If you’ve seen the 1960 Spencer Tracy movie Inherit the Wind, you know about the Scopes Monkey Trial. In this real-life 1925 case, John Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The case became an enormous media sensation. It was reported on like […]

In the early 1800s there was no English explorer greater than James Holman. He travelled almost 20 times farther than Marco Polo. He travelled among 200 different cultures, charted undiscovered parts of Australia, and by October 1846 had visited every inhabited continent. He did all this despite being completely blind. How did he travel the […]

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — the victor at the Battle of Gallipoli, Turkey’s first president, and a reformer so zealous that he replaced six centuries of Ottoman Islamic legal and cultural custom with Western practices in the space of 15 years — lost his father at the age of 7, was neglected by his family, […]

Recognized by most historians and much of the public as one of our country’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln is known for his impressive accomplishments, including preserving the union during the Civil War and signing The Emancipation Proclamation. But he is less known for his ability to overcome a significant obstacle in his life—clinical depression. He […]

In a remote forest clearing in Burgundy, France, a 13th-century castle is slowly being constructed using only the tools, techniques, and materials that would have been available to the builders of the day. It’s archaeology in reverse. What started out as an eccentric pipe dream is now an established enterprise, drawing in tens of thousands of […]

Marco Polo is the most famous European explorer to the Far East, but he definitely wasn’t the first. His father and uncle came there years before. And they found a small colony of Europeans who lived permanently in China. Perhaps the most famous pre-Polo European in the Far East is William of Rubruck. This […]

Damascus swords, which were generally made in the Middle East anywhere from 540 A.D. to 1800 A.D., were sharper, more flexible and harder/stronger than other contemporary blades. According to legend, the blades can cut a piece of silk in half as it falls to the ground and maintain their edge after cleaving through stone, metal, […]

Can you sew your own clothing? That one is easy. What about making your own shoes, butchering an animal, removing its skin, tanning the leather, then rending the fat to make candles? If you can answer ‘yes’ to all those things, then you are merely average for a medieval peasant. Learn more about what a […]

Think you have a good memory? The average peasant of 1,000 years ago had 10x more memorized than you ever will. Learn more about people trained in the  ars memoriae, who were living databases of information. Like this podcast? Click here to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes

We’ve all done it in moments of anger. But why do we use our middle finger to express anger? And why do we call it “the bird.” Suggestions range from The Battle of Agincourt in 1415 to Ancient Rome. We find out the history everyone’s favorite one-finger salute in this episode. Like this podcast? Click […]