The Howe famly was at the heart of Britains long eighteenth century. Connected to the Hanoverian ruling family by blood, they were addicted to Whig politics, high society, warfare and statecraft, and

Postcards, writes todays guest Lydia Pyne, have left an indelible imprint on the history of human communication, unmatched by any other material medium. They owe their success to the decentralizat

In 510 BC, an obscure Greek city located literally on a backwater revolted against its tyrant. This was not extraordinary; such things happened regularly in the many Greek city-states. What followed h

For nearly 3,000 years, the question of what it means to be Greek has been one of perennial interestand, incredibly enough, not only to the Greeks. How a collection of of small cities and kingdoms ar

For thousands of years, laws have not only been used to impose order by the powerful on the powerless. In the very process of their codification they often became instruments of control by the powerle

For nearly a century after the First Crusade captured Jerusalem, that ancient city became the nucleus of a several kingdoms and principalities established by the crusaders. At the political, social,

On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany. Occurring simultaneously with Franklin Roosevelt's "One Hundred Days", Hitler's first one

Storytelling, writes my guest Jonathan Gottschall, is the way in which people have for thousands of years not only bound themselves together into communities, but the art which built civilization. But

This is the first in a new series of podcasts. Long time listeners will remember that when my book Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life was published, I did a number of podcasts with experts delving in

In a eulogy to Abraham Lincoln delivered on June 1, 1865, Frederick Douglass posed the question what was Lincoln to the colored people or they to him? His answer was that Lincoln was emphatically t