The Immovable Ladder of Jerusalem
For centuries, one of the holiest places in Christianity has been governed by an extraordinarily delicate balance of tradition, property rights, religious rivalry, and international diplomacy. In thi...
11 Sep 15min
The Srivijaya Empire
For centuries, one of Asia's most powerful empires controlled the vital sea lanes connecting China, India, and the Middle East. It grew fabulously wealthy from trade, became a major center of Buddhi...
10 Sep 16min
A History of Looney Tunes
For decades, audiences around the world have watched a collection of characters survive explosions, outwit hunters, fall from cliffs, and repeatedly bend the laws of physics. What began as inexpensiv...
9 Sep 14min
Organ Transplants
For most of human history, when a vital part of the body failed, there was little doctors could do. Then a series of advances in surgery, immunology, and pharmaceuticals made something once consider...
8 Sep 16min
The Pirahã People
Deep in the Amazon rainforest lives a small society that has challenged some of our most basic assumptions about language, numbers, time, memory, and even how human beings organize their lives. For d...
7 Sep 15min
The Great Awakening
In the early 18th century, religion in the American colonies was often orderly, formal, and deeply tied to established churches. Then a new generation of preachers began drawing enormous crowds, del...
6 Sep 15min
Mosquitoes
Throughout human history, a tiny insect has influenced wars, shaped settlement patterns, halted major engineering projects, and caused more deaths than almost any other animal. For most of history, n...
5 Sep 16min
