How we research
These are the rules every episode and every book is held to. They are published so you can hold us to them.
The source list comes first
Research is finished and the source list assembled before a word of script is written. That list is published in full on the episode page, grouped by what kind of evidence it is: primary records, books, institutions and archives, and papers. Every date, number and proper noun in an episode traces to something on it. If a claim cannot be traced, it is cut.
Contested claims stay contested
Where historians disagree, the episode says they disagree and explains the disagreement. "The evidence suggests", "researchers disagree" and "no record survives" are used literally. A theory that is popular is not thereby settled — the lead poisoning explanation for the Franklin deaths is a good example, widely repeated and substantially weakened by later isotope work.
No invented dialogue, no invented minds
Quotation marks are used only for words someone actually wrote, or that a witness recorded. There is no reconstructed inner monologue. "He must have felt" is fiction; "his journal records no entries that week" is history, and it is usually the more affecting of the two.
Oral testimony is evidence
Where Inuit, First Nations or other oral history bears on a story it is cited by name and weighed like any written record. This is not a courtesy. In 1854 John Rae brought back Inuit accounts of the Franklin expedition's final months; Britain rejected them and attacked him for repeating them. In 2014 and 2016 both wrecks were found close to where that testimony had always placed them.
Restraint about real people
Living descendants and identifiable individuals are named only where they have spoken publicly, and never speculated about. The dead are given their names and, where the record allows, what became of them.
Images are labelled
Archival images are public domain or properly licensed, and credited. Everything else is an AI-generated reconstruction, and every page that shows one says so in plain text under the image. A stock photograph is never presented as archival.
What is unknown is listed
Every episode and every book ends with the open questions. Where Franklin is buried, what the boat pointing north means, whether documents survive inside the wrecks — none of these have answers, and pretending otherwise would be the easiest way to lose your trust.