Author Dana Schwartz explores the stories of some of history’s most fascinating royals: the tyrants and the tragic, the murderers and the murdered, and everyone in between. Because when you’re wearing a crown, mistakes often mean blood.
286 episodes transcribedJean Baptiste Charbonneau is best known for something that he accomplished as an infant -- traveling with his mother, Sacagawea, and Lewis and Clark w...
In the late 19th century, French writer Marc de Montifaud was sentenced to prison for indecency in his work. But rather than being sent to the rather...
Alchemist, magician, astronomer, astrologer - John Dee served as an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, interpreting the stars for her. And when a comet cro...
CW: Gore, cannibalism. The village of Hautefaye was a sleepy town in France best known for a local fair. But in the summer of 1870, gripped by parano...
According to legend, around 1100, a woman disguised herself as a man and was unanimously elected Pope. The ruse lasted until she gave birth while ridi...
William the Conqueror is considered the first King of England. But the road to his victory at the Battle of Hastings was strange and challenging, and...
The wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, Josephine went from a sugar plantation to prison to Empress. But her rise and her fall reveal a dark undercurrent in t...
When her husband, King John of England died, the widowed Isabelle of Angouleme sailed back to France to fight for her own independent kingdom. But ove...
A minor aristocrat, Charlotte Corday could have lived an ordinary life in Normandy in the 18th century. Instead, she took it upon herself to kill the...
CW: Spousal abuse, miscarriage. In the UK in the early 19th century, married women didn't exist as their own legal entities; they were extensions of...
Khutulun was a 13th century Mongolian princess born in the war-torn years after Genghis Khan's massive empire began falling apart at the seams. She fo...
Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was an obsessive collector — of art, of rare and expensive artifacts, of scientific equipment, of natural curiositi...
Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth II's younger sister, was one of the most famous and glamorous women of the 20th century. But her life was lived in...
After marrying the Duke of Gloucester, Eleanor Cobham became one of the wealthiest and post powerful women in England. She and her husband were a hear...
After Vatican II, many traditionalist Catholics around the world decided that the heresies of the Pope meant that the papal throne was actually empty....
When Mehmed III, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, died, his young son Ahmed took the throne. Tradition dicrated that Ahmed should have killed any rivals...
In 1836, a stranger arrived to a remote Russian town on a snow-white horse. The man spoke fluent French and had a noble bearing, but he refused to giv...
William Somer (or Will Summers), Henry VIII's fool, became known to history as a famous wit, the man who spoke truth to power and advocated for the co...
Marie Lafarge's trial was a sensation. But when chemists begin to disagree on their conclusions, who's to say what the real story is? NOTE: This is th...
In 1840, the trial of Marie Lafarge scandalized France. Marie was a woman from noble birth, raised in all of the right social circles in Paris, who en...
