The Inspiration

I work in healthcare, and I worked all through covid. Todd worked from home during the pre-vaccine days. Despite our different experiences, we both found comfort in television, like everyone else. It is a depressing fact of our existence that Todd and I found inspiration from television, not nature or life experiences or even music. We watched classic Hawaii Five-O. All of it. Except the last season. That was too much even in our quarantine desperation. But plague came up a couple of times in the show and since we were living through a plague, we became interested in the subject. But make no mistake, it was inspired by Hawaii Five-O.

Luckily, at the same time, we were also watching all the Mary Beard documentaries we could find. If you don’t know who Mary Beard is, I suggest you find out. I love her and we have a tribute to her under the influences tab on this website. She presented history in such an engaging and thoughtful way, that we decided to explore history ourselves. And then we found Dorsey Armstrong’s class on the plague (we also have a link to that class under the influences tab). Once we started watching that class, an idea grew. So much about what happened during the Black Death had covid parallels, especially in terms of human response to plague. Those two ladies helped move the idea along.

In addition to watching television, I was also listening to podcasts. But one podcast stood out from all the others. The British History podcast by Jamie Jeffers was entertaining, ridiculously well-researched, and membership funded. We didn’t have to listen to ads! It was fantastic. The British History podcast became the model for how we could do our own podcast. Slowly, but surely, we started taking the idea more seriously. It started happening. But we never would have thought of doing it at all without our influences. And for that we can only be grateful