What the Middle Ages Can Teach Us About Pandemics, Mass Migration, and Tech Disruption

The medieval world – for all its plagues, papal indulgences, castles, and inquisition trials – has much in common with ours. People living the Middle Ages dealt with deadly pandemicsmass migration, and controversial technological changes, just as we do now. Today’s guest, Dan Jones, author of POWE…

Did Orson Welles’s 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast Really Cause a Mass Panic?

On a warm Halloween Eve, October 30, 1938, during a broadcast of H G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Orson Welles held his hands up for radio silence in the CBS studio in New York City while millions of people ran out into the night screaming, grabbed shotguns, drove off in cars, and hid in basements, a…

A Talk With The Polar Geographer Who Discovered Shackleton’s Endurance Under 10,000 ft of Frozen Water

On August 1, 1914, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton and his crew sailed from England, set on making history as the first to cross Antarctica. Their ship never returned from her maiden voyage. On November 22, 1915, the aptly named Endurance disappeared, crushed by ice and swallowed by the Wedd…

The Founding Fathers Were 20 and 30-Somethings. Why Is America Now a Gerontocracy?

A house on the Florida coast. An assisted living program. A lively retirement community. Medicare. Our modern concept of old age—and even the idea of old age as a distinct stage of life—are products of our recent past. Where once Americans had little choice but to work until death, in the years aft…

A Pre-WWI French Philosopher Was More Popular Than Elvis and Possibly Entered the US Into the Great War

In New York City, 1913, French philosopher Henri Bergson gave a lecture at Columbia University, resulting in fanfare, traffic jams, and even fainting spells among the thousands of people clamoring for a seat. But this was not Bergson’s only taste of celebrity. When he got married in 1891, Marcel Pr…

While Starving at Besieged Leningrad, Scientists Hid Drought-Resistant Crop Seeds That Could Prevent Future Famines

In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—and began the longest blockade in recorded history, one that would ultimately claim the lives of nearly three-quarters of a million people. At the center of the besieged city stood a converted palace th…

Surviving Nearly 2 Years of Shipwreck on a South Pacific Island in the 1880s

Today, half of the world’s population lives around the Pacific Rim. This ocean has been the crossroads of international travel, trade, and commerce for at least 500 years. The economy was driven by  workers in rickety sailing boats like in Moby Dick. The risk of starvation, dehydration, shipwreck, …

How Did 450 Boers Defeat 15,000 Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838?

By the 1830s, the Zulu kingdom was consolidating its power as the strongest African polity in the south-east, but was under growing pressure from British traders and hunters on the coast, and descendants of the early Dutch settlers at the Cape – the Boers. In 1837, the vanguard of the Boers' Great …

Key Battles of the Barbary Wars, Episode 9: The End of North African Piracy and the Beginning of American Global Naval Hegemony

In this final episode of our series on the Barbary Wars, we look at the fates of the Barbary States. After 1815, the Barbary States lost their independence, with Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco succumbing to European powers through military defeats and colonization, culminating in French and S…

When Did Americans Become Americans? 1945, 1865, 1787, or 1776?

When news reached Parliament of the Boston radicals’ destruction of the Royal East India Company’s tea, it passed the Coercive Acts, a collection of punitive measures designed to rein in that insubordinate seaport town. The Coercive Acts unleashed a political firestorm as communities from Massachus…