Podcast Transcript Five different times during the Earth’s history, the planet has entered a prolonged period of reduced temperatures. When this happens, massive ice sheets form, and sea levels drop. While some of these events occurred billions of years ago, not all of them were in the distant past. In fact, the last such event …
Podcast Transcript In William Golding’s 1954 novel, the Lord of the Flies, a group of young boys find themselves on a deserted island. Stuck there, they create their own civilization which eventually turns violent and savage. The book was a statement on the fundamental nature of humanity. The book was fiction, but many people have …
Podcast Transcript Around 10,000 years ago, someone in Southeast Asia captured a bird that lived on the floor of the jungle. Today, billions of descendants of that bird now live on six different continents and provide food for billions of people. Yet, the birds which exist today are often very different birds from the ones …
Podcast Transcript Money is a very strange thing. All of us use it. We spend it, earn it, and save it. We know it when we see it. Yet, even some of the world’s best economists have a very hard time defining it. It has been around for thousands of years, yet there is still …
Podcast Transcript One of the most successful enterprises of the Middle Ages was a collection of free cities located in Northern Germany and along the North and Baltic Seas. These cities created one of the greatest trade networks that the world had ever seen and for several centuries dominated trade and economics in Northern Europe. …
Podcast Transcript Ever since people have had secrets, people have taken measures to protect those secrets. The first methods to hide secrets were simple and mechanical. Over time they became more elaborate and used machines. Today, they are mathematical and would require an enormous amount of computing power to decipher. Learn more about cryptography and …
Podcast Transcript The election of 1860 was unquestionably the most important election in American history. The presidential election after that was still important, but it has the distinction of being perhaps the oddest presidential election in history, if for no other reason than it was conducted in the middle of a civil war. Learn more …
Podcast Transcript In 1945 after the conclusion of the Second World War, a Dutch man was accused of collaborating with the Nazis and plundering the Netherlands of some of its greatest artistic works. During the trial, he came up with a defense that seemed to everyone to be preposterous, yet wound up being true. Learn …
Podcast Transcript During the US Civil War, over a quarter million African-Americans served and fought on the Union side with distinction. After the Civil War, in a reorganization of the United States Army, permanent, albeit segregated, units of black soldiers were created. These units served with distinction in almost every military conflict fought by the …