One explanation of the Salem witchcraft trials is that there was this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined that they saw witches and made their accusations based on that. So, you know, maybe that's true.

One explanation of the Salem witchcraft trials is that there was this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined that they saw witches and made their accusations based on that. So, you know, maybe that's true.

Maybe they were all tripping up at Salem.

Maybe they were all tripping up at Salem.

Welcome to one day University Talks with the world's most engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This podcast is your chance to discover some of our top rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Steven Shregis, and today's lesson is about historians' biggest challenge, the unknown. There's a famous story about how Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm and discovered electricity. Did that actually happen Stanford? His professor Carolyn Winterer says, we really have no idea Franklin was interested in electricity, but there's no clear historical evidence that he actually flew that famous kite. That's just one example of the many stories from the past we've embraced as fact when the truth is far more ambiguous. So what do we really know when it comes to history? Professor Winterer dug into this question for a one day university lecture titled Unexplained History What Historians Still Don't Understand. She's a professor of history and American Studies and department chair at Stanford University and the author of quite a few history books. The idea that our historical understanding may have large gaps is quite unique, so I asked her about the origins of the idea.

Welcome to one day University Talks with the world's most engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This podcast is your chance to discover some of our top rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Steven Shregis, and today's lesson is about historians' biggest challenge, the unknown. There's a famous story about how Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm and discovered electricity. Did that actually happen Stanford? His professor Carolyn Winterer says, we really have no idea Franklin was interested in electricity, but there's no clear historical evidence that he actually flew that famous kite. That's just one example of the many stories from the past we've embraced as fact when the truth is far more ambiguous. So what do we really know when it comes to history? Professor Winterer dug into this question for a one day university lecture titled Unexplained History What Historians Still Don't Understand. She's a professor of history and American Studies and department chair at Stanford University and the author of quite a few history books. The idea that our historical understanding may have large gaps is quite unique, so I asked her about the origins of the idea.

This is how I remember it. We were chatting on the phone about ideas for lectures and this sort of popped out, like, how could we bring people into the workshop of the historian, because usually we just go out and present all these lovely polished findings, and we thought, Oh, wouldn't it be fun if we could just let people see how real historians actually work.

This is how I remember it. We were chatting on the phone about ideas for lectures and this sort of popped out, like, how could we bring people into the workshop of the historian, because usually we just go out and present all these lovely polished findings, and we thought, Oh, wouldn't it be fun if we could just let people see how real historians actually work.

You've said that before eighteen hundred, it gets a lot harder to figure out what was going on.

You've said that before eighteen hundred, it gets a lot harder to figure out what was going on.

Why is that, Yeah, Well, we think that before about eighteen hundred, ninety percent of the world was illiterate. So that means that most people in the world are neither producing nor consuming print materials. So if they're not producing them or consuming them, it means that we don't have any record of what they're thinking. Before fourteen fifty. There's no printing press, so there's very little broad dissemination of things, and things tend to be in one copy in handwrits, which historians called manuscript so if that one copy is lost, then the whole thing is lost and we never even know it happened. In some cases. There's also very little in terms of what historians call eye documents or ego documents, things like diaries that give you a sense of people's interior landscape. So the only thing we have by the time we get to about two or three thousand BC are documents of trade receipts, like a grain receipt. You know, you gave me three bushels of grain, and I have a clay tablet that records that. But we have no sense of how you're feeling about things, how you're thinking about things. So by the time we get into the deep archaeological record of ten thousand BC, we're really almost in a no man's land in terms of what we can know.

Why is that, Yeah, Well, we think that before about eighteen hundred, ninety percent of the world was illiterate. So that means that most people in the world are neither producing nor consuming print materials. So if they're not producing them or consuming them, it means that we don't have any record of what they're thinking. Before fourteen fifty. There's no printing press, so there's very little broad dissemination of things, and things tend to be in one copy in handwrits, which historians called manuscript so if that one copy is lost, then the whole thing is lost and we never even know it happened. In some cases. There's also very little in terms of what historians call eye documents or ego documents, things like diaries that give you a sense of people's interior landscape. So the only thing we have by the time we get to about two or three thousand BC are documents of trade receipts, like a grain receipt. You know, you gave me three bushels of grain, and I have a clay tablet that records that. But we have no sense of how you're feeling about things, how you're thinking about things. So by the time we get into the deep archaeological record of ten thousand BC, we're really almost in a no man's land in terms of what we can know.

You showed up with a number of examples. I've picked a few of them that we'll talk about.

You showed up with a number of examples. I've picked a few of them that we'll talk about.

We're going to.

We're going to.

Start with my favorite, and that is what Accent did. The founding far have you want to tell us about that?

Start with my favorite, and that is what Accent did. The founding far have you want to tell us about that?

Yeah, So just to set the stage, the founding fathers, you know, the big ones, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, et cetera. They're all born in the seventeen thirties and seventeen forties, so technically they're citizens of the British Empire, so perhaps they have a British accent. But the American Revolution comes along in seventeen seventy six and they become Americans. So it's an interesting question what accent do they have. And when we look at movies, the bad guys who are the British have these British accents like Darth Vader, and the Americans have these American accents like you and I have Stephen today. So the way we often think about it is that there is a thing called a timeless British accent that sounds like BBC English Today or you know whatever, Jane Austen movies people like to watch, and that after seventeen seventy six, the American accent that you and I have appears and we all start talking like I'm talking now. But in fact, what happened is that before about eighteen hundred, there was a common accent shared by many British people and many people living in British America, what we know is colonial America. And they actually sounded a little bit like I do and you do. In that they pronounced the r as in car, So we're hearing the hard R. Why do we think that this happened. Well, we don't have sound recordings, but we do have what are called pronouncing dictionaries, and they show us that they guide people about how to pronounce words, and they show British people in the seventeen nineties being told to pronounce words like car as call. So why did they do that? Well, this is hard for US Americans to swallow because we think we're at the center of the universe. But it in fact has nothing to do with the American Revolution. Instead, it has everything to do with the industrial revolution in England, where wealthy capitalists wanted to now distinguish themselves in society from the poor, and so they began to develop this new accent. The non rhotic are to say things like cod, whereas the poor would say things like card.

Yeah, So just to set the stage, the founding fathers, you know, the big ones, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, et cetera. They're all born in the seventeen thirties and seventeen forties, so technically they're citizens of the British Empire, so perhaps they have a British accent. But the American Revolution comes along in seventeen seventy six and they become Americans. So it's an interesting question what accent do they have. And when we look at movies, the bad guys who are the British have these British accents like Darth Vader, and the Americans have these American accents like you and I have Stephen today. So the way we often think about it is that there is a thing called a timeless British accent that sounds like BBC English Today or you know whatever, Jane Austen movies people like to watch, and that after seventeen seventy six, the American accent that you and I have appears and we all start talking like I'm talking now. But in fact, what happened is that before about eighteen hundred, there was a common accent shared by many British people and many people living in British America, what we know is colonial America. And they actually sounded a little bit like I do and you do. In that they pronounced the r as in car, So we're hearing the hard R. Why do we think that this happened. Well, we don't have sound recordings, but we do have what are called pronouncing dictionaries, and they show us that they guide people about how to pronounce words, and they show British people in the seventeen nineties being told to pronounce words like car as call. So why did they do that? Well, this is hard for US Americans to swallow because we think we're at the center of the universe. But it in fact has nothing to do with the American Revolution. Instead, it has everything to do with the industrial revolution in England, where wealthy capitalists wanted to now distinguish themselves in society from the poor, and so they began to develop this new accent. The non rhotic are to say things like cod, whereas the poor would say things like card.

It makes sense you're telling us that the English accent is the fancier accent, so at least I'm comfortable with that.

It makes sense you're telling us that the English accent is the fancier accent, so at least I'm comfortable with that.

Yeah, what we suspected all along that the British are in fact fancier than we are, and they sound better than we do. So there it is.

Yeah, what we suspected all along that the British are in fact fancier than we are, and they sound better than we do. So there it is.

Okay, let's move even further back in history, the sixteen hundreds and the Salem witch Trials. It's a famous historical event, but do we really know what happened?

Okay, let's move even further back in history, the sixteen hundreds and the Salem witch Trials. It's a famous historical event, but do we really know what happened?

So, you know, we love the Salem witch Trials of sixteen ninety two and sixteen ninety three up there in Salem, Massachusetts, a little north of Boston. It's a big tourist destination today, and we know that something really creepy happened that involved young women and hysterics and bigot administers and various deaths and hangings and whatnot. So it's exciting and everybody is interesting said in this, So you know what do we know? Well, we know that at Salem in sixteen ninety two there were two hundred people accused of witchcraft, many of them young women. Nineteen of them were executed. And we think this sounds like a lot until we look at the European context, where around the same time, over about a two or three hundred year period, between fourteen hundred and seventeen hundred, there were fifty thousand witchcraft executions. So you take that European context, fifty thousand witchcraft executions over a three hundred year period, and then you look at Salem with its nineteen executions in one year, and you reverse the question. It's not what happened at Salem, it's why weren't there more witchcraft executions at Salem? What's wrong in North America that they weren't hunting down which is more so that's you know, that's an example of how knowing the broader contexts of a historical event can really help us to reframe it. So, you know, what are our sources for the witchcraft trials? So a lot of it is legal evidence that is written in Latin or in English handwriting that is very hard to read. And from that historians have come up with several hypotheses. So the first hypothesis is what I call the rich hating hypothesis. And historians mapped onto Salem where did the accusers live and where did the accused witches live? And what they found was that many of the accusers lived on the poorer side of Salem, on the wrong side of the tracks. Whereas the people who were more likely to be accused lived on the wealthier side of Salem. So this is an economic argument, and it basically says that the accusers were envious of the wealth of the accused and they lodged a witchcraft accusation based on that. So there's some evidence to support that hypothesis, but it doesn't account for everything, because there's a lot of economic envy in the world in sixteen ninety two, but we only have one incidence of an event like Salem, so it answers some questions, doesn't answer all of them. During the nineteen sixties, there was a second hypothesis, that is the ergot hypothesis. So the biologists out there might know that Ergot's ergot is a hallucinogenic rye fungus, so it grows on wheat and rye and barley grains you might store, as they did in the seventeenth century over a long winter, and that if you ingest this fungus you basically get high. So one explanation of Salem witchcraft trials is that there was this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined that they saw witches and made their accusations based on that, So you know, maybe that's true, maybe they were all tripping up at Salem. The trouble is that there was a lot of Rye fungus throughout the colonies, throughout the other parts of the world, and it didn't manifest necessarily in witchcraft accusations. So, just like the economic explanation, it has some things that it explains, some things that it doesn't explain. You know, there's many more hypotheses, but you know, at the end of the day, will never really understand what happened at Salem because our evidence is pretty paltry when you think about the kind of evidence we might have today for such an event.

So, you know, we love the Salem witch Trials of sixteen ninety two and sixteen ninety three up there in Salem, Massachusetts, a little north of Boston. It's a big tourist destination today, and we know that something really creepy happened that involved young women and hysterics and bigot administers and various deaths and hangings and whatnot. So it's exciting and everybody is interesting said in this, So you know what do we know? Well, we know that at Salem in sixteen ninety two there were two hundred people accused of witchcraft, many of them young women. Nineteen of them were executed. And we think this sounds like a lot until we look at the European context, where around the same time, over about a two or three hundred year period, between fourteen hundred and seventeen hundred, there were fifty thousand witchcraft executions. So you take that European context, fifty thousand witchcraft executions over a three hundred year period, and then you look at Salem with its nineteen executions in one year, and you reverse the question. It's not what happened at Salem, it's why weren't there more witchcraft executions at Salem? What's wrong in North America that they weren't hunting down which is more so that's you know, that's an example of how knowing the broader contexts of a historical event can really help us to reframe it. So, you know, what are our sources for the witchcraft trials? So a lot of it is legal evidence that is written in Latin or in English handwriting that is very hard to read. And from that historians have come up with several hypotheses. So the first hypothesis is what I call the rich hating hypothesis. And historians mapped onto Salem where did the accusers live and where did the accused witches live? And what they found was that many of the accusers lived on the poorer side of Salem, on the wrong side of the tracks. Whereas the people who were more likely to be accused lived on the wealthier side of Salem. So this is an economic argument, and it basically says that the accusers were envious of the wealth of the accused and they lodged a witchcraft accusation based on that. So there's some evidence to support that hypothesis, but it doesn't account for everything, because there's a lot of economic envy in the world in sixteen ninety two, but we only have one incidence of an event like Salem, so it answers some questions, doesn't answer all of them. During the nineteen sixties, there was a second hypothesis, that is the ergot hypothesis. So the biologists out there might know that Ergot's ergot is a hallucinogenic rye fungus, so it grows on wheat and rye and barley grains you might store, as they did in the seventeenth century over a long winter, and that if you ingest this fungus you basically get high. So one explanation of Salem witchcraft trials is that there was this kind of collective hallucinogenic event and people imagined that they saw witches and made their accusations based on that, So you know, maybe that's true, maybe they were all tripping up at Salem. The trouble is that there was a lot of Rye fungus throughout the colonies, throughout the other parts of the world, and it didn't manifest necessarily in witchcraft accusations. So, just like the economic explanation, it has some things that it explains, some things that it doesn't explain. You know, there's many more hypotheses, but you know, at the end of the day, will never really understand what happened at Salem because our evidence is pretty paltry when you think about the kind of evidence we might have today for such an event.

After the break the mystery of Cleopatra's legendary beauty and why some people believe aliens built Stonehenge, let's go back another like sixteen hundred years, so it really gets are now, to put it bluntly, what did Cleopatra look like? Why do we think that she's so beautiful? What did she actually look like? Why did you.

After the break the mystery of Cleopatra's legendary beauty and why some people believe aliens built Stonehenge, let's go back another like sixteen hundred years, so it really gets are now, to put it bluntly, what did Cleopatra look like? Why do we think that she's so beautiful? What did she actually look like? Why did you.

Tell us possibly the most famous woman who has ever lived, trailing all kinds of legends about her beauty. But the fact of the matter is that we really do not know what Cleopatra looked like. So you know, when I say Cleopatra, the members of your audience, who are perhaps over the age of the half century mark, are going to immediately think of Elizabeth Taylor with her great blue eyeshadow looking like Cleopatra. So that's, you know, that's the image in our mind, but we in fact don't know, and that was kind of an invented image. So what do we know, Well, we have very very little evidence because we are around the decades right before the BC era ends, right, so we're around thirty BC. And given how much we think about that time period, you know, the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and Romans, we imagine that we have tons and tons of evidence, but we don't, and a lot of it is very contradictory. So the first thing we need to realize is that Cleopatra is not in fact Egyptian. She is Cleopatra the Seventh. She is from the Ptolemaic dynasty PTol e Naic, and the Ptolemies are in fact Greek. They conquered the Egyptians during the third century BC, and she's one of the later queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty. So when you are in the Ptolemaic world, you are in a world of what we know as royal incest. So your listeners can take away a new vocabulary term for today. Royal incest comes from a time period when they believe that royal families were in fact manifestations of gods on earth. So why would you want to marry outside of the royal blood and sully the royal blood with the blood of mere common know, you want to marry within the royal family. So we believe that her parents were brother and sister. So she is not Egyptian at all. She is Greek, extremely Greek. We have to get out of our heads a kind of Egyptian appearance, whatever that might be at this time, and imagine a Greek appearance again, whatever that might be. Okay, So there's first of all, what is her ethnicity. Second of all, we might be asking, well, she's a queen. There's probably a ton of statues of her that we can look at. But that's also a problem because Ptolemaic and ancient Egyptian statuary is very formulaic. They're not all about expressing individualism. So they have all of these protocols for how you show a queen, so you have a certain hairstyle, you have a certain way of showing their lips and their neck and all of that. What that means is that our images of what may or may not be Cleopatra are very generic, and we don't know if it's her or another queen. Same thing with coinage that was issued during her reign. There is a woman's head on coinage during Cleopatra's reign of Egypt, but it's so formulaic and it's intended to express her power. So she looks very masculine on the portraits on coins, so we don't know if that's actually what she looked like. So so much for statues, so much for coins. We also know that eventually a further complication is that the Romans conquered Egypt, and many people in Rome hated Cleopatra because she was this outsider queen brought back to Rome by Julia Caesar and then Mark Antony. So they had this anti Cleopatra propaganda in which they called her a witch, a whore, an animal worshiper, and of course very strange looking, because they didn't want her around.

Tell us possibly the most famous woman who has ever lived, trailing all kinds of legends about her beauty. But the fact of the matter is that we really do not know what Cleopatra looked like. So you know, when I say Cleopatra, the members of your audience, who are perhaps over the age of the half century mark, are going to immediately think of Elizabeth Taylor with her great blue eyeshadow looking like Cleopatra. So that's, you know, that's the image in our mind, but we in fact don't know, and that was kind of an invented image. So what do we know, Well, we have very very little evidence because we are around the decades right before the BC era ends, right, so we're around thirty BC. And given how much we think about that time period, you know, the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and Romans, we imagine that we have tons and tons of evidence, but we don't, and a lot of it is very contradictory. So the first thing we need to realize is that Cleopatra is not in fact Egyptian. She is Cleopatra the Seventh. She is from the Ptolemaic dynasty PTol e Naic, and the Ptolemies are in fact Greek. They conquered the Egyptians during the third century BC, and she's one of the later queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty. So when you are in the Ptolemaic world, you are in a world of what we know as royal incest. So your listeners can take away a new vocabulary term for today. Royal incest comes from a time period when they believe that royal families were in fact manifestations of gods on earth. So why would you want to marry outside of the royal blood and sully the royal blood with the blood of mere common know, you want to marry within the royal family. So we believe that her parents were brother and sister. So she is not Egyptian at all. She is Greek, extremely Greek. We have to get out of our heads a kind of Egyptian appearance, whatever that might be at this time, and imagine a Greek appearance again, whatever that might be. Okay, So there's first of all, what is her ethnicity. Second of all, we might be asking, well, she's a queen. There's probably a ton of statues of her that we can look at. But that's also a problem because Ptolemaic and ancient Egyptian statuary is very formulaic. They're not all about expressing individualism. So they have all of these protocols for how you show a queen, so you have a certain hairstyle, you have a certain way of showing their lips and their neck and all of that. What that means is that our images of what may or may not be Cleopatra are very generic, and we don't know if it's her or another queen. Same thing with coinage that was issued during her reign. There is a woman's head on coinage during Cleopatra's reign of Egypt, but it's so formulaic and it's intended to express her power. So she looks very masculine on the portraits on coins, so we don't know if that's actually what she looked like. So so much for statues, so much for coins. We also know that eventually a further complication is that the Romans conquered Egypt, and many people in Rome hated Cleopatra because she was this outsider queen brought back to Rome by Julia Caesar and then Mark Antony. So they had this anti Cleopatra propaganda in which they called her a witch, a whore, an animal worshiper, and of course very strange looking, because they didn't want her around.

They didn't like Cleopatra. Everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor.

They didn't like Cleopatra. Everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor.

Yes, everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor. People in Rome didn't like Cleopatra. And so we come away from this with this astonishing realization that for all that she's famous, we really don't know what Cleopatra actually looked like.

Yes, everybody likes Elizabeth Taylor. People in Rome didn't like Cleopatra. And so we come away from this with this astonishing realization that for all that she's famous, we really don't know what Cleopatra actually looked like.

The next one I can almost sum up in one word, Stonehenge.

The next one I can almost sum up in one word, Stonehenge.

Stonehenge.

Stonehenge.

Aliens built that, right, that's the quick answer.

Aliens built that, right, that's the quick answer.

Aliens built it, and there it is, and they beamed down and put up a bunch of stones, and you can go there and communicate with the aliens.

Aliens built it, and there it is, and they beamed down and put up a bunch of stones, and you can go there and communicate with the aliens.

All right, Well, just in case that's not true. What is true?

All right, Well, just in case that's not true. What is true?

What is true? So we're fascinated by Stonehenge. The first thing we should know is it wasn't built by the Druids. The Druids are kind of manifest in England right around the time of the Romans, which is around first century BC for century AD. It's not a Druid temple. It's way, way, way way older than that. What we do know about Stonehenge is that, first of all, we don't know a lot about it because it's about three thousand years old. And the way to think about Stonehenge is not as Stonehenge, but as stone Henges, like many of the monuments that are scattered around Stone Age England and the continent. So we think that an outer ditch started to be constructed around three thousand BC that was made of wood, so it's actually it starts life as Woodhenge, and then over time they started to bring in all of these sarcins and bluestones those are the big rocks, and that those stones got moved around a lot over the next hundred years, and that finally the site was abandoned. What we need to do to kind of retrain our consciousness is to constantly imagine that this is not one thing that's locked in time. It is used by multiple people at multiple different moments. What we imagine today, based on new archaeological research, is that Stonehenge is actually part of a much wider ceremonial landscape that we weren't paying attention to before. We were just focused on the stones themselves. But our chaeologists have started to look much more broadly, several kilometers outside of Stonehenge, and they think that it's part of what they call a ritual landscape, so that a couple kilometers away you would have had a ceremony to mark let's say my death, right, So my death, we start ceremony a couple kilometers away, and that we then marched towards Stonehenge, which moves us from the world of the living into the world of the dead, and that Stonehenge functions as a kind of portal into the afterlife. But you know, at the end of the day, the trouble with anything that before about two thousand BC is that we just don't have any writing from that time period. When we don't have writing, we really have a hard time getting into people's mindsets, into what they are actually thinking. So I fear that the Stonehenge stones are going to live mutely forever more, just as they do today.

What is true? So we're fascinated by Stonehenge. The first thing we should know is it wasn't built by the Druids. The Druids are kind of manifest in England right around the time of the Romans, which is around first century BC for century AD. It's not a Druid temple. It's way, way, way way older than that. What we do know about Stonehenge is that, first of all, we don't know a lot about it because it's about three thousand years old. And the way to think about Stonehenge is not as Stonehenge, but as stone Henges, like many of the monuments that are scattered around Stone Age England and the continent. So we think that an outer ditch started to be constructed around three thousand BC that was made of wood, so it's actually it starts life as Woodhenge, and then over time they started to bring in all of these sarcins and bluestones those are the big rocks, and that those stones got moved around a lot over the next hundred years, and that finally the site was abandoned. What we need to do to kind of retrain our consciousness is to constantly imagine that this is not one thing that's locked in time. It is used by multiple people at multiple different moments. What we imagine today, based on new archaeological research, is that Stonehenge is actually part of a much wider ceremonial landscape that we weren't paying attention to before. We were just focused on the stones themselves. But our chaeologists have started to look much more broadly, several kilometers outside of Stonehenge, and they think that it's part of what they call a ritual landscape, so that a couple kilometers away you would have had a ceremony to mark let's say my death, right, So my death, we start ceremony a couple kilometers away, and that we then marched towards Stonehenge, which moves us from the world of the living into the world of the dead, and that Stonehenge functions as a kind of portal into the afterlife. But you know, at the end of the day, the trouble with anything that before about two thousand BC is that we just don't have any writing from that time period. When we don't have writing, we really have a hard time getting into people's mindsets, into what they are actually thinking. So I fear that the Stonehenge stones are going to live mutely forever more, just as they do today.

Okay, one last question. Then we've gone back now a few thousand years, just for the fun of it, let's go forward maybe a thousand years or so. Imagine we're there and historians like you are looking back saying, we don't quite get what went on in twenty twenty three. We can't piece it together. We have some ideas, what is it you think historians won't be able to figure out?

Okay, one last question. Then we've gone back now a few thousand years, just for the fun of it, let's go forward maybe a thousand years or so. Imagine we're there and historians like you are looking back saying, we don't quite get what went on in twenty twenty three. We can't piece it together. We have some ideas, what is it you think historians won't be able to figure out?

I thought a lot about this question. I think they're going to really ponder the fate of democracy and why we weren't thinking in the right directions about how to save democracy. So, you know, democracy is a new idea. It's only been on the earth for about two hundred and fifty years, and we're at a moment of reckoning right now. Does democracy or autocracy rule of the day? And I don't really think that they're going to wonder about the rule that informative podcasts played in saving democracy. And you know, this has been a huge revolution, unexpected in the last couple of years, and the pandemic probably had something to do with it. But everybody's listening to podcasts. Some of them are listening to murder podcasts. I'm one of those true crime junkies, I admit it, But a lot of us are also listening to podcasts like this one, where you have people talking about certain topics of their expertise. And John Adams actually said during the American Revolution that knowledge is power. And I think that historians in the future may wonder about the role that informative podcasts played in helping Americans to think through the problem of democracy and how we get an informed citizenship. And they're going to try to measure the role that podcasts played in that. I honestly believe this. I'm not just saying this.

I thought a lot about this question. I think they're going to really ponder the fate of democracy and why we weren't thinking in the right directions about how to save democracy. So, you know, democracy is a new idea. It's only been on the earth for about two hundred and fifty years, and we're at a moment of reckoning right now. Does democracy or autocracy rule of the day? And I don't really think that they're going to wonder about the rule that informative podcasts played in saving democracy. And you know, this has been a huge revolution, unexpected in the last couple of years, and the pandemic probably had something to do with it. But everybody's listening to podcasts. Some of them are listening to murder podcasts. I'm one of those true crime junkies, I admit it, But a lot of us are also listening to podcasts like this one, where you have people talking about certain topics of their expertise. And John Adams actually said during the American Revolution that knowledge is power. And I think that historians in the future may wonder about the role that informative podcasts played in helping Americans to think through the problem of democracy and how we get an informed citizenship. And they're going to try to measure the role that podcasts played in that. I honestly believe this. I'm not just saying this.

Well, thank you to John Adams then, and even bigger thank you to Professor Carolyn Winter. Thank you so much for doing this all right, Thank you. Thanks for joining us here at One Day University. Sign up at our website one dayu dot com to become a member and access over seven hundred full length video lectures from the world's finest professors. You can also download our app. There you can learn more about today's episode and watch Stanford Professor Carolyn Winterer's lecture on Unexplained History, as well as her talks on Benjamin Franklin, the Roman Empire, and more. Join us next time when we talk about the literature that shaped our presidents.

Well, thank you to John Adams then, and even bigger thank you to Professor Carolyn Winter. Thank you so much for doing this all right, Thank you. Thanks for joining us here at One Day University. Sign up at our website one dayu dot com to become a member and access over seven hundred full length video lectures from the world's finest professors. You can also download our app. There you can learn more about today's episode and watch Stanford Professor Carolyn Winterer's lecture on Unexplained History, as well as her talks on Benjamin Franklin, the Roman Empire, and more. Join us next time when we talk about the literature that shaped our presidents.

George Washington loved to read etiquette books. These books that teach us how to gracefully accept or decline a dinner invitation or I imagine the updated version of Emily post would Feeley how to gently unfriend someone on Facebook.

George Washington loved to read etiquette books. These books that teach us how to gracefully accept or decline a dinner invitation or I imagine the updated version of Emily post would Feeley how to gently unfriend someone on Facebook.

One Day University is a production of iHeart Power and School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app You can also check out other Curiosity podcasts to learn about history, pop culture, true crime, and more.

One Day University is a production of iHeart Power and School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app You can also check out other Curiosity podcasts to learn about history, pop culture, true crime, and more.

School of Humans,

School of Humans,