history nerds:
Fall of the Aztecs - They have a multi-part series on Cortes and Montezuma meeting and the fall of the Aztecs. It's so unbelievably dramatic. I'm sort of shocked there hasn't been a movie made about this.
- Cortes is one ambitious son of a gun. Shows up and starts demanding to talk to whoever is in charge.
- The story of their first meeting, the capital city's beauty, how it was organized, is absolutely wild.
- Montezuma took Cortes and his men as guests/prisoners. There's even some speculation that he wanted to put them in his zoo, where he kept animals.
- Then it just devolves and blows up and...it's wild
Franz Ferdinand and the Start of WWI - The have a multi-part series on the murder of Franz Ferdinand and why WWI started.
- Long story short...it's a war that seems so silly and didn't need to happen...but was also inevitable. You had several empires that were worried about other empires becoming too powerful and wanting to make sure they ended up on the right side of history. It's just a series of miscalculations and bad diplomacy and the a few radicals in the Serbian government that started the thing. Pretty wild.
- And I didn't know the details of the Archduke's assassination or why it was so important.
Anyway, they're good! And the two hosts are awesome. Just two nerdy British historians who make each other laugh but are true experts.