Reflecting History

More so than maybe any other historical topic, students of history have been fascinated by the brutality and moral depravity of the Nazi totalitarian regime. This is the story of how they rose to powe...

25 Jul 20171h 5min

A young girl receives a strange vision that turns into a prophecy for an entire people. One year and 400,000 dead cattle later, more than 40,000 people would be dead as a result. The Xhosa Cattle Kill...

4 Jul 201729min

In this episode I attempt to answer the question of whether or not we can make moral judgments about the past. All too often history gets boiled down to a simple good guy vs bad guy narrative in pop c...

13 Jun 201718min

In what was maybe the most controversial and unethical psychological experiment of all time, psychologist Philip Zimbardo turned average university students looking for a summer job into either dehuma...

30 Mai 201731min

It is said that desperate times call for desperate measures. The ultimate historical example of this might just be the Great Leap Forward. As the horrors of collectivization ramped up, how were the pe...

16 Mai 201738min

Whether digging irrigation ditches or working backyard furnaces, the people of China were forced to smolder their lives away in the all-consuming destruction that was the Great Leap Forward. This is ...

25 Apr 201724min

Most people look to the Soviet Union when discussing the dangers of communism and totalitarianism. But from 1958-1962 Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China initiated a system of incompetence, vi...

11 Apr 201725min

The Holocaust has been analyzed often from the victim's perspective (including by me, check out Episode 3: Night), but less often from the perspective of the perpetrators. How did a group of middle-ag...

28 Mar 201733min