History Shorts

Few medical breakthroughs have changed the world as profoundly as the birth control pill, and few people were as instrumental in that transformation as Margaret Sanger. In this episode, we trace the f...

26 Jun 202510min

When Adolf Hitler shot himself in a Berlin bunker, the Nazi regime didn't die with him, not immediately. In an eerie coda to World War II, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of Germany's deadly U-bo...

25 Jun 202510min

For 84 remarkable years, from 96 to 180 CE, the Roman Empire was guided not by the worst instincts of autocracy, but by its best hopes. In this episode, we explore the era of The Five Good Emperors: N...

24 Jun 202511min

Before Rosa Parks made history by refusing to give up her seat in Montgomery, Alabama, there was another young woman, just 15 years old, who had done the very same thing. Her name was Claudette Colvin...

23 Jun 20259min

TODAY IN CONTEXT BONUS: The animosity between the United States and Iran is one of the most enduring geopolitical rivalries in modern history, rooted in a mix of historical grievances, ideological con...

22 Jun 202513min

In the frigid mountains of North Korea in the winter of 1950, 30,000 United Nations troops, led by the U.S. Marines, faced encirclement by over 120,000 Chinese soldiers in one of the most brutal milit...

22 Jun 202510min

On August 20, 1940, in a quiet Mexico City study, one of the last living architects of the Russian Revolution was struck down, not by a rival revolutionary, but by an ice axe wielded by a Soviet assas...

21 Jun 202511min

Peter speaks with Joseph J. Ellis, a Two-Time Pulitzer-Prize winner, about his newest book, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding. They discuss what the Founding Fathers go...

20 Jun 202527min