Tides of History

Most people today remember the Roman aristocratic woman Clodia as the target of one of Cicero's nastiest works, but Douglas Boin has written a wonderful new book - Clodia of Rome - that recovers just ...

David Chaffetz, author of the recent and truly outstanding book Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires, joins Tides to talk about the long and intertwined history of horses an...

Why did Rome win? It's a simple question, but the answer is anything but. To figure it out, we have to look not only at what made Rome special but also at its adversaries. Only then can we understand ...

We usually think of the American Civil War as a conflict fought between massive armies at famous battlefields like Gettysburg, but that's not really accurate: Much of the war was actually made up of g...

At the end of the fifteenth century, the center of European banking suddenly swung from its birthplace in Italy to south Germany. The key figure in that transition was Jakob Fugger of Augsburg, maybe ...

The Medici name still carries echoes of power and labyrinthine politics. But the Medici got their start as bankers, and built a financial empire that spanned fifteenth-century Europe. Popes, kings, an...

For most of its history, Rome barely bothered with the Greek east. Then, quite suddenly, Rome exploded onto the scene, laying low the two most powerful Hellenistic warrior-kings of the past century. W...

Thomas More is one of the most fascinating figures of the 16th century: saint, persecutor of Protestants, government official, martyr. But who was he, really? Dr. Joanne Paul has written a wonderful n...

For most of its history, the Roman Republic had little to do with the Greek East. That changed at the end of the third century BC. As the war against Hannibal reached its conclusion, momentous things ...

The Hellenistic world stretched from Sicily to India and encompassed tens of millions of people for centuries, as new kingdoms sprang up, new ways of life emerged, and the distant edges of that world ...