The Scopes Monkey Trial, HL Mencken, and Religion in Public Life—Darryl Hart
If you’ve seen the 1960 Spencer Tracy movie Inherit the Wind, you know about the Scopes Monkey Trial. In this real-life 1925 case, John Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which ha...
20 Nov 201755min
The Reformation Happened 500 Years Ago, But It's More Timely Than Ever—Benjamin Wiker
Secularism, radical Islam, and nationalism all sound like buzzwords pulled straight from today’s headlines. But you might be surprised to know that 500 years ago they were at the epicenter of one of t...
17 Nov 201739min
How Did You Call the Police Before the Phone Was Invented?
Dialing 9-1-1 is a new innovation (at least in the sense of the scope of human history), but the need for emergency services goes back to the earliest settlements. How did a pre-modern civilization ca...
16 Nov 20176min
All the Presidents Who Owned Slaves and How They Treated Them
A whole bunch of presidents owned slaves considering they took an oath to uphold the rights of their citizens. But how many of the pre-Civil War presidents actually owned slaves? And how did they trea...
15 Nov 20176min
Who Were Worse—The Spanish Conquistadors or the Aztecs?
The Spanish conquistadors have rightly been called out for their brutal treatment and enslavement of native populations. But did they behave worse than the Aztecs?See omnystudio.com/listener for priva...
14 Nov 20177min
The Lives of Slaves, Heretics, Cave-Dwellers, and Other People Ancient History Never Tells You About—Robert Garland
The 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle wrote, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” In a sense that's true. We have plenty of biographies of emperors, popes, kings, queens,...
13 Nov 20171h 23min
What Did Entertainment Do To The Romans?
You can point to hundreds of factors that led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (which Edward Gibbon and many others have been doing for centuries). Decadence and frivolous entertainment are...
10 Nov 20179min
Syriac-The Best Language for Conquering The Ancient World
If you were transported to the ancient world, there's only one language that could be used in Roman Briton and China alike. It was Syriac: the lingua franca of the Silk Road and your best language to ...
9 Nov 20178min
