Joe Streckert
255 episodes listed below
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The Weird History Podcast explores the out-of-the-way, obscure, weird, and overlooked corners of history. New episodes appear every Thursday.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Joe Streckert turns book-centered interviews into clear, candid conversations about historical evidence, interpretation, and episodes that standard surveys often pass over.
Joe Streckert builds episodes around sustained interviews, using a guest's book as the route into a larger historical question. The range runs from changing archaeological methods and Asian maritime trade to California's Dust Bowl border blockade, wartime Asia, and piracy in the…
A treasure hunt destroys evidence; suddenly you want your history told with a smaller shovel.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded Dust Bowl conversation connects environmental collapse with California's effort to keep migrants out.
The Golden Fortress turns a lesser-known Dust Bowl history into a sharply framed story about movement, exclusion, and environmental breakdown.
A wide-ranging look at Asian maritime history, from trade and piracy to slavery, religion, and everyday memory.
European sea power is only one part of maritime history, and this episode opens the view toward Asian waters. Joe Strachan speaks with Cornell history professor Eric Talia Cozzo about In Asian Waters through exploration, trade, piracy, and religion, giving the conversation a…
A synagogue mosaic turns this archaeology episode into a vivid study of evidence, craft, and interpretation.
Archaeology's shift from Heinrich Schliemann's rough hunt for Troy to more careful modern practice gives this single-episode review a clean shape. Joe Streckert's conversation with Ann R.
A World War II conversation that widens the map and keeps one human story in focus.
Joe Strecker and Bill Lasher shape a World War II conversation that pulls the lens away from the familiar Pacific theater and toward the Asian continent, where colonial power, Japanese pressure, and wartime uncertainty all press against one another.
A myth interview that makes Hades, Persephone, and Dali's garden feel strange again.
Joe Streckert talks with Crystal King about In the Garden of Monsters, her retelling of Hades and Persephone from the point of view of a model Salvador Dali brings to a garden of stone monsters in 1948.
Piracy, trade, and a pirate queen anchor a brisk South China Sea conversation with a historical bent.
Joe Strickland uses Rita Chang-Eppig's Deep as a Sky, Red as a Sea to open a brisk talk about piracy in the South China Sea. The discussion moves from trade and boats to small pirate fleets, a larger federation, Qing pressure, and the life of a pirate queen, including her…
Antique travel, court wit, and historical narration.
Northern Ohio history, remembered out loud.
This episode explores the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, a bizarre February ritual involving naked priests, goat-skin whips, and public smackings meant to promote fertility.
Host Joe Strecker interviews journalist Bill Lascher about his new book featuring previously unpublished photos by war correspondent Melville Jacoby, exploring WWII in Asia through personal stories and overlooked histories like French Indochina and Jewish refugees in Shanghai.
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This episode explores how Elizabethans, particularly William Shakespeare, perceived hedgehogs as creatures of darkness and malevolence, contrasting sharply with modern views of them as adorable animals.
Bill Lascher's The Golden Fortress follows the 1936 LAPD blockade of California's borders, when 136 armed officers tried to stop Dust Bowl refugees and other domestic migrants.
Zheng He’s seven voyages reached Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and East Africa by 1433.
Tom Dillehay's Monte Verde dates pushed human presence in the Americas from 9,000 to 14,000 years ago.
Joe Streckert presents three possible futures for North Korea—war, reform, and reunification—after noting that the country has no clear ending.