History is usually remembered through wars, revolutions, movements, dates, and famous events. But history did not experience any of those things.
People did.
History Was Human tells the true stories of remarkable people who lived inside the history we now read about—some famous, some forgotten, some misunderstood, and some whose extraordinary lives never received the attention they deserved.
Author Brian R. Smith explores one life at a time, following the historical record beyond the familiar version of events to discover the person behind the name: what they wanted, what they endured, the choices they made, and how the world around them shaped what happened next.
The stories cross cultures, continents, and centuries. Warriors and spies. Rebels and survivors. Leaders, outsiders, and ordinary people caught in extraordinary moments.
Some of these lives have inspired Brian’s historical novels. Others are simply stories too compelling to leave buried in the past.
Because before history became history, it was human.
Send us Fan Mail. Three months before his murder, Chicago labor power broker Timothy D. "Big Tim" Murphy received an ovation at a South Side political banquet. On June 26, 1928, machine-gun fire killed him outside his home. His murder was never solved. How did a man associated with gambling, labor racketeering, and violent rivalries remain a popular figure in his own neighborhood? In this episode of History Was Human, author Brian R. Smith explores the complicated life of Big Tim Murphy, fro...
3 Nov 2026
Woman Chief: A Daughter of Two Enemies
Send us Fan Mail. Taken in war as a child and raised among the Crow, the woman remembered as Woman Chief built a life few nineteenth-century observers knew how to explain. She became a skilled hunter, a warrior, a leader of raids, a keeper of horses and wealth, and a woman whose influence forced even an outsider like trader Edwin Thompson Denig to stop and take notice. But Woman Chief's history is not a clean legend. The surviving dates conflict. The sources were written largely by outsiders...
27 Oct 2026
Gertrude Bell: The Woman at the Birth of Iraq
Send us Fan Mail. Gertrude Bell was an archaeologist, traveler, writer, intelligence officer, and colonial administrator who became one of the most influential British officials in Baghdad after the First World War. She knew Winston Churchill. She worked alongside T. E. Lawrence. She helped support Faisal as the first king of Iraq, advised on the country's emerging political structure, worked on frontier questions, and later helped build what became the Iraq Museum. But the familiar claim th...
20 Oct 2026
Nancy Wake: The White Mouse Who Came Back
Send us Fan Mail. Nancy Wake became one of the Gestapo’s most wanted women in occupied France—and earned the nickname “The White Mouse” because she repeatedly slipped through their grasp. Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Wake was living in France when World War II changed the course of her life. She worked with the French Resistance, helped people escape Nazi-occupied territory, fled across the Pyrenees herself, trained with Britain’s Special Operations Executive, and eventually ...
13 Oct 2026
Jeff Ake: The Man Who Remembered the Old West
Send us Fan Mail. Jeff Ake lived long enough to remember an American West that was already disappearing into legend. Born in the nineteenth century, he moved through Arkansas, California mining country, southern Arizona, Confederate Texas, ranching country, and some of the most violent corners of the frontier. His life intersected with Apache conflict, the deadly Ake Party ambush in Cooke’s Canyon, and even a Texas jail where John Wesley Hardin and John Ringo were part of the same world. In ...
6 Oct 2026
Rain-in-the-Face: The Warrior Behind the Custer Legend
Send us Fan Mail. Rain-in-the-Face became one of the most famous Lakota warriors associated with the Battle of the Little Bighorn—but much of what Americans thought they knew about him came from a story that may never have happened. Years before the battle, Rain-in-the-Face was arrested by Tom Custer and imprisoned at Fort Abraham Lincoln. After his escape, stories spread that he had sworn revenge. When Tom Custer was later killed at the Little Bighorn, legend transformed Rain-in-the-Face in...
29 Sept 2026
Bloody Knife: Custer's Scout, Gall's Enemy
Send us Fan Mail. Bloody Knife is often remembered simply as "Custer's favorite scout." His real life was far more complicated. Born to a Hunkpapa Lakota father and an Arikara mother, Bloody Knife grew up between two peoples with a long history of conflict. He became an accomplished Army scout, developed a close working relationship with George Armstrong Custer, and ultimately rode into the Battle of the Little Bighorn—where an old enemy from his past, Gall, was fighting on the opposite side...
26 Sept 2026
Belle Boyd: The Spy Who Would Not Stay Quiet
Send us Fan Mail. At seventeen, Belle Boyd shot a Union soldier in her family home. Soon afterward, she began listening to the soldiers assigned to watch her—and passing what she learned to the Confederacy. In the first episode of History Was Human, Brian R. Smith explores the life of one of the Civil War’s most famous female spies: her wartime intelligence work, arrests, celebrity, contradictions, and the cause she chose to serve. This is not a story about turning Belle Boyd into a hero or ...
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