How the Great Migration Remade America
Between 1910 and 1970, approximately six million African Americans left the rural South and relocated to cities across the North, Midwest, and West in one of the largest internal migrations in human h...
24 Maalis 48min
How the Cotton Gin Dismantled Ancient Mississippi
The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 is typically presented as a straightforward story of technological progress, but in the Mississippi Delta, this single machine set in motion a cascade of destru...
24 Maalis 13min
How the 1899 Open Door Policy Backfired
In 1899, Secretary of State John Hay sent a series of diplomatic notes to the major imperial powers proposing what became known as the Open Door Policy toward China. The idea sounded reasonable enough...
24 Maalis 43min
How television synchronized the American mind
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, something unprecedented happened to the American mind. For the first time in human history, an entire nation of nearly two hundred million people began ...
24 Maalis 36min
How storms and enemies became demons
Every culture on earth has stories about malevolent supernatural beings, but the specific forms these beings take reveal something fascinating about the societies that imagined them. Across the ancien...
24 Maalis 54min
How land grants built American engineering
In 1862, the same year Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, he also approved legislation that would quietly revolutionize American education and transform the United States into a global engineer...
24 Maalis 26min
How Social Security flipped American poverty
In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, creating a program that would fundamentally transform the experience of aging in America. Before Social Security, growing old in th...
24 Maalis 28min
How One Morning Sight Decides Your Year
The ancient Roman practice of augury, the reading of divine messages in the flight patterns and behavior of birds, strikes modern minds as quaint superstition. But for the Romans, what a person saw on...
24 Maalis 37min
