The Encyclopedia: One Book’s Quest to Hold the Sum of All Knowledge

The Encyclopedia: One Book’s Quest to Hold the Sum of All Knowledge

What if one book could contain the sum of mankind’s knowledge? Scholars and chroniclers have tried to write this book since antiquity, penning several so-called universal histories (perhaps the best was Rashid al-Din’s “Compendium of the Chronicles” that was commissioned by a Mongol Empire daughter state in 14th century). This goal was reached in 1768 with the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published in Scotland by Enlightenment thinkers who believed that human thinking could be categorized. It became a fixture of American households in the 19th century and occupied the bookshelves of every library and school in the United States until very recently.

Today’s guest is Jill Lepore's show, host of the show “The Last Archive,” about the US's post-truth crisis -- of how we know what we know and why it seems lately as if we can't agree on anything at all. She both reckons with the present moment through her historical expertise and also presents solutions that are forward and current.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The Thucydides Trap: How A Rising Athens Made The Peloponnesian War Inevitable

The Thucydides Trap: How A Rising Athens Made The Peloponnesian War Inevitable

The Peloponnesian War is considered one of the most famous wars of the ancient world not only because it was a massive and devastating conflict that reshaped the Greek world, but also because its thor...

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The Free French Army in North Africa, 1940-1945

The Free French Army in North Africa, 1940-1945

One of the principal architects of Allied Victory in North Africa during World War Two was French General Louis Dio. His importance in North Africa lies in his role as a key leader of the Free French ...

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An Inventor’s Quest to Build a Pneumatic Subway System in 1870s New York

An Inventor’s Quest to Build a Pneumatic Subway System in 1870s New York

Alfred Beach built America’s first operational subway in secret beneath 1860s Manhattan, decades before the city’s official electric subway line in 1904. He designed and commissioned a 300-foot-long, ...

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Spirited Rivalry: Did Ireland or Scotland Invent Whisky?

There’s a divide between Scotland and Ireland as fierce as the Protestant/Catholic split during the Thirty Years’ War or the battles between Sunnis and Shias in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It’s th...

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The Horse That Ate the Legion: Rome’s Cavalry's Triumph Over the Infantry

The cavalry 'wings' that probed ahead of the Roman Army played a key role in its campaigns of conquest, masking its marching flanks and seeking to encircle enemies in battle. However, at the very begi...

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Beyond Joan of Arc and Agincourt: How the 100 Years War Crushed Medieval Europe and Launched its Global Order

Beyond Joan of Arc and Agincourt: How the 100 Years War Crushed Medieval Europe and Launched its Global Order

Modern France and Britain were forged in the fires of the Hundred Years War, a century-long conflict that produced deadly English longbowmen, Joan of Arc’s heavenly visions, and a massive death toll f...

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Reverse Ellis Island: American Migrants Who Fought for Mussolini and Built Stalin’s USSR

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America saw a significant reverse-migration in the 1800s and 1900s, with 20–50% of Italian immigrants returning to Italy as ritornati and tens of thousands of Americans, including ideologues and worke...

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Don’t Use Rome as a Model of Why Societies Collapse; Use Crime Syndicates and Somalia Instead

Don’t Use Rome as a Model of Why Societies Collapse; Use Crime Syndicates and Somalia Instead

12,000 years ago, human history changed forever when the egalitarian groups of hunter-gathering humans began to settle down and organize themselves into hierarchies. The few dominated the many, seizin...

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