History with side roads and sharp elbows.
History Homos treats history as a live argument, not a museum tour. Episodes move from Puerto Rican nationalism to Christian Science, Peter Thiel, the Opium Wars, and American Movie with blunt jokes, side roads, and heavy suspicion of official narratives.
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History Homos is built around history as a running fight over what really happened and who benefited. It is funny, but not lightweight. The show can start with a joke, a song, a plug, or a stray personal anecdote, then suddenly be deep inside Puerto Rican nationalism, Christian Science theology, British trade policy, documentary filmmaking, or the architecture of power. Its rhythm is conversational rather than tidy. One speaker sets up a claim, another interrupts or agrees, the argument doubles back, and a detail that looked like a side note becomes the point. The episodes show a wide range: the failed Puerto Rican nationalist uprising, Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science, American Movie, the Opium Wars, and guest conversations with Johnny Vedmore and Jay Dyer. The show is especially interested in institutions that present themselves as neutral while acting politically: banks, empires, churches, media, intelligence networks, and reform movements. It also likes cultural objects that reveal more than they seem to, as in the American Movie discussion, where a low-budget documentary becomes a way to talk about craft, ambition, payoff, and the strange dignity of obsession. The politics are openly opinionated. The humor is blunt. The historical frame is suspicious of official explanations, especially when money, empire, drugs, policing, or ideology are involved. Some passages are researched monologues; others are sprawling guest exchanges where the guest takes long runs and the regular voices steer, challenge, or riff alongside. The show is not polished public-radio history. It is a crowded table argument with books open, tabs everywhere, and a strong appetite for connecting yesterday's machinery to today's scandals. For the right listener, that looseness is the appeal.
Made for: For listeners who like history, parapolitics, religion, film, and current affairs discussed with speed, suspicion, and irreverent humor. Best suited to people who prefer argumentative conversation over clean lecture format.
What sets it apart: The show mixes historical context with loose real-time argument, letting tangents become part of the method. It stands apart from polished history podcasts by treating institutions, ideology, and cultural artifacts as interconnected evidence rather than separate topics.
Scott and William put aside their continental differences to teach a history lesson to you (and hopefully a guest) each week in their attempt to come to a greater understanding about history, ideology and current affairs while having lots of laughs along the way.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
History Homos connects political power, belief, finance, and empire through detailed history, guest conversations, and an openly argumentative style.
History Homos treats the past as an argument still running through institutions, ideology, and public memory. The hosts combine explanatory passages with loose conversation, moving from Christian Science and the Opium Wars to Puerto Rican nationalism, intelligence networks, and…
An Opium Wars trade discussion wanders into state-mandated haircuts; you're invited to keep up.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Johnny Vedmore turns a loose, in-group catch-up into a pointed reckoning with dismissal and belated recognition.
History Homos leans into a conversation with Johnny Vedmore that begins by repeating the show’s claim that he was attacked by Vatican intelligence, hit with an MKUltra slash biological agent, and spent a week rebuilding his memory from scratch.
Puerto Rico history, banking power, and police militarization meet in a blunt, curious conversation.
The episode moves from a personal attachment to Puerto Rico into a wider look at the Pinochet episode, the CIA, the OSS, and Riggs Bank, which gives the conversation its main structure.
Christian Science is framed as a Boston-born 19th-century movement shaped by faith, science, and liberal Protestantism.
The episode presents Christian Science as a Boston-rooted movement from the mid-to-late 19th century, tied to 1875, Science and Health, and Mary Baker Eddy, consistently named Mrs. Eddy.
American Movie gets read as a puzzle, a prank, and a piece of craft.
History Homos treats American Movie as a film that keeps refusing a single label, and that uncertainty gives the discussion its edge. The episode moves between documentary, mockumentary, hyper self-aware documentary, and behind-the-scenes making of, while returning to Coven, the…
Tea, silver, and a trade loophole become the machinery of war.
The Opium Wars emerge here as a collision of silver, tea, and a trading loophole that let private merchants move drugs from India to Canton. History Homos tracks the East India Company's separate monopolies and then settles into the murkier space between India and China, where…
A Jay Dyer return that folds a title joke into Brazil, coffee, drugs, and scandal.
History Homos brings Jay Dyer back for a third visit and spends its early stretch on a running explanation of the title, which is framed as a joke about genus homo rather than a promise of solemn political analysis.
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
History Homos Ep.
Jay Dyer returns to History Homos for a conversation that starts with films and quickly turns to MKUltra, Alcoholics Anonymous, and rehab facilities.
History Homos Ep.
The hosts connect the 1898 Spanish-American War, the 1899 hurricane, and the peso being pinned at 60 cents on the dollar to Puerto Rico’s economic decline.
The History Homos host, going solo this week, covers the founding and theology of Christian Science, the American religious movement started by Mary Baker Eddy following her 1875 book Science and Health.
History Homos discusses American Movie as a 1999 documentary about Mark Borchardt, his 30th birthday, and the unfinished Northwestern Wisconsin filmmaking project Northwest.