The Srivijaya Empire
For centuries, one of Asia's most powerful empires controlled the vital sea lanes connecting China, India, and the Middle East. It grew fabulously wealthy from trade, became a major center of Buddhi...
10 Sep 16min
A History of Looney Tunes
For decades, audiences around the world have watched a collection of characters survive explosions, outwit hunters, fall from cliffs, and repeatedly bend the laws of physics. What began as inexpensiv...
9 Sep 14min
Organ Transplants
For most of human history, when a vital part of the body failed, there was little doctors could do. Then a series of advances in surgery, immunology, and pharmaceuticals made something once consider...
8 Sep 16min
The Pirahã People
Deep in the Amazon rainforest lives a small society that has challenged some of our most basic assumptions about language, numbers, time, memory, and even how human beings organize their lives. For d...
7 Sep 15min
The Great Awakening
In the early 18th century, religion in the American colonies was often orderly, formal, and deeply tied to established churches. Then a new generation of preachers began drawing enormous crowds, del...
6 Sep 15min
Mosquitoes
Throughout human history, a tiny insect has influenced wars, shaped settlement patterns, halted major engineering projects, and caused more deaths than almost any other animal. For most of history, n...
5 Sep 16min
The 1920 Wall Street Bombing
At 12:01 PM on Thursday, September 16, 1920, a large explosion went off in the heart of America’s financial industry. 30 people were killed instantly, another eight people died later from wounds, an...
4 Sep 13min
The Divided Island of Hispaniola
In the Caribbean, two nations share a single island, yet their histories, languages, economies, and political systems developed along dramatically different paths. Their border is more than a line o...
3 Sep 15min
