"I'm Grant!"
"And I'm Alaina!"
"And welcome to History Honeys!"
"The podcast where a married couple teaches each other about cool stuff from the past!"
"And I'm Alaina!"
"And welcome to History Honeys!"
"The podcast where a married couple teaches each other about cool stuff from the past!"
History Honeys is a biweekly history Podcast hosted by Grant (a.k.a. General Ironicus) and his wife Alaina. Each spouse alternates as the "teacher", while the other is the "student", cracking jokes while asking Watson-esque questions and maybe even providing some insight of their own.
Topics covered on the show are incredibly diverse, from Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom to The Comics Code to the impact of tuberculosis on fashion trends. At the end of each episode, they read fan mail based on the theme requested from last episode (e.g. weird things about your local city or your favourite historical ship) and give a fanmail "prompt" which foreshadows the next episode's topic.
You can listen to them on iTunes here
, or visit their Podbean blog. They also have a second podcast, Sex Archie, dedicated to the Archie comics and their live-action adaptation Riverdale.
These podcasts provide examples of:
- Alliterative Name: The podcast title.
- Compulsive Liar: John Keehan, a.k.a. Count Dante, the Deadliest Man Alive. While it is true that he could fight, Grant points out that Keehan/Dante had a knack for making stuff up about himself and his past.
- Content Warnings: Whenever an episode is going to be a sad one (we can usually blame Alaina), it's preceded with a cheerful "Bummer Warning!" from the couple.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The pilot episode on Mackinac Island had both Grant and Alaina on relatively even terms knowledge-wise, which they recognized and ended the episode by outlining how future casts would work from now on. Additionally, the first few episodes had the role of "teacher" decided by a coin flip; after negative listener feedback (and Alaina's growing frustration with the coin and its outcomes - "it's in a ditch somewhere!"), they decided to just take turns instead.
- Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: The Count Dante episode gives us a Real Life example regarding April 24th, 1970, the deadliest day of the "Dojo Wars". As Grant puts it: "Nobody's accounts of this event match!" There are several different versions of what occured, including a sensational magazine story and a legal account; varying on how Dante and company entered the rival dojo, how many people were waiting inside, what happened, etc.
- Never Live It Down: Discussed in relation to Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent, whose many achievements in the world of psychology and education (particularly with civil rights and desegregation) are completely overshadowed by Seduction's impact on the moral panic backlash against comics and the heavy self-regulated censorship by The Comics Code. They also note that eventually, even Wertham himself felt that the sanitized, kid-friendly violence that came out of Code-era comics did more harm than good, since it presented an unrealistic depiction of violent acts that made it seem consequence-free and playful.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Whenever Alaina is the teacher, you can expect her topics to be full of death, gore and general depression. For instance, during the pilot episode on the history of Mackinac Island, Alaina related her favourite (and extremely graphic) story on how Alexis St. Martin's self-inflicted gut shot while fur trading led to the discovery of how the human digestive system works. Keep in mind she apparently first heard this story when she was seven years old. Even her episode on The Magic Kingdom took time to point out how Walt Disney died before ground ever broke at Walt Disney World despite being heavily involved in the planning stages, and his brother Roy died of a seizure just two months after its opening day. What Alaina doesn't like is anything about animals dying.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Alaina loves doing the gory and death-filled stories, so it's quite significant when it's Grant going into that territory instead, such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the uranium mining that greatly harmed the Navajo people. For the former, Grant had to consciously take a break after reading of all the horse deaths that occurred in the reconstruction efforts. Before those, he covered the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which also involved history's bloodiest civil war and worst manmade disaster with deaths in the millions, to Alaina's surprise.
- Sound-Effect Bleep: Profanity is censored by the sound of a quacking duck. No, we don't get it either.Grant: (after Alaina curses a lot during the Fordlandia episode) We got a whole field o' ducks. They're flying south for the winter!
"Because history's better with your honey!"
