saloon bar in San Francisco on 23rd November, 1889. Created by Louis Glass and William S. Arnold, the contraption was an Edison Class M wax cylinder phonograph fitted with a coin mechanism and four stethoscope-like listening

History’s most notorious pirate, Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, was killed and decapitated by lieutenant Robert Maynard, who besieged Blackbeard’s boats in Ocracoke on 22nd November, 1718.  Now recalled as a fearsome and gratuitous murderer, Blackbeard’s demonic character is not documented in contemporary sources. In fact, very little is truly known about Teach (even, indeed, whether that

La Ronde, the USA’s first revolving restaurant, opened on 21st November, 1961, at the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu. On the menu in the 298ft-tall tower was shrimp cocktail, mahi-mahi, and ‘the Queen of beefdom’. It had a predecessor, though, in perhaps an unlikely city: post-war Dortmund, Germany.  In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly