Individual Episodes

Things You Don’t Know

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Did Columbus really think that he was going to reach Asia?

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What little do we actually know about Shakespeare, the person?

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Why is it misleading to apply the word “religion” to Judaism and Hinduism?

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How did Tisquantum (popularly known as Squanto) already know how to speak English before the Pilgrims had ever arrived?

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Ever heard that Florida has no history? Dr. Sam wants you to know how incorrect that common perception actually is…

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How did so much of the Epic of Gilgamesh remain hidden and forgotten – but preserved – for over 2,000 years until being rediscovered in modern times?

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What did Netflix’s movie “The Dig” miss about the most dramatic part of the whole Sutton Hoo discovery?

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What does the English Civil War of the 1640s tell us about the American Civil War, and about the present?

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How is the growing field of genetics being used to both tear down and reinforce the myth of ‘Race’ today?

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Who were the Freemasons of the 1700s? How did they grow from a local Scottish fraternity to a global network?

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How can one mid-sized U.S. city – Tulsa, Oklahoma – serve as a microcosm of so much of the triumphalism and tragedy of American history?

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Why can no one agree on what “capitalism” actually is? And why does a lack of clear definition call into question so many other myths of the modern world?

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How – and why – did universities begin in the Middle Ages, long before the scientific revolution and the “Enlightenment”?

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Was there really an Exodus from Egypt like the one described in the Bible?

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How did accusing people of witchcraft further several political agendas of the time?

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How did mountains on the Moon help bring about an end to the Earth-centric view of the universe?

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Why did every Renaissance-era ruler in Europe have a court astrologer?

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Does a single coin prove that Vikings came all the way to what’s now the United States?

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Why is the dramatic 2019 fire at Paris’ Notre Dame actually a common occurrence for cathedrals around Europe?

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Why don’t US citizens directly elect their President? Or have a more proportional Senate?

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How might a series of volcanic eruptions in the Americas have spurred the earliest Viking raids and the creation of the myth of Ragnarok in Scandinavia, halfway around the world?

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Are people really becoming less religious than they used to be?

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What did followers of the ancient and secretive branch of Christianity, Gnosticism, actually believe?

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How did changes in the climate in the 1600s lead people to think they were living in the Apocalypse? How did this help spur the creation of institutions and forces that still shape the world today?

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Could all of British history have turned out differently if the winds on the English channel had shifted direction on just one day in 1066?

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Hot Off The Presses:

Interpreting Solomon’s Temple

The center of every sacred mystery, the Temple at Jerusalem is the most famous building on earth, even though it has not existed for almost 2000 years and no one knows precisely what it looked like. We join with Michael of “Xai, how are you?” podcast to discuss Solomon’s Temple – both the real historical building as it can be reconstructed from ancient texts and archaeology, and the symbol that has been endlessly appropriated to represent humankind’s relationship to the cosmos…

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Unlocked:
Doorways in Time –
The Great Archaeological Discoveries #4:
The Library of Ashurbanipal

One moonlit night in 1853, an Iraqi excavator named Hormuzd Rassam and his team snuck into the hills outside of Mosul and began to uncover the massive palace of the last ancient Assyrian emperor, Ashurbanipal. Inside the palace was the largest trove of surviving documents from the ancient world that has ever been found…

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Origins of the First World War, pt. 2:
Serbia

We consider the history and explosive politics of the often-forgotten Eastern European nation that set the events of the First World War in motion: Serbia. We examine the country’s emergence and brief flowering as an Eastern Orthodox kingdom in the high Middle Ages, its fall to the Ottoman advance… through to its long-frustrated quest to fulfill its purported destiny of reunifying the Southern Slavs, which led a militant and conspiratorial secret society to murder their own country’s king and to smuggle teenage assassins across the border to kill their rivals’ crown prince…

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Myth of the Month 22:
Culture

What is “culture”? And how did a metaphor from gardening invade social-science discourse in 19th-century Germany and America and then take the world by storm? Am I doing “podcast culture” right now? However you define it, I make the case that it is the defining myth of our time, and that we should get rid of it…
Currently available to patrons only. Become a patron at any amount to keep commercial free

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Origins of the First World War
pt. 1 –
The Ottoman Empire

For over a century, scholars, politicians, and pundits have debated the supposed causes of the First World War, from German naval provocations to the rising global tide of nationalism. All of these explanations tend to ignore the simple fact that the war began in eastern Europe, triggered by regional feuding and violence in what had previously been the Ottoman provinces…

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India – pt. 3: The Rise of the South & the Islamic Conquests

We follow the dramatic evolution of Indian civilization after the fall of the Gupta empire, tracing from the spectacular rise of trade, art, and new religious movements in the southern kingdoms, through the tumult and fragmentation of the northern statelets and the cataclysmic invasions of raiders from Central Asia, and finally to the creation of Islamic states in the subcontinent just in time for the arrival of the first European ships in Indian ports…

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History of the United States in 100 Objects #21:
The Braddock/Washington Pistol

We consider the complex history and symbolism of an elaborately decorated sidearm weapon…which came across the ocean to America with General Edward Braddock, witnessed the catastrophic events in the Ohio valley that sparked the Seven Years’ War, and which then became a prized possession of George Washington…

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The Vikings, pt. 2 –
Into Distant Realms

They rained terror and destruction on Christian lands across Europe as far as Spain and Constantinople, before turning their attention away from raiding towards permanent settlement and the founding of new societies, from Ukraine to Normandy to Greenland. There has never been an explosion of exploration and aggression quite like the Viking expansion of the early Middle Ages…

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Doorways in Time:
The Great Archaeological Discoveries #6:
Early Audio Recordings

In the second half of the nineteenth century, many of the most brilliant and ambitious minds in both Europe and America were bent upon solving the problem of capturing sound waves from the air and playing them back. Most… were either forgotten or lost to decay and degradation. In the past fifteen years, however, scientists and engineers, including the First Sounds collective, have located the surviving remnants…revealing much of the auditory world of the nineteenth century…
Currently available to patrons only. Become a patron at any amount to keep commercial free.

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History of the United States in 100 Objects #18: Jesuit Brass Medallion with Image of Ignatius Loyola

Unlocked after one year for Patrons only:

A small brass religious medallion found in the house of a French fur trader inside a fortress on the remote Straits of Mackinac shows the immense power of small numbers of merchants and missionaries to control sprawling networks of diplomacy and trade, stretching from Europe all the way into the deep interior of North America, and to sway the course of wars and imperial power struggles…

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The Vikings, pt. 1 –
In the Norsemen’s World

We have all seen images of axe-wielding Vikings raining destruction upon the shores of medieval Europe — but who were these berserking Norsemen and where did they come from? What society produced them? How did the Scandinavians of the Viking age understand the world and their place in it? We examine the Norsemen’s complex and mysterious cosmos described in the poems and prophesies of the Eddas, and compare it to the realities of survival, trade, kingship, politics, warfare, art, gender, and the family in Scandinavia…

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2022 in Historical Context –
How Do You Like Your New Gilded Age?

We consider some of the major events of this year in light of their historical roots, from the abortion ruling to the Ukraine war; in particular, we consider the Twitter controversy in light of the history of media monopolies beginning with the telegraph, and the crisis over railroad labor in light of the railways strike of 1922, exactly one century ago.

Also see the first video segment of Dr. Sam’s appearance on the Katie Halper Show on 2022.

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Myth of the Month 21:
The Old West

“Cowboys and Indians.” For most Americans, the words evoke a sinister game, representing a timeless enmity between the forces of civilization and savagery. In actual historical fact, cowboys and Indians were symbiotic trading partners, and many cowboys were Indians themselves; but the image of the cowboy as a conqueror and as the bearer of civilization into the “Wild West” has become central to the American national myth…

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Monarchy, Honours, and the Molding of Modern Society – A Conversation with Tobias Harper

I speak with historian Tobias Harper about about the evolving and growing role of the British crown as the head of the voluntary sector in a neoliberal, atomizing, and celebrity-driven society. We examine both the “magic of the royal touch” and the hard-nosed bureaucratic calculations that it can serve to obscure, as captured in Toby’s book, “From Servants of the Empire to Everyday Heroes: The British Honours System in the Twentieth Century”…

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Special Guest Conversations:

Beyond Plymouth Rock: The Deep Beginnings of
New England

A Conversation with
Michael J. Simpson
The long history of contact, exchange, violence, disease, and acculturation among indigenous and European peoples…that created a complex creolized world before any Puritans were even on the scene…

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Uncovering the Medieval Slave Trade

A conversation with
Hannah Barker
Before Columbus had even set foot in America, medieval Europe and the Islamic Middle East already had a long history in trading and exploiting slaves…

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Special Guest Conversations & Interviews