In fourteen thirty-one, Joan of Arc was nineteen years old and facing trained clerics in a church court in English-controlled Rouen. She had helped lift the siege of Orléans, accompanied the campaign to Reims, and stood beside Charles VII when he was crowned king of France. Her enemies needed to destroy the meaning of those events, and the way to do it was to condemn the voices she said had guided her. The trial was designed to break her. The questions were traps. She was asked whether she believed herself to be in God's grace — a question with no safe answer. Her reply became one of the most famous moments in the history of any trial.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover the full trial of Joan of Arc — the church court that operated in English-controlled territory with a French bishop aligned against her, the pressure to make her surrender the meaning of her own life, the abjuration she signed under threat of immediate execution and then withdrew, and the morning of May thirtieth, fourteen thirty-one, when she was burned in the marketplace at Rouen. Twenty-five years later, a rehabilitation inquiry declared the original trial invalid. She was cleared of every charge. Her mother lived to see it.

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In nineteen twenty-five, a group of businessmen in Dayton, Tennessee met in a drugstore and decided their town needed attention. Tennessee had just passed a law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. The ACLU wanted a test case. The businessmen asked a local teacher named John Scopes whether he would agree to be charged. He wasn't entirely sure he had taught the forbidden lesson, but he had used the state-approved textbook, which included evolution, and that was enough. Within weeks, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan were both in Dayton, and the whole country was watching.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover the Scopes Monkey Trial — the reporters and vendors and monkey jokes that turned a courthouse into a carnival, the moment Darrow called Bryan to the stand and pressed him on whether the days in Genesis were literally twenty-four hours long, and the verdict that found Scopes guilty and fined him one hundred dollars while deciding almost nothing about the larger argument. Bryan died five days after the trial. The Butler Act stayed on the books until nineteen sixty-seven. Scopes left teaching and became a geologist.

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In January sixteen ninety-two, two girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts began having fits. By summer, nineteen people had been hanged, one man had been pressed to death under stones, and several more had died in jail. The machinery that killed them ran on spectral evidence — testimony that an accused person's invisible spirit had caused harm — which made every denial useless and every accusation almost impossible to refute. A community already divided by land disputes, family rivalries, and political anxiety turned its fear into a legal process, and the process killed people.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover the full arc of the Salem Witch Trials — Tituba's confession that expanded the panic beyond the first three accused, the Court of Oyer and Terminer that accepted evidence no sane court should have accepted, Giles Corey who was pressed under stones rather than give the court a plea, and the slow collapse of the proceedings when the accusations reached people too respected to dismiss. Judge Samuel Sewall stood in church five years later and had a confession of guilt read aloud for his role. Ann Putnam publicly asked forgiveness. Nineteen people were already dead.

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