pplpod

Alexander the Great conquered the known world before his thirty-third birthday — then drank himself to death in a Babylonian palace. His campaigns reshaped the ancient world, but the man behind the le...

14 Jun 22min

Sun Yat-sen is the only political figure revered as a founding father by both Communist China and Nationalist Taiwan — two governments that agree on almost nothing else. The man who overthrew the last...

14 Jun 23min

In 399 BC, the world's first democracy put its most famous philosopher on trial and sentenced him to death. Socrates was not charged with violence or treason but with corrupting the youth and disrespe...

14 Jun 25min

The young Henry VIII was everything a Renaissance prince was supposed to be — handsome, athletic, educated, musical, and genuinely popular. He was nothing like the bloated tyrant who would execute two...

14 Jun 23min

Vladimir Lenin spent most of his revolutionary career in exile — writing pamphlets in Swiss cafes, arguing theory in London libraries, and building a conspiratorial party apparatus from thousands of m...

14 Jun 20min

Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a would-be assassin and delivered a ninety-minute speech before going to the hospital. That single anecdote captures the man — a force of nature who transfo...

14 Jun 22min

Before Elizabeth I became Gloriana, she was a child declared illegitimate by her own father, a teenager interrogated in the Tower of London, and a young woman who watched her stepmother and her mother...

14 Jun 21min

Catherine de Medici arrived in France as a teenage Italian bride whom the French court openly despised. Over the next forty years, she would outlast husbands, outmaneuver rivals, and hold the French t...

14 Jun 23min