pplpod

Sacagawea was kidnapped from her Shoshone people as a child, sold to a French-Canadian fur trader, and joined the Lewis and Clark expedition as a teenager carrying an infant on her back. She has since...

14 Jun 22min

Brigham Young was a barely educated house painter from Vermont who took over a persecuted religious movement after its founder was murdered and transformed it into one of the most organized migrations...

14 Jun 23min

Before Augustine became one of Christianity's most influential theologians, he was a partying philosophy student who kept a mistress for fifteen years, fathered an illegitimate son, and famously praye...

14 Jun 22min

John Calvin trained as a lawyer, fled France as a religious fugitive, and built a theocratic city-state in Geneva that reshaped Western civilization. His theology of predestination, discipline, and wo...

14 Jun 22min

Jackie Robinson is remembered as the man who quietly endured racist abuse to break baseball's color line. The real Robinson was anything but quiet. He was a fiercely competitive, outspoken, and confro...

14 Jun 23min

Thomas Aquinas was so large and quiet that his classmates called him the Dumb Ox. His teacher Albert the Great replied that the bellowing of this ox would be heard throughout the world — and he was ri...

14 Jun 22min

Serena Williams won twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles, more than any other player in the Open Era, and she did it while being policed, penalized, and scrutinized in ways her white competitors nev...

14 Jun 18min

The Dalai Lama is presented to the world as a spiritual leader above politics — a monk who preaches compassion and nonviolence. But behind that image lies a sophisticated geopolitical operator who nav...

14 Jun 20min