Pliny the Elder's Deadly Work Ethic
Pliny the Elder was one of the most extraordinary figures of the Roman world, a man whose relentless commitment to work and knowledge literally killed him. A military commander, government administrat...
24 Mar 36min
North Dakota's Radical Agrarian Socialist Revolt
In the early twentieth century, North Dakota became the unlikely epicenter of one of the most radical political experiments in American history. The Nonpartisan League, founded in 1915, swept to power...
24 Mar 56min
Low Country Elites and Backcountry Rebels
Colonial South Carolina presents one of the most dramatic examples of class conflict in early American history. The colony developed a stark divide between the wealthy plantation elite of the coastal ...
24 Mar 42min
Locked Doors of the Triangle Factory
On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Within eighteen minutes, one hundred and forty-six workers were dead, most of them young im...
24 Mar 54min
How the Taliban outlasted America
The war in Afghanistan was the longest and most expensive conflict in American history, spanning two full decades, four presidential administrations, trillions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of...
24 Mar 46min
How the Poison Squad Saved American Food
In the early 1900s, a team of young men employed by the United States Department of Agriculture volunteered to eat poison. They consumed borax, formaldehyde, copper sulfate, and other chemical preserv...
24 Mar 56min
How the Platt Amendment Shackled Cuba
In 1901, the United States forced Cuba to accept the Platt Amendment as the price of ending American military occupation, embedding into Cuban law a series of provisions that gave Washington the right...
24 Mar 41min
How the Nile explains Egyptian history
Egypt's extraordinary civilization is impossible to understand without understanding the Nile. The river was not merely a geographical feature of the Egyptian landscape. It was the organizing principl...
24 Mar 19min
