Episodes
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1916 is one of the most depressing years in human history and today we're covering it. This is the year that makes World War One the horror it is. This is the year of Verdun, of the Somme, and of countless deaths on other fronts.
It is also the year everyone starts wondering: will it all be worth it?
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The western front grinds to a slow halt, despite the best efforts of the generals on both sides who appear to be overly committed to killing their own men in pointless offensives... Across the pond, America tries to stay neutral while watching the unfolding Mexican Revolution to the south.
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The Eastern Front in World War One is often overlooked. But, even beyond the Battle of Tannenberg, the Eastern Front is critical not only in understanding the outcome of the war but the 20th century as a whole.
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In this bonus, author interview, I sit down with Marc Baer and discuss his latest book: Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish–Muslim Relations.
Today, the dominant narrative of the relationship between Jewish and Muslim peoples assumes a long history of violent hostility. In Children of Abraham, historian Marc David Baer lays this myth to rest, showing how Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East and Europe, more often in cooperation than in conflict, for more than a millennium. When Islam emerged in the seventh century, Muslims and Jews were bound by shared religious tenets and common cultural practices, and for centuries afterward, they were often allies.
Baer introduces readers to Muslim warriors fighting for a medieval Turkish Jewish kingdom on the Caspian Sea, Jewish viziers leading the Muslim sultan’s troops in Spain, and Jewish literary lights and political party leaders in modern Egypt and Iraq. But Baer resists the alluring fable that Jews and Muslims ever lived in interfaith utopia, and he shows how European colonization and nationalism fed the emergence of modern antisemitism and Islamophobia and helped to drive these two peoples further and further apart.
Traversing the full spectrum of Jewish–Muslim relations, this is an urgent, essential history for understanding today’s unending conflicts in the Middle East and beyond.
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Germany nearly won World War One in the first six weeks, just as it planned. Nearly.
But it turns out that timetables are a heck of a lot easier to work out on paper than in real life....
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Somehow, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, throws the entire world into war. Of course, it was not an accident. The alliance systems, the militarism, the nationalism, all of it conspires to doom Europe to its own destruction. But it all starts with two bullets fired by a nineteen-year-old assassin.
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World War One did not happen accidentally. There were a multitude of factors that led up to the Great War. Today we cover them.
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The period from 1877 to 1912 saw America transform from an agrarian, second-tier power, to one of the more dominant nations in the world. This is that story.
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Today I sit down with Brendan Ballou and discuss a book EVERYONE should read: When The Companies Run The Courts.
America has a hidden justice system. There, decisions are made in secret, and “judges” are paid for by the companies and abusers who are being sued. Victims usually lose. But when they do, they cannot appeal, and they cannot turn to real courts for help.
They are trapped in this system, and quite likely, so are you. You joined it when you accepted the Terms and Conditions on a website, opened a new credit card, or started a new job. When you did, you agreed to be trapped in this secret justice system called “forced arbitration.” Through its secrecy and corruption, forced arbitration helps companies cheat their workers, helps banks deceive their customers, and helps predators act with impunity. If companies and the very powerful often seem beyond the reach of the law, it’s because they are, and forced arbitration is the reason.
Yet despite the fact that forced arbitration profoundly shapes our lives, almost nothing has been written about it. Brendan Ballou’s When Companies Run the Courts changes that. It shows how forced arbitration came to be, how it makes your life worse, and how we might escape it.
Buy The Book HERE.
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Today I am proud to welcome back renowned historian, Adrian Goldsworthy, to discuss his latest book: Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece.
No period has more profoundly influenced the Western world than classical Greece, and at its center stood two cities: Athens and Sparta. Side by side, they beat the Persians, the only superpower of that age. Yet later, they spread conflict and destruction throughout the eastern Mediterranean, culminating in the horrors of the Peloponnesian War.
Athens and Sparta tells the definitive history of the relationship between brutal, militaristic Sparta and brash, radically democratic Athens. Eminent historian Adrian Goldsworthy narrates their incredible rise to prominence and how they became allies, rivals, and enemies. Ultimately, Goldsworthy shows that Athens and Sparta were more than competitors vying for power. They were polar opposites in ideology and culture, both driven by the Greek longing to excel, who led radically different experiments in how to run a state.
A remarkable account of ancient Greece at its height, this is the tale of the two cities that helped build it—before almost tearing it apart.
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The era we call Reconstruction is one of the most hopeful, and ultimately, heartbreaking of American history. The passage of the Reconstruction Amendments provided legal rights to thousands of people. But the bargain of 1877 and the corruption of the Gilded Age ultimately prove too much weight for the promise of equality to bear.
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In the second half of the 19th Century, Europe goes nuclear and expands across the globe. The "Scramble for Africa" and press for colonies drove the European states to compete with one another in ways that will have disasterous consequences.
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In this bonus, author interview, I sit down with historian Roderick Beaton and discuss his latest book, Europe: A New History.
What do we talk about when we talk about Europe? Is it defined by geography? Or is it politics, or shared culture? In Europe, award-winning historian Roderick Beaton tells the story of Europe as never before—as the history of an idea, and a collective identity.
Since its dramatic birth in ancient Greece, “Europe” has been defined, and redefined, by its people. Through this powerful lens, and with the narrative drive and scope of a novelist, Beaton deftly surveys Europe’s major historical developments: the rise and fall of Rome; the explosion of Christianity; the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; the arrival of Europeans in the Americas; the violent upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the uncertainties of the present. Throughout, original sources allow the voices of the past, from Tacitus to Thatcher, to speak for themselves.
Grappling with the multilayered identities that have always come with being European, Europe places the Europe of today in a long arc of history stretching back more than 2,500 years.
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In the span of a decade, Bismarck does the unthinkable. He unites Germany, changing the history of western civilization forever.
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Over a period of thirty years, Italy goes from a fragmentation of independent, kind of, states and kingdoms and into a unified, kind of, nation.
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The Crimean War really does sound the advance warning of the death knell for the Concert of Europe. If only anyone knew that...
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Here I quickly cover Russian history from Peter the Great, through Catherine the Great, and then down to the beginning of the Crimean War.
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After Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the Confederacy slowly fades. Despite Lee's efforts, Grant grinds his army down through murderous battles such as the Wilderness and Cold Harbor. Ultimately, the resouces of the Union are simply too much. But even as America ultimately wins its civil war, its greatest president falls to an assassin's bullet.
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In three days in Pennsylvania in 1863, the American Civil War turns forever.
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