This episode discusses the Jack the Ripper murders and includes descriptions of murder, violence against women, poverty, sex work, alcohol addiction, and postmortem mutilation. While I’ve deliberately avoided unnecessary graphic detail, some descriptions of the victims’ injuries and crime scenes are necessary to understand the history and the investigation.

More importantly, these were real women—not characters in a Victorian horror story—and I’ve tried to treat their lives and deaths accordingly.

Please listen with that in mind, and use your own discretion.

London, 1888. Women are being murdered in Whitechapel, police are struggling to find their killer, newspapers are feeding a terrified public—and somebody sends a letter signed with a name that will become immortal:

Jack the Ripper.

There’s just one problem.

We have no idea if the murderer wrote it.

For the first Naked History Halloween episode, we’re stripping away more than a century of fog, top hats, conspiracy theories, dubious suspects, disputed letters, and questionable “case closed” claims to find the real history underneath the legend.

We follow the murders of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly; enter the overcrowded streets and lodging houses of Victorian Whitechapel; examine what police were—and weren’t, capable of investigating in 1888; and watch as newspapers, hoaxers, fear, prejudice, and public fascination transform an unidentified murderer into one of history’s most recognizable monsters.

Because Jack the Ripper may be famous.

But almost everything we think we know about him is built around an empty space.

We don’t know his name.

We don’t know his face.

We don’t even know for certain how many people he killed.

And maybe that’s exactly why we’re still talking about him.

Music Credit:

• "In The West" Kevin MacLeod (⁠⁠⁠incompetech.com⁠⁠⁠)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License ⁠⁠⁠http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠⁠

• Music track: lavender by massobeats Source: ⁠⁠⁠https://freetouse.com/music ⁠⁠⁠Royalty Free Music for Video (Safe)

Titanic sank in 1912. The myths surrounding her have somehow remained extremely buoyant.

In this Naked History: Debrief, we return to RMS Carpathia: All Possible Speed to separate some of the history from the legend. We revisit the claim that Carpathia pushed her engines so hard during the rescue that they were permanently affected, dig deeper into Captain Arthur Rostron’s belief that divine intervention guided his ship safely through the ice, and look at what the historical record can—and can’t—actually tell us.

Then, Myth-Taken takes on some of Titanic’s most persistent stories: the supposedly “unsinkable” ship, ignored iceberg warnings, third-class passengers allegedly locked below decks, the band’s final song, and the question James Cameron will apparently be answering until the heat death of the universe: could Jack have fit?

Plus, This Week in History takes us from William the Conqueror and Alexander the Great to Charlie Brown, German reunification, and Sputnik.

Titanic became a story about catastrophe. Carpathia became a story about what people do afterward.

And sometimes the footnotes are where the best stories are hiding.

Everyone knows the story of RMS Titanic. This time, we’re telling it from the deck of the ship that came looking for her.

When Carpathia received Titanic’s distress call in the early hours of April 15, 1912, Captain Arthur Rostron was nearly sixty miles away. He didn’t know how badly Titanic was damaged, how long she had left, or whether anyone would still be alive when they arrived. He knew only that another ship needed help.

His response was simple: turn around and make all possible speed.

In this episode of Naked History, we follow Carpathia’s desperate race through the North Atlantic as stokers pour coal into the furnaces, engineers push the machinery toward its limits, lookouts search the darkness for the same ice that had already doomed Titanic, and Rostron prepares his entire ship to receive survivors before knowing whether there would be anyone left to save.

Music Credit:

• "In The West" Kevin MacLeod (⁠⁠⁠incompetech.com⁠⁠⁠)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License ⁠⁠⁠http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠⁠

• Music track: lavender by massobeats Source: ⁠⁠⁠https://freetouse.com/music ⁠⁠⁠Royalty Free Music for Video (Safe)