My name is James Fell and I say “fuck” a lot.

Historically, I didn’t write the word fuck that much, because the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, where I authored columns for several years, tend to frown upon such language. I also didn’t swear in my 1996 history master’s thesis, titled Rebellion and the Quest for Social Revolution in Latin America. In that academic work I did manage to get the message across that the CIA are fucking dicks without actually using the words “fucking dicks.”

Anyway, in the spring of 2020, a year I refer to as a fucktacular shitnado of ass, I said what the fuck and began authoring a column titled “On This Day in History Shit Went Down.” To my immense pleasure and no small amount of surprise it’s proven quite popular, with several million readers each month. These columns were turned into two self-published volumes of the same name: On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down, and they sold so many copies that Bantam Books gave me an assload of money for the rights to republished them. The new and Big-Publishing-Company-improved version of Volume I is on sale now.

You can read free samples of my sweary history stories on my Facebook, and you should also subscribe to my Substack. You can get a free subscription or a paid one. I like it when people subscribe to the paid one.

I’m also on Twitter (blarf), and my TikTok channel is called Sweary Historian.

In a previous life I wrote about fitness and motivation. The cool and science-based kind of fitness writing, not the bullshit and/or fat shaming sort. Find my earlier published books here.