podcast Transcript Over the last several centuries, one of the weapons that has defined warfare has been artillery. It was used in the conquest of Constantinople by ships on the high seas, reached its peak during the First World War, and is still in use today. What has allowed this weapon to remain in use …
Podcast Transcript In the years prior to the outbreak of the US Civil War, abolitionists had been ratcheting up their efforts to end the institution of slavery. The battle was fought mainly through politics and persuasion, but some were not satisfied with a peaceful approach and felt that more active means were necessary. One abolitionist …
Podcast Transcript Sometime in the last 24 hours, most of you have used soap or detergent, either directly or indirectly. Soap, like many other things, was most likely discovered by accident thousands of years ago. Fast forward to today, and these products are used for cleaning almost everything, from our bodies to cars to dishes. …
Podcast Transcript Prisoners of war or POWs during the 20th century were a part of war. Beligerant nations had to develop systems to guard, house, and feed their prisoners, and before the war, in 1929, most countries had agreed on how prisoners would be treated in captivity. In reality, conditions for POWs differed dramatically, particularly …
Podcast Transcript Located in the Indonesian Archipelago, it is one of the newest countries in the world, Timor-Leste, or, as it’s sometimes known in English, East Timor. While geographically very close, and pretty much surrounded by Indonesia, Timor-Leste has had a history very different from Indonesia. Their histories diverged when they became colonized by different …
Podcast Transcript In the 18th century, a French astronomer who was a regular comet hunter kept finding things in the sky that weren’t comets, but they also weren’t stars or planets. So, he created a list of these objects, not because he was trying to catalog the night sky, but rather to help other comet …
Podcast Transcript For as long as humans have been watching the night sky, they noticed that every so often, during a full moon, the moon would briefly go dark, or at least change color. They often created mythical explanations for the event. Eventually, these ancient people began to record its occurrences and were able to …
Podcast Transcript In the summer of 1863, after two years of war, Confederate General Robert E. Lee felt it was possible to swiftly end the conflict by taking the fight to the Union. Up until this point, almost all of the fighting had taken place in Virginia. Lee felt that by moving to the north, …
Podcast transcript Once every 450,000 years or so, the Earth undergoes a radical transformation. The planet’s magnetic field will literally flip. The north pole becomes the south pole and vice versa. Despite the fact that we know this has happened many times in the Earth’s history, we really don’t know what would happen if the …