The Body Worth Stealing: Why Medieval Cities Fought Over Francis of Assisi’s Corpse
When St. Francis of Assisi was near death in 1226, he joked with companions that his corpse would be practically as valuable as gold. And he was right: In medieval Europe, relics, or the physical rema...
9 Apr 38min
The Alphabet as Artifact: How Egyptian Pictograms Became Your ABCs
The alphabet you're reading right now is a 3,800-year-old archaeological artifact, preserving ancient decisions in plain sight—from the upside-down ox head that became the letter A to the demotion of ...
7 Apr 57min
Greenland is Nothing: American Nearly Acquired El Salvador, Canada, and the Kamchatka Peninsula
America’s desire to expand its borders has existed since its first colonies – from attempts to settle beyond the Appalachian Mountains in the 18th century to Manifest Destiny in the 19th century down ...
2 Apr 43min
From Big Village to Global Power: The Thousand-Year Rise of Moscow, Russia's Fortress Capital
When St. Petersburg nobility mockingly called Moscow a "big village," in the 19th century – a time when they lived in all the excess found in a Tolstoy novel -- they couldn't have imagined the provinc...
31 Mar 56min
American Civilians Caught Behind Enemy Lines After Pearl Harbor, and How They Were Repatriated
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, more than ten thousand Americans living abroad became trapped in Japanese-controlled territories, and with rumors of ill treatment and torture, the U.S. State Department w...
26 Mar 47min
Washington's Crossing from the Other Side: Three Hessian Soldiers' Stories of Defeat and Capture at the Battle of Trenton
Emanuel Leutze's iconic painting Washington Crossing the Delaware shows the general standing heroically at the bow of his boat, staring toward an unseen enemy across the icy river. But who were those ...
24 Mar 46min
From Bronze to Blood: How the Sword Became Humanity's First Murder Weapon
For nearly two thousand years, swords reigned as humanity's weapon of choice—the first tools designed exclusively to kill other humans rather than hunt animals. When archaeologist Paul Gething redisco...
19 Mar 47min
