Published Tuesday, October 20, 2026 at 08:12 AM PT

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🏛️ This Day in History

On October 20, 1349, Pope Clement VI did something most of us only dream of doing to a group chat full of extremists: he issued a bull and told everyone to cut it the hell out. The target was the Flagellants, bands of self-flagellating doomsday enthusiasts who’d sprung up across Northern and Central Europe convinced that whipping themselves bloody in public was the fix for the Black Death. For a hot minute the Church tolerated the bit — monks and priests even joined in — but once the movement curdled into something resembling its own breakaway theology (skipping the sacraments, ignoring Church jurisdiction, claiming miracle powers), Clement VI pulled the plug and ordered bishops to stamp it out, a crackdown Gregory XI doubled down on in 1372 by lumping the Flagellants in with the Beghards as certified heretics.

So: a plague tears through Europe, and part of the response is public self-harm as spiritual pest control, until the Pope shows up to say, essentially, “put the whip down, that is not how any of this works.” Fourteenth-century Europe, never change. Details via Nova’s history library on the Flagellants.

Rough day to be a historian with ad reads to deliver. Half of today’s haul is excellent — dead generals, vanished navies, a tank so bad it assassinated itself — and the other half is sponsor copy wearing a geopolitics costume. I sifted. You’re welcome. Fair warning up front: no alternate history and no family-tree stuff survived the cut today, because none of the source material actually had any — and I’d rather tell you less than make something up, Little Mister, dÇ’ng ma? (Mandarin, “understand?” — the crew’s way of double-checking an order landed. It landed.)

World History and Turning Points

The myths we keep telling ourselves

History of Everything went spelunking through Conservapedia this week, and the thing worth salvaging from that trainwreck isn’t the website — it’s the reflex it triggered. The creator got heated over the old “America saved Australia” myth from World War II, and rightly so: Australians fought at Kokoda and at Milne Bay themselves, and joined American formations besides, but the “minor nation rescued by the big one” framing is a flattering lie that erases the people who actually bled for it. Same channel also traced Australia’s secularism back to Federation-era politics — it wasn’t some Enlightenment ideal, it was protecting Irish Catholic communities, heavily concentrated in lower-income areas, from a Protestant-majority government. Keep religion out of government, and nobody gets to use the state to screw the minority. Practical, not noble, and better for it.

The same channel’s “Primary Sources Suck” video makes the companion point: Holocaust deniers love pointing out there’s no single signed order from Hitler authorizing the Holocaust, as if history only counts when it comes with a notarized confession. That’s not how responsibility works, and it’s not how history works either — you build the case from the whole pattern of stated goals, decisions, and actions, not one magic document. Which brings me to Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #259: “A lie is a way to tell the truth to someone who doesn’t know.” The Ferengi meant it as a sales technique. I mean it as a description of every bad-faith argument built on cherry-picked paperwork — technically a fact, a lie.

America’s longest, least winnable war

Biographics’ rundown of the War on Drugs doesn’t pretend there’s a tidy ending, because there isn’t one: fifty-plus years in, the US is no better off than when it started, opioids have wrecked the country from the inside, incarceration rates stayed brutal, and whole communities got hollowed out trying to solve an addiction problem with handcuffs. The video’s own verdict — doing the same thing for five decades and expecting a different result is, definitionally, insanity — tracks pretty well with Ecclesiastes 1:9: “there is no new thing under the sun.” Nobody needed three thousand years of hindsight to know that repeating a failed policy doesn’t improve it with age, but apparently some lessons need relearning every single generation.

Biographies

Soldiers who outlived their wars

Biographics closed out Paul Revere’s story well past the famous ride, which is the part nobody remembers: he spent his later decades as a genuine industrialist — a hardware store, an import business for English goods, a foundry, a copper rolling mill — while silversmithing stayed his actual bread and butter the whole time. His metalwork ended up in the USS Constitution, the Massachusetts State House, and King’s Chapel in Boston. He fully retired in 1811, handed the businesses to his son, and died May 10, 1818, at 83. Locally he was a beloved success story — one obituary called it a life “so honorable and useful” — but nationally, almost nobody noticed. The video then cuts off exactly as it’s about to explain how that changed forty years later. Thanks for that, Biographics. Real cliffhanger energy for a guy who’s been dead two centuries.

Winfield Scott Hancock got the fuller arc: decisive at Gettysburg, forty-five years in uniform, and he never once commanded his own army the way Grant or Sherman did — he just showed up, every time, wherever the war needed him to hold a line. It’s all for you, Damien! That’s the kind of devotion you’d expect from a guy who ran for president in 1880, lost New York by roughly 21,000 votes — enough to swing the entire Electoral College to James Garfield — and then conceded gracefully and went to Garfield’s inauguration. Garfield, for his trouble, got shot by a deranged man in a Washington train station four months into office and died two months later of what the video bluntly calls incompetent medical care. Hancock just went back to the only job he’d ever had, aged out on Governors Island, and died February 9, 1886, at 61, from an infected carbuncle complicated by untreated diabetes. Buried in Norristown, Pennsylvania. Less famous than Grant. No less load-bearing.

Secret societies and shady ends

Biographics also dug up the 1889 murder of Dr. Patrick Henry Cronin, a story that is somehow both obscure and absolutely wild: Cronin was a member of Clan na Gael, the Irish-American secret society, and got killed after clashing with Alexander Sullivan’s faction — nicknamed “the Triangle” — over control of the organization. A detective named Coglin went down for jury bribery in an unrelated case, fled the country to Honduras, and died there of tuberculosis, which is about as undignified an exit as history offers. Sullivan himself was never held properly accountable. Cronin got remembered as a martyr; Clan na Gael got torn apart for over a decade before it reunited under new leadership in the early twentieth century, permanently stained. Nobody comes out of this one looking good except the dead guy.

Royalty and Hollywood exits

King George V’s death, per Biographics, is one of those facts that sounds like a conspiracy and turns out to just be documented history: his physician, Lord Dawson, hastened the king’s death and announced it in the Times’ morning edition — and since euthanasia was and remains illegal under UK law, that technically makes Dawson a regicide. More than 800,000 people filed past George V’s casket at Westminster Abbey. What followed was messier: Edward VIII abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced woman the video notes was uncomfortably close to high-ranking Nazi German officials, clearing the way for George VI and eventually Elizabeth II. George V’s actual legacy, the video argues, is that he proved the British monarchy still had a job after Parliament took the real power — national cheerleader-in-chief, which is either a beautiful bit of institutional reinvention or the world’s longest-running ceremonial consolation prize.

John Wayne made 169 feature films, a record nobody’s touching, and his actual final movie, 1976’s The Shootist, cast him as an aging gunfighter dying of cancer who picks one last fight to go out on his own terms — which is exactly how Wayne wanted his own ending to go. Real life was less cinematic: stomach cancer, likely from switching to chewing tobacco after losing a lung earlier in life, with his girlfriend Pat Stacy at his side after he and wife Pilar separated (never formally divorced) in 1973. His last Academy Awards appearance in 1979 reportedly shocked the room with how gaunt he looked. Comedian Bernie Mac’s ending, also via Biographics, was quieter and crueler: he managed sarcoidosis privately through most of his career, had the condition worsened by the physical toll of The Bernie Mac Show, and died August 9, 2008, at just 50, of cardiac arrest following pneumonia treatment at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

Carrie Fisher’s death at 60 on December 27, 2016, was ruled cardiac arrest, with sleep apnea and arterial fatty buildup listed as contributing factors and a toxicology report later finding a mix of drugs in her system. Her mother, Debbie Reynolds, died the next day of a stroke. Fisher’s own line on living scared anyway — “stay afraid, but do it anyway” — holds up better than most celebrity quotes do in hindsight. And Alan Rickman’s death prompted fans to build an unofficial memorial under the Platform 9Âľ sign at King’s Cross station, while an enormous list of former co-stars — Ralph Fiennes, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Helen Mirren, Johnny Depp, Ian McKellen, among others — paid tribute. His final two films were released posthumously and dedicated to him.

The nephew who wanted to fight his own uncle

Biographics also covered William Patrick Hitler — yes, that family — who publicly denounced his uncle before the war, warning France and England through the press that an invasion was coming and that the Munich settlement was a false peace. He wanted to prove himself in the “great struggle for liberty” by fighting the Nazis directly; FDR personally kicked the question to the FBI, which investigated and found no evidence of subversion, clearing the way for him to serve in the US Navy. After the war he settled in Patchogue, on Long Island, opened a medical lab specializing in blood analysis, had four sons, and lived quietly until his death on July 14, 1987, at 76. Possibly the single most normal ending anyone named Hitler has ever gotten.

Geography and How Places Got That Way

RealLifeLore buried a few real geography stories under an avalanche of VPN and credit-card ad reads this week, but a couple survived. The Strait of Hormuz piece noted that the overwhelming majority of Persian Gulf energy now flows east to Asia, not west, a share that keeps growing as Europe decarbonizes and leans harder on American LNG. There’s a proposed overland route through Syria to the Mediterranean meant to route around Hormuz entirely — expensive, slow, politically radioactive, and ships oil in roughly the opposite direction from where most of it’s going. The video’s read is that the real payoff isn’t the oil route at all, it’s stripping Iran of its leverage over a chokepoint it can threaten to close whenever it wants.

Malta got the “600,000 people on a rock with no resources” treatment, and the numbers back it up: the island’s population is already nearly a third foreign-born, with projections of more than 40% by 2050, on top of the millions of tourists who show up every year to a nation with essentially nothing going for it except location. The video also flagged a genuinely weird downside of small-island governance — historically weak data privacy laws that put a ton of personal information into public government records, which was harmless for centuries until the internet turned “public record” into “monetizable scraping target.”

Somali piracy, meanwhile, is roaring back after everyone assumed it got solved in the mid-2010s. The Somali federal government has zero capacity left to respond, between a near-total cut to US development aid and spiking fuel, food, and fertilizer prices, while the Puntland region has been operating as a de facto independent state rejecting federal authority since 2024. And in Nepal, a flood disaster on August 26th reportedly hit multiple mountainsides at once — the source barely elaborated before pivoting to a sponsor read, so that’s all I’ve got, which is more honest than padding it with guesses.

Lost and Sealed History

Whatever the Sahara is hiding, it’s not telling

RealLifeLore’s Sahara piece pointed at the Tamanrasset River area as a plausible site for traces of civilization from the last time the Sahara went green and fertile — assuming anyone can get in to look. Critics describe Morocco’s administration of Western Sahara as effectively a police state, and armed clashes between the Moroccan military and the Saharawi political-and-armed wing have been frequent again since a ceasefire broke down in 2020. Until that conflict resolves — and the video is not optimistic about a timeline — whatever’s buried out there stays buried. Neti, neti, as the Sanskrit tradition puts it: not this, not this. Sometimes the answer to “what’s really under there” is just “we don’t know yet, and geopolitics won’t let us find out.”

The navy that vanished in a year

History of Everything’s dive into East Germany’s Volksmarine is the saddest kind of history — not tragic, just forgotten. Roughly 27,000 sailors served across its existence; after reunification most were simply demobilized rather than folded into the unified Bundeswehr, which, as the video puts it with admirable bluntness, didn’t want a lot of former East German officers in its ranks — “well, spies.” A thirty-four-year institution basically derezzed — TRON’s word for a program getting deleted outright, and there’s no better term for a navy that just stopped existing within a year or two of the wall coming down. Almost nothing physical survives: no ships in active German service, though some Parchim-class vessels still serve in the Indonesian navy, and one museum ship sits at PeenemĂĽnde. Rostock, fittingly, is still the headquarters of the modern Deutsche Marine, same as it was back then. Sabbe sankhara anicca, says the Dhammapada (277) — all conditioned things are impermanent. Even navies. Even superpowers’ little proxy fleets nobody remembers existed.

Megaprojects and Engineering Disasters

Armor Week at History of Everything turned into an unofficial theme of “big, expensive things that mostly failed,” and it’s a great theme.

The Soviet T-35 “super tank” was a multi-turreted monster whose failures came almost entirely from being run past its service intervals with no field repair infrastructure to fall back on, because it was too mechanically complex to fix in the field at all. Some units reportedly covered over 300 miles of unpaved and cross-country terrain during the opening Soviet retreat before dying — we’re humped, basically, a phrase the Firefly crew would recognize instantly as the moment your primary breaks down and your backup is in worse shape. The last combat action for the type came at the first Battle of Kharkov, when four factory-fresh-patched T-35s got hastily rearmed and thrown into the city’s defense. A captured unit sent to Germany’s Kummersdorf proving ground showed wildly inconsistent armor thickness — possibly Stalin-era purge-driven quality collapse, possibly just combat patch jobs. Either way: groovy design on paper, catastrophe in practice.

Soviet battleships have an even weirder footnote: the USSR never actually built one of its own, start to finish. Every battleship it operated came from Imperial Russia or from war reparations — Italy’s Giulio Cesare became the Novorossiysk, Britain handed over the Royal Sovereign — while the ambitious homegrown Sovetsky Soyuz class never got finished. The host admits a genuine fondness for these ships despite their grim histories, which tracks; there’s something almost endearing about a navy that kept trying to build a battleship for decades and just never managed it.

The Marine Corps’ M50 Ontos, by contrast, is an underdog success story: only 297ever built, running a GMC engine that at least made one component easy to source, and designed as an anti-tank vehicle that found its real calling doing something else entirely — urban demolition in Vietnam, blowing through walls and bringing down fortified structures around entrenched defenders. The psychological effect alone reportedly made some defenders retreat the moment they spotted one, or even just saw a single round punch through a window. It could also be airlifted by CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters to hard-to-reach positions. Surviving examples sit at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico and the Marine Corps Mechanized Museum at Camp Pendleton, but with so few ever built, authentic restoration for private owners is nearly impossible.

And then there’s the M1 Abrams in Ukraine, which the video frames as a logistics nightmare even for the US military that built it — dependent on uncontested airspace, a condition that doesn’t exist in a peer or near-peer war. The US has supplied Ukraine just 31 Abrams tanks, fewer than Australia’s 49, and roughly 25 of the US-supplied units have been lost, mostly from breakdowns under heavy use without replacement parts, with one captured outright. Context matters here: this is a war where thousands of armored vehicles on both sides have been destroyed, so that 25 aging Cold War tanks going down is even a talking point says something about the war’s actual scale. Let’s be precise about who’s defending what: Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign neighbor, and every tank any ally sends — American, Australian, breakdown-prone or not — exists to help Ukraine hold its own ground. If it bleeds, we can kill it, as Dutch put it in Predator — the entire philosophy of military engineering distilled to one line. The Abrams bleeds plenty. It’s still in the fight because the alternative is worse.

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