Episode (200)
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Humanity’s Past Suggests We Only Have 10,000 Years to Change or Go Extinct
Mar 27, 2025We are living through a period that is unique in human history. For the first time in more than ten thousand years, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. In the middle of this century p...
The 16th Century Ottomans Nearly Conquered Europe. Why Did European Kingdoms Make So Many Alliances With Them?
Mar 25, 2025The determined attempt to thwart Ottoman dominance was fought by Muslims and Christians across five theaters from the Balkans to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, from Persia to Russia. But this...
Fort Stanwix and the Forgotten Revolutionary War Siege That Convinced France to Help the US
Mar 20, 2025After a series of military defeats over the winter of 1776–1777, British military leaders developed a bold plan to gain control of the Hudson River and divide New England from the rest of the colonies...
Enough is Enuf, Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell
Mar 18, 2025No language is as inconsistent in spelling and pronunciation as English. Kernel and colonel rhyme, but read changes based on past or present tense. Ough has many pronunciations: ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (...
Did Haiti’s First and Last King Squander the Revolution or Succeed in Underappreciated Ways?
Mar 13, 2025Slave, revolutionary, king, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow th...
What Ancient Greeks and Victorian Explorers Thought Was at the North Pole
Mar 11, 2025The North Pole looms large in our collective psyche—the ultimate Otherland in a world mapped and traversed. It is the center of our planet’s rotation, and its sub-zero temperatures and strange year of...
Nothing Healed America’s Wounds After the Civil War Like Baseball
Mar 06, 2025The nineteenth century was a time of rapid growth and development for the game of “base ball,” and players George Wright and Albert Spalding were right in the thick of it. These two young men, the fir...
How an 1870 Murder Created San Francisco
Mar 04, 2025Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the cr...
Failed Futures: If Alexander The Great Hadn’t Died, He Might Have Conquered Europe, Circumnavigated Africa, and Built His Own Silk Road
Feb 27, 2025And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer. That’s a quote from Hans Gruber in Die Hard, which is a very convoluted paraphrase from Plutarch’s essay collection Moralia. There’s ple...
Why the Anabasis is the Second-Most Influential Greek Epic (After Homer’s Works)
Feb 25, 2025Imagine being stranded thousands of miles deep in enemy territory with 10,000 soldiers, no allies, no clear way home, and the only means of escape was by foot. This was the predicament faced by Xenoph...