High Crimes and History was a historical true crime podcast Katie and I created and hosted, exploring criminal cases from before 1918. Each episode took a single case and built outward from it, starting with the crime itself, the world that produced it, the legal and social systems that responded to it, and what the whole thing tells us about the period that a conventional history lesson probably wouldn't.
The show grew directly out of my academic work in social history and my conviction that crime is one of the most revealing lenses you can point at a society. How a community defines crime, who it punishes, who it protects, what it considers forgivable; these aren't footnotes to history. They're the main text. The cases I covered ranged from obscure local incidents that never made it into any history book to headline cases that shaped legal precedent, and the goal was always the same: use the story to teach the history, not the other way around.
High Crimes and History charted multiple times on Stitcher and iTunes, reaching an international audience, and remains one of the projects I'm proudest of. Episodes are still available here or wherever you listen to podcasts.