BYU linguistics professor Alan Manning joins guest host Lisa Valentine Clark to discuss his research into evidence pointing to a Mormon girlfriend in Mark Twain's past.

Trebbe Johnson, writer and founder of Radical Joy for Hard Times, discusses our fractured relationship with the environment and how to find joy and connection in damaged places.

Historian Benjamin Madley joins us to tell the chilling story of the government-sanctioned genocide of California's Indians in the nineteenth century.

Daniel Bender discusses his book The Animal Game: Searching for Wildness at the American Zoo and examines the role zoos have played in shaping our relationship with faraway places and people.

Langston Hughes is often erroneously accused of being an opponent of religion, but an understanding of the religious culture of Hughes's Harlem and his religious poetry shows otherwise. Wallace Best, author of "Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem," joins the show. 

Kori Schake discusses why the transition from British toAmerican hegemony was so peaceful, and why we probably can't expect thenext transition to follow that example.

We rarely think about how every man-made objects, from our cars to our phones to our clothing, is colored with a pigment that had to be invented or manipulated by someone at some point. Color is made.

We’re joined by Kassia St Clair, author of "The Secret Lives of Color." St Clair’s surveys 75 shades that range all over the color wheel, unlocking their unique histories and stories.

Marcus Smith visits with an expert in Judaism about new Jewish communities sprouting up around the world in places like Cameroon, Ghana and India.

Stanford history professor Priya Satia discusses how war, imperialism, and Britian's thriving gun trade acted as the real engine of the Industrial Revolution.

Whether you think it's on its way out or a permanent fixture in our culture, there's no denying that we're fascinated with books. Poet and scholar Amaranth Borsuk joins the show to explore the limits and possibilities of the book as object, as content, and as idea.