Arts & Culture

Think history is for wimps and nerds? Seattle ‘Badass’ author might change your mind

By Molly Gilmore Contributing writer
Ben Thompson, author of a dozen books on “badasses” from Julius Caesar to Joan of Arc, will speak in a virtual Washington State History Museum event next week.
Ben Thompson, author of a dozen books on “badasses” from Julius Caesar to Joan of Arc, will speak in a virtual Washington State History Museum event next week. Courtesy photo

Editor’s note: The time of the Thursday evening program has been corrected to 7 p.m.

Ben Thompson of Seattle has made a career out of writing about history’s badasses, from heroes such as Neil Armstrong and Joan of Arc, to villains such as Genghis Khan and Augustus Caesar.

On Thursday, he’ll turn his focus to some of the gutsiest people in Washington history in a live-streamed talk for the Washington State Historical Society.

If a history talk doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, you should know that Thompson’s tales of the real people behind true-yet-sometimes-hard-to-believe feats of derring-do have filled a dozen books and landed him on The History Channel and Discovery. He’s written about badasses for publications from Penthouse to The American Mustache Institute.

In other words, his work is not so much tea as Red Bull.

“He’s amazing,” said Molly Wilmoth, the society’s program manager. “We had him for a History After Hours event, which is one of our adult evening programs, and we were all in stitches.”

The society’s Washington Stay Home Society programming has been so popular that it’s unlikely to stop when in-person gatherings are possible.

“We’ve gotten just a ton of interest in it,” Wilmoth said, “and we’re more easily able to serve the entire state when we can do these things virtually.”

Thompson is excited about the possibilities of online programming, too.

“I’ve done a couple of talks at the Washington State History Museum,” he said. “All of my Tacoma friends come, but none of my Seattle friends can make it. This will be really cool because everybody can see me do my thing.”

Thompson gave The Olympian the lowdown on blogging, bad asses and why history is cool.

Q. What’s a badass?

A. When I did the first “Badass” book, I wrote the whole book, and I submitted it to the publisher, and my editor was like, “OK, this is great, but you have to write a chapter on what a badass is.” That was the hardest chapter for me to write.

What I came up with was that it was determination. It didn’t matter if you were trying to conquer the world or save your homeland as long as you went all out for it and never gave up and didn’t let anything stop you. That’s the definition of a badass.

Q. How did you come to be a badass expert?

A. I grew up loving history. My dad would collect old weapons and was really into old war movies. I think anybody who likes history has had some person who could take these historical figures and events and make them real.

I studied history in college (at Florida State University), and when I got out, I got this boring day job, and I started writing website articles about things that I thought were cool from history. … I started with five hits a week, and that was me twice and my mom and two of my friends, and it ended up really blowing up. Eventually, I was able to turn it into a book deal because I was getting millions of hits a month.

I didn’t think I would ever be able to use a history degree in real life and now I get to write about this cool historical stuff for a living.

Q. On your website, you write about astronomer Tycho Brahe, who “had most of his nose chopped off by a broadsword during a duel with a rival mathematician; lived on his own private island in a massive castle complete with trap doors, an army of astronomer henchmen and a dungeon where he could extrajudicially imprison anyone who pissed him off; … had a pet moose that got drunk at parties; was best friends with a psychic dwarf who lived under his dining room table; and accurately predicted the cosmic trajectories of over 700 stars despite the fact that he was performing his observations with his naked eye because he was working before the invention of the telescope.” Really?

A. Truth is stranger than fiction, right? If you put it in a movie, people wouldn’t believe it, but it’s this guy’s life.

I try to find reliable sources. If it’s in a book and I can corroborate it in more than one book, I’ll generally go with it. History is difficult. It’s not math. It’s not one plus one equals two. It’s a lot more complicated than that. … It gets really tricky as you go back further and further, and you have one source on this guy and that guy had an agenda.

It’s hard for us to agree on what’s actually happening in the world right now, let alone something that happened 2,000 years ago.

‘Guts & Glory: Washington State Edition’

This story was originally published May 22, 2020 at 5:45 AM.

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