pplpod

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 Juni 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 Juni 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 Juni 23min

Marcus Aurelius never wanted to be emperor. He was a bookish young man who dreamed of philosophy, not politics — yet duty placed him on the throne of the most powerful empire on earth during one of it...

14 Juni 22min

The movie gave us an oiled-up warrior screaming about freedom, but the real Leonidas was something far more complex — a Spartan king born into a society built on slavery, trained in a system of instit...

14 Juni 22min

Saladin did not come from wealth or royal blood. He rose from a modest Kurdish military family to unite the fractured Muslim world and recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 — a feat that had ...

14 Juni 26min

Francisco Pizarro could not read or write. He grew up tending pigs in one of Spain's poorest regions, illegitimate and ignored. Yet this uneducated swineherd crossed the Atlantic, marched into the hea...

14 Juni 23min

Diogenes of Sinope lived on the streets of Athens with no home, no property, and no interest in the social norms everyone else took for granted. He slept in a large ceramic jar, urinated on people who...

14 Juni 19min