Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify | RSS Feed
On the night of October 8, 1871, a fire started in a barn on the southwest side of Chicago. Within hours, it had consumed an entire city.
You probably know the story. Or at least, you think you do.
But the version most people learned — the one that made it into textbooks, into pop culture, into the way we talk about this event — turns out to have a problem. A significant one. And when you pull on that thread, the whole tidy explanation starts to unravel.
It gets stranger from there. Because as Chicago was burning, something else was happening hundreds of miles away. Something that raises an uncomfortable question: Was this really just a barn fire? Or was something else going on that night?
The new episode of Sidequests digs into one of American history’s most famous disasters — and one of its most persistent myths.
%26stroke%3Dnone%26strokeWidth%3D3.6){kind=small}
