Podcast Transcript In the early 1970s, after the triumph of landing on the Moon, NASA faced a question: what comes next? The answer was Skylab, America’s first space station. Built from leftover Apollo hardware and launched on the final Saturn V rocket, Skylab became humanity’s first long-term laboratory in space. Astronauts lived aboard for months, …
At the turn of the 20th century, a Russian physiologist made a discovery that would fundamentally change how we understand learning and behavior. What began as research into digestion unexpectedly revealed that animals, and humans, could be trained to associate one stimulus with another. The experiments involved bells, food, and a group of very famous …
Podcast Transcript After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, hopes for democracy gradually gave way to decades of instability and dictatorship. By the early 20th century, frustration with the long rule of Porfirio Díaz finally erupted into revolution. What followed was a decade of coups, assassinations, shifting alliances, and civil war involving figures like …
Podcast Transcript If you look at the Internet Movie Database, one of the most prolific directors over the last 70 years has been Alan Smithee. He has been credited with directing over 156 feature films, shorts, and music videos, with several more projects in the works. Despite his prodigious output, Alan Smithee has never been …
Podcast Transcript Most people are familiar with the transatlantic slave trade, which enslaved over ten million people over a period of centuries. Fewer people are aware of the other African slave trade, which was centered in Eastern Africa along the Indian Ocean. It was centuries older and lasted decades longer than the Atlantic slave trade. …
Podcast Transcript The 1876 plot to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln is one of the strangest and most audacious crimes in American history. The scheme aimed to ransom the corpse of the assassinated president in exchange for the release of a jailed criminal and a huge sum of money. Although the attempt ultimately failed, …
Podcast Transcript The Inca Empire was the largest and most sophisticated state ever created in the pre-Columbian Americas, stretching along the Andes from present-day southern Colombia to central Chile and Argentina by the early 16th century. What makes it historically significant is that the Inca managed to build and administer this enormous realm without many …
Podcast Transcript When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, members of his crew observed the native people they met offering them dried leaves as gifts. They had no clue why, but they soon found out that native people smoked the burning leaves, and when they brought these leaves back to Europe, it became a sensation. …
Podcat Transcript The 19th-century Ottoman Empire was in decline and was often called the “sick man of Europe”. The Ottomans, like Qing China and Imperial Russia, had failed to implement the forces that modernized European nations. A group known as the Young Turks developed a strong admiration for the west were determined to modernize their …