Humans in History

Humans in History is built on a calendar trick. Each episode takes a date, finds someone whose birthday falls on it, and tells the story of a life that changed things for the better. Hannah Mira hosts, and she describes the show as a homemade, single-person production. Her criteria are personal, and she says so: she wants people she finds interesting who did remarkable things and got little recognition for them. That instinct shapes the lineup. She introduces Robert Smalls as the enslaved man who sailed himself to freedom. He would make her personal top five, and she calls his absence from her school books criminal. She tells his escape with real suspense: the ship flying Confederate colours, then his decision to pass right under Fort Sumter and sound the usual signal instead of steering wide. Civil rights history runs through several episodes. In the Sylvia Mendez episode, she argues that school desegregation did not begin with Brown v. Board in Topeka. She then explains how California sorted Latino children by surname and skin tone, admitting lighter-skinned cousins while turning Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr. and Jerome away. The Mildred Loving episode goes darker. It opens on the history of interracial marriage bans and their roots in compulsory sterilization, with sterilization counts, before it reaches the couple at its centre. The episode on Viola Liuzzo, a slain civil rights activist, opens with an admission Hannah Mira says she has made many times: she never knew how much history she did not know until she started the project. Not every story is grim. The host calls Camille du Gast probably the most interesting person she has ever researched. That story brings a newspaper scandal over a nude painting and a prince throwing a punch outside the courtroom. It also brings a passion for race car driving that made Camille du Gast one of the first women to hold a driver's license. The host clearly enjoys period detail and stops to relish the old-fashioned insult 'insulter'. Medicine gets its turn with Dr. George Papanicolaou, the creator of the pap smear. His wife Mary was his test subject for more than two decades while he also studied guinea pigs. That episode opens with a plain warning that anatomy will be discussed candidly. The warning is typical of the show's manner: direct, a little wry and unembarrassed. The narration is conversational and openly opinionated. Anger at injustice, amusement at absurdity and real surprise all come through. The closing often notes how a subject was honoured, such as Sylvia Mendez's Medal of Freedom or Dr. George Papanicolaou's face on a Greek banknote. Then come the sources used, often Wikipedia and sometimes NPR or the New York Times. A preview of the next birthday closes things out.