The Backstory with Patty Steele

The Netflix hit film Society of the Snow is the true story of South American athletes trapped in the snowy mountains after a plane crash…with some surviving by eating their dead teammates. Now we look at the Donner party of pioneers in 1846, trapped in 22 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains…and the even more gruesome way some of them survived.

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This is the remarkable story of Robert Smalls. In 1862, he was a young slave who managed to commandeer a rebel warship in Charleston, South Carolina’sheavily fortified harbor, turn it over to the North and go on to have a spectacular business and political career.

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The Nazis not only had a deluded belief in their own racial superiority, some of their top leaders believed they were superhumans descended from the inhabitants of the lost city of Atlantis. (They had a whole branch of the military dedicated to proving that.)

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Human attachment is thousands of years old but Valentine’s Day started off as a blood soaked pagan fertility festival, and it wasn’t much fun for women. On the flip side, the romance element is a recent invention. You can thank the Victorians for that.

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Sports, whether they're big-time or small-time, make an awful lot of people happy. They can also push folks to pull some crazy stunts.

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We’re all a contradiction at times, but nothing like Civil War general Oliver Howard. He was a medal of honor winner, he worked to get freed black men the right to vote, and was the founder of historically black Howard University. But after the war he chased down and killed or captured hundreds of Native Americans in the Nez Perce War with the U.S.

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What would we do to live better, longer, or maybe even forever? Lots of quests for immortality involved mystical potions or objects. And one very popular fad in the 1920s involved transplanted monkey testicles!

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In the race to become the reigning superpower, nations have resorted to all sorts of bizarre tactics. Some of them were pretty humorous. And that reached new heights during the Cold War.

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Stop and think about the impact of radio on our world. For thousands of years, storytelling, music, news, and entertainmentwere all in person. Suddenly, this gadget arrives and opens up the world to us. What did we hear, and how did it change us?

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You love gangster TV shows and movies like The Sopranos, The Godfather, and Goodfellas? You love Las Vegas? Bugsy Siegel was the mobster/visionary who created Las Vegas with his spectacular Flamingo Hotel and Casino in 1947. But it cost him his life.

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