History's Trainwrecks

What kind of nerd do you want to be when you grow up?

There are so many choices: role-playing games, science fiction, chess, Renaissance festivals, comic books, and many more. The number of ways open to me to avoid popularity and the chance of ever touching a woman recreationally seemed without limit.

I picked history. It worked like a charm.

I was a huge hit at parties, with my conspirator's knowledge of the true role George Washington played in starting the French and Indian War, the temper tantrum Mary Todd Lincoln threw that guaranteed she and her husband went to Ford's Theatre alone, Julius Caesar getting captured by pirates (who he later crucified), and the real reason Philip II of Spain sent that Armada to England.

Not really.

Somehow, there was no line of popular girls at my door. I stayed home instead of going to prom, consoling myself that Constantine the Great wasn’t a swell dancer either, and he was a SAINT.

I was in good company. Also, high school girls are excessively picky.

I went on to get a Master’s degree in history (and all the student loans that came with it) and looked for ways to put my education to good use. It became a race to see what happened first – me using my degree as intended, or paying off those loans.

The loans won.

It’s a good thing they invented the Internet. Finally there was a way to seek out like-minded companions, and regale them with how that egomaniac Douglas MacArthur revived Washington’s old Legion of Merit, renamed it the Purple Heart, and awarded the first one to himself. Or the tale of Marcus Crassus, ancient Rome’s richest man and first fire chief, who would only save your burning house if you agreed to sell it to him at a reduced price. “It was a fire sale. Get it? A FIRE SALE.”

For the first time in my own history, they got it.

I started a Facebook page and a podcast called History’s Trainwrecks—the stories of some of history’s most successful figures who always seemed to fail in sight of the finish line. Aaron Burr, Douglas MacArthur, George McClellan, Herbert Hoover, and rich old Crassus, to name a few.

It was just the beginning. Two months later my nerdy posts had been seen by nearly a million people and had engaged about two hundred thousand. People from around the world commented, liked, shared, and started conversations with fellow strangers that went on for days.

It was heartwarming. Finally there were people out there as passionate about history as I was. They brought their own immense pent-up knowledge to the site; all those stories that their significant others and co-workers and drinking buddies rolled their eyes at that we found endlessly fascinating.

I learned more from them than they ever learned from me.

The stories of History’s Trainwrecks are the ones we never learned in high school. Mainstream history studies only have time for the ones who made it to the finish line. It was more important to talk about Dwight Eisenhower, who won, than Douglas MacArthur, who didn’t. But I think the tales of these train wrecks are at least as interesting, because they deal with an element of historical study that most scholarship only mentions in passing.

Aaron Burr was one vote shy of the Presidency in 1800, and he beat John Adams and a ton of Founding Fathers to do it.

George McClellan commanded all the Union armies at age thirty-four, while Ulysses S. Grant was just a failed potato farmer.

Herbert Hoover was one of the most-admired men in the world when he won the White House, and one of the most reviled when he lost it four years later to a paralyzed man whose political career had seemed dead and gone years before.

Douglas MacArthur was a lieutenant general at the same time Dwight Eisenhower was a paper-pushing colonel who had never had an active duty combat command.

So what happened?

The answers to these questions are getting the attention of all the world’s history nerds, from Ukraine to England to California. There is a real, passionate audience for this material, and I believe a committed following can be developed.

These historical figures are true train wrecks, and we can’t look away.