About
Cory Hughes
Independent historian, author, and host of Bloody History. I work from primary documents — testimony, Bureau files, photographs, and the paper trail — and I try to say plainly what they show.
The short version
I'm an independent historian. That means no university press, no institutional funder, and no editor telling me which conclusions are acceptable. It also means the work is answerable directly to the people who read and listen to it.
I started Bloody History in 2023 as a way to walk through the violent parts of the American past in sequence, with the sources in hand. Four hundred episodes later it has become the main record of the work: the assassinations, the intelligence failures, the men who did the shooting, and the people who spent decades insisting there was nothing to see.
Alongside the podcast I write A Warning From History, a two-volume study of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald In Black and White, a documentary life of Oswald built from the photographs and paper rather than the legend. The second editions of both Warning volumes were published in 2026.
The other half of the work is the Second World War. On Substack I publish critical analyses of the war and its origins — speeches, memoirs, and orders read closely and set against what was actually happening on the ground.
The documents are not missing. Most of them have been sitting in the same boxes for sixty years, waiting for someone to read them in order.
How the work is made
Every episode begins with the record: HSCA and Warren Commission testimony, FBI and CIA files, contemporary newspaper coverage, and the photographs. Where a claim cannot be supported, I say so. Where the record contradicts the accepted story, I show the document rather than assert the conclusion.
Quoted material is used under fair use for criticism, commentary, and research. Sources are cited in the episodes and linked in the written work.