Sidequests

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific during the final leg of an attempted circumnavigation of the globe, sparking one of aviation's most enduring mysteries. This episode of Sidequests, marking the anniversary, argues that the disappearance is the least interesting part of her story — and tells the one that actually matters: how a Kansas-born woman became the first to fly solo across the Atlantic, set records across nearly every category in aviation, founded an organization for female pilots that still exists today, and redefined what the world believed women could accomplish, years before the mystery that made her a legend.

The bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil began almost by accident — a Confederate division wandering into a Pennsylvania crossroads town in search of shoes, triggering an unplanned collision between two massive armies. This episode of Sidequests, marking the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, covers the three days of fighting that turned the tide of the Civil War: the cavalry officer who recognized the high ground in time, the college professor who led a desperate bayonet charge down Little Round Top, and the catastrophic failure of Pickett's Charge that ended Lee's invasion of the North for good. Plus: how Lincoln's two-minute address four months later transformed the meaning of the entire war.

On June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer split his cavalry regiment, ignored his scouts' warnings, and led roughly 200 men into a Native encampment far larger than he understood. Every one of them died within the hour. This episode of Sidequests, marking the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, takes apart the "Custer's Last Stand" myth and tells the real story: a genuine military triumph for Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors who defeated a professional army — and the swift, crushing response that followed within two years and ended Plains Native independence for good.

Episode 10 closes out the Titanic series. Carpathia arrives at Pier 54 with 706 survivors and thirty thousand people waiting in the rain. The inquiries begin almost immediately — eighteen days in Washington, thirty-six in London, J. Bruce Ismay and Captain Stanley Lord both put through public crucifixions that would define the rest of their lives. The free episode covers the arrival, the reunions and the devastating non-reunions, the survival statistics broken down by class and gender and age, and the regulatory overhaul that followed within a year: lifeboats for everyone aboard, mandatory drills, 24-hour wireless watch, the International Ice Patrol that still operates today and has never had a ship struck by ice while heeding its warnings.The premium episode goes deeper on the individual lives destroyed or transformed by survival, and on the cultural reckoning that turned one disaster into the defining symbol of an entire era.

In 1859, an American farmer shot a pig belonging to the British Hudson's Bay Company on a disputed island in the Pacific Northwest, and two major world powers spent the next thirteen years facing each other down over the incident. American troops dug in under George Pickett — that George Pickett. Britain responded with five warships and two thousand soldiers. Both sides were ready to fight. Neither side fired a shot. The only casualty of the entire thirteen-year standoff was the pig. This is the Pig War — one of history's most accidental near-wars and most improbable peaceful resolutions.

In 1980, Dennis Hope filed paperwork claiming ownership of the Moon and sent formal notice to the United Nations. Nobody objected. So he started selling. This episode of Sidequests traces how a struggling used-car salesman from San Francisco built a multimillion-dollar real estate business on a gap in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, generated roughly twelve million dollars in revenue, sold property to Ronald Reagan and Tom Cruise, created his own interplanetary government, and was never successfully stopped by any country on Earth. Whether it's legal is still, technically, unclear — which is exactly the point.

Episode 8 of our ten part series The Titanic Disaster covers what happened after the ship disappeared — five hours of darkness and cold in the lifeboats, the arrival of Carpathia at dawn, and the ship that sat ten to twenty miles away watching distress rockets and did nothing. It’s a story with a clear hero and a clear villain, and both earned their reputations entirely.The free episode covers Carpathia’s race through the ice field, the rescue operations at dawn, and the SS Californian’s catastrophic inaction. The premium episode goes deeper on the lifeboats themselves, the long-term trauma survivors carried for the rest of their lives, and the grim work of body recovery off Halifax.

Antonio López de Santa Anna was President of Mexico eleven times, fought the Texas Revolution, and declared himself the Napoleon of the West. He was also the man who, after losing his leg to cannon fire, had the limb preserved, paraded through Mexico City in a glass coffin, and buried with full military honors. Then a mob dug it up. Then he accidentally helped invent bubble gum. This is the strangest footnote in Mexican history — and it's an actual foot.