In seventeen seventy, a machine sat down to play chess — a carved wooden figure in a turban that beat courtiers, diplomats, and, it is said, Napoleon himself. For eighty-four years the greatest minds in Europe and America tried to work out how it thought. It didn't. There was a person folded up in the box.

August Mercer reveals the beautiful, cruel secret of the automaton that fooled the world. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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On a Saturday afternoon in nineteen eleven, a fire tore through a New York garment factory packed with young immigrant women. The fire escape buckled. The ladders were too short. And the stairwell door was locked — deliberately, to stop the girls stealing cloth. A hundred and forty-six people died. The youngest were fourteen.

August Mercer tells how their deaths were written into the safety laws that protect us today. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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A sixteen-year-old girl was told she was Queen of England. She wept, and refused, and said the crown was not hers. They made her take it anyway. Nine days later, the men who had used her abandoned her — and she was left kneeling, blindfolded, on a scaffold, groping for the block she could not find.

August Mercer tells the story of a pawn in a game she never asked to play. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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An American suburb — homes, a school, a playground — built directly on top of twenty-one thousand tonnes of buried chemical waste. When the rain brought it back up, the children were already sick. And in the deed of sale, the company had written, in plain language, that people might be killed.

August Mercer tells the story of the housewife who mapped the illnesses house by house and would not be silenced. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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You know the story: a people so obsessed with building giant statues that they cut down every tree, wrecked their island, and destroyed themselves. It is taught in schools as the ultimate warning. And the modern evidence says it is almost entirely wrong.

August Mercer takes apart the ecocide myth and reveals the far more disturbing thing that actually happened to the people of Rapa Nui. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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A young doctor found a way to stop mothers dying in childbirth. It cost nothing: wash your hands. He proved it worked, and the medical establishment ignored him, mocked him, and drove him out — and he died in an asylum while the women he could have saved went on dying.

August Mercer tells the story of the deadly gap between being right and being believed. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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On a foggy Friday morning in nineteen sixty-six, a mountain of colliery waste slid down onto a Welsh mining village and engulfed the school directly below it. A hundred and forty-four people died. A hundred and sixteen of them were children.

It was not an act of God. It had been warned about, in writing, for years. August Mercer tells the story of how completely, and how obviously, Aberfan could have been prevented. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Followed for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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A mountain in the Andes made of silver — so rich it bankrolled the Spanish Empire, flooded the world with coin, and made a freezing city on a barren plateau one of the largest on Earth. But the silver was dug out by human beings in conditions so lethal they called it the mouth of hell.

August Mercer follows the silver from the tunnels to the markets of the world, and asks why the coins never carried a mark to show what they cost. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

#history #truehistory #truestories