History or His Story?

History or His Story? runs on a bluff. In each episode Dan tells three stories from the past, and one of them did not happen. His buddies Bran and Panda get to question him after each story to test the details, then have to decide which tale is the fabrication. It is history as a parlor game, and the pleasure is in the suspicion. Dan says he used to teach history and now helps run a podcast network. The closing credits name Daniel Thompson as writer and Brandon Gray as producer. The old classroom habits show up quickly. Before a Gilded Age story, the table is asked to name the century, and the era itself gets called the least favorite one to teach because it is boring. A spelling detour follows, separating gilded from guild after someone ties the period to the Wizard of Oz. The subjects move around a lot. One story follows Benjamin Franklin from the Second Continental Congress to a commission in Paris. Another is billed as 'Robert Lincoln, a harbinger of death' and starts from Robert Todd Lincoln being the only one of Abraham Lincoln's children to reach adulthood. A third features a woman with a pile of confiscated guns whom the Cherokee called 'war woman'. Any of these could be the invention, so every specific is both a lesson and a possible lie. The episode list turns the game into a competition, with titles such as 'TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS WEEK 1 - Failed WWII Weapons' and 'TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS WEEK 3 - Halloween', and 'Mass Hysteria' sits alongside them. Listeners get a turn as well. Titles credit Jeremy Butler and Lee Hodo as listener guests, and the credits invite anyone who wants to be a guest to get in touch by email. Still, the friends do much of the work. Panda is introduced as the one who does not know a hot mic, and the others complain that he keeps finding new noises to make near it, a loudly opened drink among them. One of them tries out 'life's the bubbles' as a catchphrase, is told flatly that it does not work, and the other repeats it anyway. The players joke that anything before about 1900 is where a brain checks out, an awkward thing to admit on a history show. Winning matters, or at least announcing a win does. The show is a Bramble Jam podcast recorded in Greenville, South Carolina, and it fits a listener who likes facts with a side of doubt.