ThePodcastofDoom's podcast (social and culture)
The Podcast of Doom explores famous disasters and calamities throughout history.
Episode 21 - A Couple of Crushes

On June 16, 1883, Mr. and Mrs. Fay presented a magic and variety show at Victoria Hall in Sunderland, England. The show featured conjurers, marionettes, illusionists and talking wax figures. At the end of the show prizes would be given away. More than 2,000 children showed up and filled the hall to capacity. When the prizes were distributed to the children nearest the stage, the children in the upper gallery panicked and rushed the doors in the lower gallery, which had been bolted closed to an opening the width of one child.

One hundred years later, in Sheffield, England, a different stampede took place. Thousands of Liverpool football fans showed up at neutral Hillsborough stadium to watch their team face Nottingham Forest for the right to play for the Cup. When the fans arrived en masse they were faced with narrow entrances and decrepit turnstiles just as the match was about to get underway.

Direct download: Episode_21_-_A_Couple_of_Crushes.mp3
Category:Social and Culture -- posted at: 1:12pm PDT
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Episode 20.5 - Question and Answer Time

Time to answer your questions about Episodes 1-20. Also, an announcement of the topics for episodes 21-25.

Direct download: Post_Episode_20_Question_and_Answer.mp3
Category:Social and Culture -- posted at: 9:26pm PDT
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Episode 20 - The Jonestown Massacre

You’re familiar with the term “Don’t Drink the Kool Aid?” It basically means don’t go along with the dominant way of thinking. It also has become an easy way for people to end an argument when they have run out of ideas. In this episode we will learn about the origin of the term “Don’t Drink the Kool Aid.” It goes back to a small town Indiana preacher named Jim Jones, who idolized charismatic leaders like Stalin, Marx, Mao, Gandhi and Hitler, and dreamed of building a communist utopia. He gathered about him a congregation of poor and repressed people in a place he called, “The Peoples Temple.” When Jones became overly concerned about the scrutiny of the public eye, he moved his temple out of the United States and into Guyana. However, the move didn’t resolve Jones’s worries. In fact, his paranoia grew only deeper.

Direct download: Episode_20_-_The_Jonestown_Massacre.mp3
Category:Social and Culture -- posted at: 9:37pm PDT
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Episode 19 - The Irish Potato Famine

Potato blight was the proximate cause of the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1849, but there were many contributing causes including the high dependency on this food staple, the harshness of British rule, the passage of laws that prohibited Irish Catholics from owning land, absentee landlords, dire poverty, and the subdivision of holdings that made the raising of any crops other than potatoes nearly impossible. As the famine took its toll, more than 1.5 million people would die of starvation in Ireland and another 1 million would emigrate to other countries

Direct download: Irish_Potato_Famine.mp3
Category:Social and Culture -- posted at: 9:49pm PDT
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China is a nation of many rivers and following mass industrialization efforts in the mid-20th century, China also became a nation of dams. One of those important dams was the Banqiao on the River Ru. The Chinese government boasted that the Banqiao Dam was built to withstand a once-in-a-thousand-year rainstorm. There was only one small problem: in August of 1975, eastern China was about to be hit by a once-in-a-two-thousand year rainstorm. The combination of a typhoon colliding with a cold front caused more than 40 inches of rain to fall in one day with 7.5 inches falling in just one hour. During the storm more than 62 dams would fail and more than 200,000 people were reported killed.

 

Direct download: Banqiao_Dam_Failure_3.mp3
Category:Social and Culture -- posted at: 7:16am PDT
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Episode 17 - The Iranian Blizzard and Carolean Death March

Two giant blizzards on two different continents in two different centuries. The Iranian Blizzard of 1972 killed more than 4,000 people, many who died from exposure or suffocation beneath the snow. In one week the storm dropped as much as 26 feet of snow. In a different century on a different continent, a Swedish army prepares to invade Norway as part of a plan to retore their power and pride. But a campaign that starts in August and was only supposed to last 6 weeks ends up taking just a little longer. Things get really complicated when the King of Sweden dies and this army in the far north must return to the homeland over a range of difficult mountain passes just as the worst winter in years is about to hit.

Direct download: Episode_17_-_The_Iranian_Blizzard_and_Carolean_Death_March.mp3
Category:Social and Culture -- posted at: 7:51pm PDT
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Three months after the surrender of Nazi Germany to Allied forces concluded World War II in Europe, fighting was still raging between the Allies and the Japanese Imperial government. Between mid-April and mid-July, 1945, Japanese forces inflicted half as many casualties as those suffered during the three previous years of fighting in the Pacific. With the capture of the Japanese Island of Okinawa, American forces were at the doorstep of the main island. With his military advisors cautioning Harry Truman that a conventional attack would result in over 1 million American casualties, the U.S. President faced one of the most difficult decisions in world history: risk millions of lives in a ground invasion or use the most powerful weapon ever developed against a civilian population.

Direct download: Episode_16_-_The_Bombing_of_Nagasaki.mp3
Category:Social and Culture -- posted at: 9:15pm PDT
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Episode 15 concludes with a summary of what happend after the Trail of Tears and The Death March of Bataan and what we can learn from those two forced marches.

Direct download: Episode_15_-_A_Tail_of_Two_Trails_II_-_Conclusion.mp3
Category:Social and Culture -- posted at: 12:44pm PDT
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A comparison of two different forced marches, on two different continents and in two different centuries. In one case, Americans were the victims, in the other case, they were the perpetrators. Thousands died in the Bataan March during World War II, as the Japanese Army forced the defeated American and Filipino troops on an 80-mile march to Camp O’Donnell. The forced relocation of Native Americans out of the American South led to the deaths of thousands of people by exposure, disease and starvation. We will look at how two forced marches changed history. 

Direct download: A_Tail_of_Two_Trails.mp3
Category:Social and Culture -- posted at: 8:42pm PDT
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Episode 14 - The Black Death

The Bubonic Plague, a.k.a. The Black Death, first appeared in China, and owing to improved trade routes, quickly moved across the Asian plateau to the Black Sea and eventually all of Europe. Killing at the rate of 1 out of every 3 people, it wiped out whole villages and towns at a time. Panic led to the mass persecutions of Jews, Romani, and lepers. The plague changed world history and European culture; and it continued to strike again and again in the centuries that followed.

Direct download: Episode_14_-_The_Black_Death.mp3
Category:Social and Culture -- posted at: 10:03pm PDT
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