One day, Paul Bates found a book in an alley. It wasn’t a magical book, but it was very old – 132 years old, to be exact. It’s called The Pictorial Treasury of Famous Men and Famous Deeds: its cover is beautiful, its language is flowery, and its tone is problematic. It’s also full of wildly obscure and preposterously inaccurate stories about people and deeds you’ve probably never heard of. And, it’s the basis for this history podcast. Each episode Paul shares a chapter with a guest and together they cut through the rhetoric, fill in the blanks and bring a modern perspective to this relic from the height of the British Empire.