Step into a tour of the delightful and absurd: Mark Twain’s frog tale meets the real-life rules of small-town America. At the Calaveras County Fair frogs leap for glory, but a blunt public-health line separates sport from supper — if a frog dies mid-jump it cannot be eaten and must be disposed of, a pragmatic and strangely moving rule to prevent disease.

Then we pivot to civic theater: Chico’s symbolic ban on building or storing nuclear weapons—complete with a token fine—reveals how municipalities use laws to assert local values even when federal authority looms larger. Along the way we debunk and decode myths, from the likely-apocryphal ban on women driving in housecoats to modern protections for driving rights and hot-button policies on clotheslines and rooftop solar in HOAs.

We zip across the West — Colorado’s permits to make it snow, rules about couches on porches — and return to a moral throughline: care for wildlife, community identity, and the small, earnest regulations that say what a place values. Protect the frog, save the planet, and please don’t bring your warhead to the farmer’s market.

August 1835. A penny paper prints a breathless scientific report and, overnight, the moon blooms with forests, oceans, and winged humanoids. Listeners gather in public squares to hear the tale read aloud; theologians and citizens debate souls and science while the nation wrestles with a new, electrifying media age.

This episode follows the Green Moon hoax from its breathless headlines to the ashes of trust it left behind, tracing how borrowed authority, vivid detail, and a hunger for sensational news made fiction feel like fact. We meet the real figures tangled in the story, the shaky science that should have warned readers, and the paper that may have been joking — or testing how far confidence could carry a lie.

In short, it’s a story about curiosity, credulity, and the fragile power of authority — and a reminder that scrutiny, not swagger, makes science reliable.

This podcast is a work of historical interpretation. While we strive for accuracy, some aspects of history are open to interpretation and debate. Thank you for listening.

When a passerby insists on pronouncing the state one way, a single resolution from the 1880s stands between history and habit. This episode opens with that small-but-stubborn decision — a deliberate choice to honor French spelling and Quapaw heritage that turned pronunciation into law.

From there we chase the folklore: bans on blue light bulbs and teachers punished for bobbed hair. Those stories smell like the kind of municipal overreach that thrived in the early 20th century — real in places, exaggerated in the telling. The narrative follows the trail from rumor to record, separating theatrical claims from likely local ordinances.

Finally, the story lands at the most prosaic truth: Arkansas does regulate what you sell at the roadside stand. Permits, safe handling and honest labeling make for less glamorous but far more enforceable rules. Arkansas, say it right, read the sign, and wash your melons.

On March 25, 1913, a series of relentless storms and rapid snowmelt turned the rivers around Dayton into a single unstoppable force. What began as a quiet morning expecting spring rain soon became a tidal wave that swept through downtown, ripping foundations from the earth, turning Main Street into a watery highway, and trapping families on rooftops. Corporations, soldiers, nurses, and ordinary neighbors rose into action—building boats on factory floors, marching through mud to set up relief stations, and clinging to telegraph poles while the city around them burned and froze.

This episode of Timetellers traces the flood’s path from a levee breach to a city transformed, weaving first-person rescues and heartbreaking losses into a larger story of invention and resilience. You’ll meet the leaders who organized life-saving responses, the communities that took in the displaced, and the engineers whose radical flood-control projects reshaped the region for generations. Through vivid eyewitness accounts and archival detail, we reveal how disaster reframed Dayton’s geography, its social divides, and its future.

By the time the waters receded, thousands were homeless, hundreds had died, and billions of dollars of damage had been done. Yet out of the mud came an audacious program of levees, dams, and rechanneling that became a model for flood control across America. Listen to learn how a city nearly erased by water reimagined itself—and how a single catastrophe altered where people lived, who was protected, and what communities were willing to change to survive.

This podcast is a work of historical interpretation. While we strive for accuracy, some aspects of history are open to interpretation and debate. Thank you for listening.

It’s the 1920s: an Arizona rancher lets his donkey nap in a bathtub, a sudden flood turns a sleepy scene into a chaotic rescue, and a costly retrieval sparks a town ordinance banning dozing equines in tubs. The tale—part history, part folklore—traces how one small, messy problem became a cautionary legend carried far beyond its prairie roots.

Along the way, meet Mojave County’s wink-worthy fixes—laws about stolen soap and frontier-style punishments—and the very real public-health rules about feeding garbage to pigs to stop disease. This episode threads humor and hard sense into a portrait of how local headaches become lasting law. Arkansas is up next.

This final episode takes you beyond the Lower 48 into Alaska’s glacial silence, Hawaii’s living volcanoes, and the contested shores of the territories. Dan and Renee weave intimate stories of scale—ancient ice and roaring lava—alongside people who have lived these places for millennia.

These parks are living, changing landscapes where conservation collides with colonization, sacred names are reclaimed, and communities demand stewardship. Tune in to hear how land keeps time through ceremonies, eruptions, migrations, and memories—and what it asks of us when we finally listen.

Imagine owning a bar where nobody's allowed to be... drunk. In this episode we follow the absurd-sounding Alaska rule that a drunken person may not remain where alcohol is sold, and meet the staff and officers who treat the law as public-safety gospel rather than punchline.

What reads like a cartoon ordinance is actually a tool to prevent over-serving and keep people safe — selectively enforced, often laughed about online, but with real consequences on the ground. We trace how a blunt line on a page becomes a quietly practical policy in smoky bars and midnight patrols.

Then we chase folklore: the infamous “don’t drop a moose from a plane” tale gives way to the real law against harassing wildlife, and the whispered myths about hunting etiquette reveal an underlying safety culture. By the end you’ll hear why Alaska’s stranger-than-fiction rules are less about whimsy and more about keeping people — and animals — out of harm’s way.

Step into a wagon of wonder and danger: this episode unspools the American love affair with miracle cures, from 19th‑century medicine shows to the cold logic of eugenics. You'll meet charismatic hucksters, desperate families, and doctors whose theories did more harm than good.

Through vivid stories—bleeding halls, opiate‑laced tonics, targeted ads, and forced sterilizations—we trace how bad science, entertainment, and prejudice fused into policies that shaped lives for generations.

As the hosts untangle placebo effects, racial and gendered exploitation, and the social roots of mistrust, they invite you to listen with curiosity: learn how to spot red flags, why skepticism matters, and how history still echoes in today’s wellness culture.

This podcast is a work of historical interpretation. While we strive for accuracy, some aspects of history are open to interpretation and debate. Thank you for listening.