Published Sunday, November 01, 2026 at 08:08 AM PT

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🏛️ This Day in History

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake is the best pick for November 1. It’s well documented, and it isn’t a battle.

The day Lisbon came apart. Start with Lisbon, 1 November 1755, because nobody gets to pick their own disaster date. A devastating earthquake destroyed the city. According to Nova’s history library, it killed an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 residents out of a population of roughly 200,000 to 275,000. It also destroyed about 85 percent of the city’s structures. The Ribeira Palace and the Hospital Real de Todos os Santos were among the important buildings lost. In coastal areas like Peniche, about 50 miles north of Lisbon, a following tsunami killed many more people.

One morning took out most of a European capital’s buildings and a sizable share of its people. The hospital went down along with the palace, which is the kind of detail that makes you want to lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling for a bit. The tsunami was the nasty encore that nobody asked for.

I’m not going to hand you a death toll more precise than “30,000 to 40,000.” Anyone who does is selling something. The library gives a range, and so do I.

None of today’s videos connect to this one. The Irish Famine episode of Who Do You Think You Are? is the closest thing in the pile. It also deals with mass death and with ordinary people losing their homes, but it’s a different catastrophe in a different century.

Happy November 1st, Little Mister. I’d call it a light snack, but the sources are lopsided, and I’ll flag where. A lot of these transcripts are mostly sponsor reads with a few paragraphs of actual history stuck in them like raisins in a bad cookie. I’m only writing what’s in the material, so if a section is short, blame the ad breaks and not me.

The Famine Nobody Learned in School

Start with the heavy one. In Who Do You Think You Are?, in the episode “Barbara Windsor Learns Her Family Fled the Irish Famine,” Barbara Windsor finds out her great-great-grandparents came from Cork. Her ancestor William was a cabinet maker, which she reads as lower middle class with “a very good living.” Then the famine hit and he got his family out to London, where the slums were, in her words, “pretty bad when he got there.”

In County Cork, Windsor visits a famine memorial and talks to Dennis O’Sullivan, treasurer of the famine commemoration for Cork. He tells her that people weren’t buried individually. The site has the outline of nine pits, and between 8,000 and 10,000 people lie in them. At one point there wasn’t even enough clay to cover them, so they were covered with sods for a while. Windsor admits that at school, this period was reduced to “they had potato farming in Ireland and that was it,” and that she feels ashamed she didn’t know more. She’s English, her ancestors fled this, and she says the whole thing is “dreadful.”

It made emigration the sensible choice for people who had something to lose. The transcript gives no more detail than that, so I’ll stop there instead of inventing a death toll to fill the space.

Spies, Secrets, and the Man Who Wanted Peace

Biographics ran “Klaus Fuchs: The Nuclear Spy,” and the part of the transcript we have covers the ending. Fuchs’s reasoning, as the video lays it out, was that if only one power block had the bomb, another world war was inevitable. That’s the kind of logic that sounds great at 2 a.m. and terrible in a courtroom.

The video calls the Fuchs affair a major scandal for British intelligence, particularly MI5, who had routinely overlooked his questionable past because his work mattered so much to the war effort. It also widened a growing rift with the United States, whose government believed the British were too incompetent to be trusted with nuclear secrets. Fuchs pleaded guilty to violating the Official Secrets Act. He wasn’t executed, even though many called for it, because the Soviet Union had been a wartime ally and was still classed as a friendly nation in 1950. He got 14 years, was released in 1959 on good behavior, and moved to East Germany. He was never allowed back on weapons research, taught and worked as a technical advisor, and died in 1988 with a state funeral in East Berlin.

Then the video drops the kicker: one attendee was a 35-year-old KGB agent named Vladimir Putin. I’m relaying that from the video, and I can’t verify it beyond what Biographics says. The state that rolled tanks into Ukraine in 2022 was shaped by exactly this kind of cold-war tradecraft, and the Ukrainians are the ones paying for it while defending their country.

For the horror fans, this is The Thing. In John Carpenter’s 1982 film, the alien imitates its victims perfectly and nobody at Outpost 31 can tell who’s compromised just by looking. MI5 had a Fuchs-shaped version of that problem: a colleague who looked fine and had a questionable past that everyone filed under “too busy to check.” MacReady had a hot wire and a petri dish. MI5 had a vibe, and the vibe was wrong.

Rome’s Most Inconvenient Neighbor

Biographics also did “Mithridates: The Roman Republic’s Greatest Enemy,” and the sources have the closing chapters. In 73 BC, eight years after the second war ended, Mithridates invaded Bithynia, partly because Rome planned to annex it and that would have made them neighbors. He’d also allied with Sertorius, a Roman rebel the senate considered public enemy number one. The war started well for him: at the Battle of Chalcedon he practically destroyed the entire Roman fleet in the region, then took city after city nearly unopposed. Then Roman reinforcements arrived, the tide turned, and eventually, in the video’s words, “Mithridates had pushed too far and someone much bigger pushed back.”

He killed himself in 63 BC. The legend, and I’m flagging it as legend, is that he tried to poison himself, found his immunity too strong, and had his bodyguard stab him with a sword instead. That’s the documented-versus-folklore line to watch here. The suicide is the account; the “too poison-proof to die by poison” detail is the story that got attached to him. Pompey, per the video, sent the body to Pontus for a royal funeral in the tombs of the kings at Sinope, because he admired Mithridates and considered him the first king of his time. Rome fought him for decades and then sent him home in style.

Ptolemy: The Guy Who Ran Away and Won

Our third Biographics ancient, “Ptolemy I: The Founders of Egypt’s Final Dynasty,” has the best underdog gag. Ptolemy abandoned his campaign and fled back to Egypt because he heard the coalition had lost. The word was false: the coalition won, Antigonus was killed at the battle the transcript renders as “Ispis” (I’m not going to guess the spelling), and Demetrius fled to Greece. Ptolemy missed the carve-up of Antigonus’s kingdom because he was the guy who “tucked his tail and ran.” The video’s verdict: “Whatever though, Ptolemy.” All he wanted was Egypt, and now he had it.

While the others bickered for decades over who’d rule Macedon after Cassander died, Ptolemy built the foundations of his own dynasty and moved the Egyptian capital from Memphis to Alexandria. The dynasty lasted almost 300 years, until the death of his most famous descendant, Cleopatra. The lesson is that the guy who skips the fight over the big prize and quietly holds the smaller prize can end up with the longer-lasting one. Rule of Acquisition #224 says never throw anything away because it may be worth a lot of latinum someday. Ptolemy threw away the coalition’s spoils and kept Egypt, which turned out to be worth roughly three centuries of throne.

The Poisoner and the Press

The Biographics video “William Palmer: The Notorious Crimes and Trial of the Prince of Poisoners” supplies the ending. A newspaper of the era said “link by link an irresistible chain of evidence wound around Palmer,” and the jury took an hour to convict him. He was executed on June 14, 1856, in front of tens of thousands of people, many of them journalists. The video reads the Manchester Guardian’s account of the hanging, which is gruesome enough that I’m not repeating it.

There’s also a nice line from an unnamed commentator in the transcript describing how Palmer, awaiting trial, wanted to project innocence, filling the jail “with a faintly rose-colored atmosphere” and moving the gallows to a more agreeable distance. That’s the oldest PR strategy in the book: believe your own press release. It did not work.

At least his bodyguard did the stabbing.

Why the CIA Has a Base in the Middle of Australia

RealLifeLore’s “Why There’s a CIA Base in the Center of Australia” is about Pine Gap. Three satellites collect signals from the Earth’s surface: radio communications, radar emissions, microwave transmissions, missile telemetry, satellite and cell phone transmissions, and more. The video says they give American intelligence agencies, and therefore the Five Eyes member states, coverage over every area of modern U.S. strategic concern: Western Africa, the Middle East, Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, China, and North Korea. That’s more than half of the Earth’s surface outside the polar regions. The data gets relayed to the Pine Gap base in the center of Australia and disseminated from there.

I’ll note that Ukraine is on that list of coverage, which is the sort of thing a NATO-aligned friend would find comforting. I don’t have more in the transcript, so I’m not going to embroider.

Libya’s Rivers, Built from Nothing

RealLifeLore’s “How Libya Built Brand-New Rivers Across the Sahara” is a megaproject story, and the usable part is the framing. The Great Man-Made River Project was built under a ruler who held power for more than four decades. His violent overthrow and death left a power vacuum that threw Libya into civil war and chaos for much of the decade-plus since. The engineering numbers aren’t in what I have, so I won’t make any up. The irony writes itself: a regime that built artificial rivers couldn’t build a stable succession plan.

The Big Trouble with the 51st State

RealLifeLore’s “The Big Trouble if DC Becomes the 51st State” gives the legislative situation. A statehood bill passed the House 216 to 208, along partisan lines. It’s unlikely to clear the Senate because of the filibuster, which requires 60 of 100 senators to advance a bill to a vote. The video says 50 current senators are Republicans, so it would take at least 10 of them to let it come to a vote, which “isn’t likely to happen right now.” It calls this the whole story of DC’s two-century quest for representation in Congress.

I note that the video also mentions a slight Democratic majority in the Senate while saying 50 senators are Republicans, which is a coin-flip of a sentence. I’m reporting what it says and flagging that it’s a bit muddy. Welcome to democracy: more than 200 years of asking for a vote and the answer is “need 60.”

Alternate Present: A Battery Story, With Salt

This one is the odd one out. Sealed History’s “America’s New Battery Could End China’s Entire Battery Industry!” describes a company called North Star (the transcript also writes “Northstar”) making sodium batteries. The claims in the video: performance at 22 below zero Fahrenheit that beats most lithium batteries, more than 4,000 charges with most capacity left, and every main material sourced from the United States. It features founder Angela Brooks, a salt shaker from her grandmother’s Duluth diner (closed in 2009), and a planned Iron Range factory.

Treat this as unverified. I can’t confirm the company, the founder, or the numbers from anything outside this one video, and the framing (“could end China’s entire battery industry”) is clickbait with a thumbnail attached. Sodium cells hold less energy for their weight than the best lithium batteries, so they suit cheaper cars, city delivery vans, buses, power storage, and cold-weather vehicles, and not long-range luxury EVs. It also notes the price war: Chinese makers have cut prices sharply as lithium prices fell, so North Star’s cost advantage depends on lithium staying where it is or rising.

What I Couldn’t Use

The Biographics video on Ronald Hunkeler, the boy who inspired The Exorcist, came through mostly as the host’s own story about a ghost hunt on a dark California road. The RealLifeLore video on the Pacific Northwest coast came through as nothing but a razor ad. And the video on Germany’s Russia problem is mostly a promo for a companion piece on Nebula covering the first phase of the Russian invasion, up to the Ukrainian victory that pushed Russian troops away from Kyiv. The one thing I’ll say about that is simple: Ukraine won that fight, and anyone describing the invasion as anything but unprovoked aggression is repeating propaganda.

That’s the issue. Next time, Little Mister, someone please make a documentary that isn’t sponsored by a razor.

Sources

Videos

  • Who Do You Think You Are? — Barbara Windsor Learns Her Family Fled the Irish Famine | Who Do You Think You Are (2026-11-01)
  • Sealed History — America’s New Battery Could End China’s Entire Battery Industry! (2026-11-01)
  • RealLifeLore — RealLifeLore - S01E0306 - Why Nobody Lives on the Pacific Northwest Coast (2026-11-01)
  • RealLifeLore — Why There’s a CIA Base in the Center of Australia (2026-11-01)
  • RealLifeLore — Germany’s Catastrophic Russia Problem (2026-11-01)
  • RealLifeLore — The Big Trouble if DC Becomes the 51st State (2026-11-01)
  • RealLifeLore — How Libya Built Brand-New Rivers Across the Sahara (2026-11-01)
  • Biographics — Mithridates: The Roman Republic’s Greatest Enemy [Re-uploaded, FIXED] (2026-10-31)
  • Biographics — Klaus Fuchs: The Nuclear Spy (2026-10-31)
  • Biographics — WILLIAM PALMER: The Notorious Crimes and Trial of the Prince of Poisoners (2026-10-31)
  • Biographics — Ronald Hunkeler: The Boy Who Inspired The Exorcist. (2026-10-31)
  • Biographics — Ptolemy I: The Founders of Egypt’s Final Dynasty (2026-10-31)

This Day in History