Two months ago, I traveled around Peru with twelve teenagers. We visited churches and underground crypts filled with artistic displays of human bones. We got altitude sickness and chewed a lot of coca leaves.

Early in the morning on September 16, 1810, a priest was warned that he would soon be arrested by Spanish officials. His brother and a band of followers took immediate action. They went to the local jail and freed dozens of prisoners,

As my husband continues to remind me, we are only a few days away from the start of a new football season. And usually I’m wholly uninterested in what goes on on the field. And I still am. But I am now highly interested in what goes on off the field.

Y’all. I just got home from seeing Black Klansman and it’s necessary viewing. Set in the 70s, this movie is not a period piece – it’s not meant to depict a different time. It’s clear that Spike Lee sees parallels between the black experience in the pas...

In 1223, Genghis Khan’s army invaded the territory of the Kievan Rus. They established the Khanate of the Golden Horde and most of eastern Europe fell under Mongol control. It was under this oppressive regime that one principality rose to unite the peo...

Friends, we’ve done it. We’ve reached the final episode of Season 1: The Big Picture of World History. Let me tell you, my original plan was to make six episodes. Six. One for each era in world history. But it turns out that a lot of things have happen...

Think about the Middle East. They’ve been controlled by Persia, Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Caliphates, the Ottoman Empire, and now the European mandate system. The last 60 years have been the first opportunity various ethnic and religious gro...

Today we’re going back to the 20th century and Decolonization, or as I like to call it, “Don’t Let the Door Hit You On The Way Out”.So remember about how WWII discredited the idea of empire? The Allies spent the war fighting against the Nazi empire in ...

Today, let’s look back through that same time period in Latin America. This is a region where the Cold War heavily influenced their politics and attempts at true independence. Latin America was a collection of Spanish colonies that gained independence ...

Today, we’ll look at the new global system that gets set up in the wake up European empires. The U.S. gets obsessed with containing things, we go to space (allegedly), China gets Mao-ed, and *spoiler alert* the U.S. wins the Cold War!