Show Notes
In 1688, a Dutch king took the English throne, banned French wine and brandy, and then let basically anyone distill gin at home. What could go wrong?
This week we're spilling Gin Mania, which historians call the Gin Craze and Londoners called "mother's ruin." By 1730, the city had more than 7,000 gin shops. Many of them were run by women, who were shut out of most other work, and some sold gin anonymously through cat-shaped "puss and mew" slot machines. Birth rates dropped, infant deaths climbed, and crime spiked. Meanwhile, doctors decided gin was full of tiny sharp structures stabbing your body's fibers from the inside.
We get into Hogarth's Gin Lane vs. Beer Street propaganda, why the Gin Act of 1736 flopped and fed a black market in spirits cut with turpentine and sulfuric acid, and how the 1751 crackdown finally ended the craze. Plus: how Victorian gin palaces may have given us the modern bar, and why Gordon's is still on shelves today. Our last non-spooky episode before Halloween. Pour yourself a beer. History suggests you should. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from SPILLED.
In 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered with a hatchet in their Fall River home, and Lizzie Borden was the only family member in the house. We go minute by minute through the day of the murders, line up the suspects, and dig into how a defense built on “nothing feminine about it” got her acquitted. Lizzie Borden took an ax… or did she?
Mosquitoes are the deadliest animal on Earth and they've been shaping human history since long before recorded time. This week, Delaney sits down with SPILLED. team member Jacob to trace malaria's fingerprints across evolution, colonization, the slave trade, the British Empire, and a WWII research push second only to the Manhattan Project. Two vaccines later, they're still winning. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We're covering seven real female warriors and soldiers across four continents and almost 1,900 years of history — women who disguised themselves as men to fight, and women who didn't have to. Featuring Hannah Snell (the British soldier who enlisted to hunt down her husband), Sarah Rosetta Wakeman (a Civil War soldier who kept her secret to the grave), Nadezhda Durova (the Russian cavalry officer awarded the St. George Cross), the Trung sisters (who led an army of 80,000 to overthrow Han China), Mai Bhago (the Sikh warrior who turned back an army of deserters), and Yaa Asantewaa (the Ashanti queen mother who led her people to war). Plus: what Deborah Sampson's story has in common with all of them. A history podcast episode on women warriors, female soldiers, and women in war — from the American Revolution and the Civil War to the Napoleonic Wars, the Mughal-Sikh Wars, and the Ashanti Empire.
Human sacrifice gets a bad rap in the history books, and we're here to spill the tea. This week we're digging into who was really practicing ritual sacrifice across history. From Mesopotamia's royal tombs to Aztec blood debts, Celtic wicker men to Japanese seppuku and why the "savage civilization" narrative doesn't hold up.
Paul Revere gets all the glory, but he wasn't the only one riding through the night to save the American Revolution. This Fourth of July, Delaney and Kendyl are spilling the tea on the women history left out of the story: 16-year-old Sybil Ludington, who rode twice as far as Paul Revere through a rainstorm to warn the Continental Army; Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a man to fight in combat and removed a musket ball from her own leg; and Abigail Adams, the original "Mrs. President," who ran the family finances, advised a president, and told her husband to "remember the ladies." In honor of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we're giving America's founding mothers the credit — and the chaos — they deserve. Happy Fourth of July, besties.