Barely Historical is a comedy podcast where two lifelong friends pick a year, dive in, and immediately regret it. Amanda and JoLynne drag the past through the mud, from Salem to the Spice Girls, covering pop culture, scandals, disasters, and all the weird moments that never made it into your textbook. It’s history told by people who probably shouldn’t be trusted with it, but at least you’ll laugh while you learn. Expect games, chaotic commentary, and stories that prove the past was just as unhinged as the present.
Castrati: The Wild History of Opera’s Castrated Superstars
Opera has everything: drama, sex, ridiculous costumes, murder—and apparently, a deeply concerning amount of testicle removal.
This week, Jo and Amanda are getting into castrati, the male singers who were castrated as boys to preserve their high singing voices. And somehow, that definition is only the beginning of the weird shit.
We’re talking about the Catholic Church’s complicated involvement, Italy’s suspicious epidemic of musically gifted boys with “hernias,” what actually happened during the procedure, and the absolutely brutal gamble families were making when they decided their kid might just be the next opera superstar.
And for the boys who actually made it? Things get even weirder. Fame. Money. Royalty. Sex-symbol status. Because apparently eighteenth-century Europe looked at all of this and said, make him the romantic lead.
Plus, we test how cultured we actually are with opera terms and eventually hear the only known recordings of an actual castrato—which exist because this practice lasted way more recently than either of us expected.
Come for the opera. Stay for the suspicious hernias.
Let’s ruin the past.
16 Sept 2026
Medieval Executioners | You Wouldn't Invite Him to Dinner, Would Absolutely Call Him at 2am
The city needed someone to carry out its justice, so it hired a guy, made him essential, and then treated him like a walking biohazard. This week we ruin the executioner: specifically Franz "Meister Frantz" Schmidt of Nuremberg, who killed almost 400 people, treated something like 15,000 patients as an unlicensed healer, and spent his retirement personally petitioning the Holy Roman Emperor so his kids could get married without the shame following them.
What we cover:
Why "dishonorable trades" existed and why they were hereditary (spoiler: nobody applied for this job, it just landed on you)
Franz's first solo hanging at 19, and what "adroitly" meant as a job review
The insane precision expected of an executioner and what happened if he screwed it up
The weirdly bureaucratic version of mercy that existed inside all this cruelty
Franz's medical side hustle, which somehow dwarfed his execution work
Corpse medicine, briefly, because it's genuinely its own episode
How a man who did exactly what the state asked of him for 45 years spent the rest of his life trying to prove his own family wasn't dangerous
Games this episode:
Dishonorable trade or just kind of gross?
Why would we be executed?
5 Fast Facts at the end, because we always have more than we have time for.
Coming soon: a corpse medicine bonus episode. Human fat, powdered skull, the English gallows-hand tradition. All of it.
Sources:
The Executioner's Journal, trans. Joel F. Harrington
Joel F. Harrington, The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
Richard Ward, "A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse"
9 Sept 2026
The Pony Express: The Wild History Behind America’s Famous Mail Riders
The Pony Express is one of the most famous legends of the American West—but apparently, Jo and Amanda knew almost nothing about it.
This week on Barely Historical, we're getting into the real history of the Pony Express: the teenage riders racing mail across nearly 2,000 miles, the isolated station workers who actually kept the operation running, the surprisingly expensive cost of sending a letter, and why the entire Pony Express lasted only about 18 months.
Then things get significantly less wholesome with Jules Beni and Jack Slade, a feud involving stolen horses, attempted murder, and a Wild West legend about a severed ear becoming a souvenir.
Plus, Fact or Folklore, Smash or Pass: Pony Express Edition, and the discovery that the Pony Express was not actually the U.S. Postal Service—which Jo probably should have known after being married to a postal worker for 19 years.
Horses. Mail. Teenagers. Outlaws. Questionable geography. Possibly an ear.
Follow Barely Historical
Hosts: JoLynne & Amanda
Produced by Barely Historical
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/BarelyHistorical (https://www.patreon.com/cw/BarelyHistorical)
Contact: oops@barelyhistorical.com
Tagline: Let’s ruin the past.
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