Podcast Episodes
Back to Search“Plato and the Tyrant” with author James Romm
Episode 1803
In 388 BCE, Plato, at the age of about forty and in the midst of writing The Republic, visited for the first time the then-Greek city state of Syracu…
1 year, 1 month ago
William Kelleher Storey, "The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Episode 1802
Cecil John Rhodes became one of the most influential people in the history of the British Empire. He made a fortune in South Africa by leading the wo…
1 year, 1 month ago
Edward Stanley et. al., "A North American Tour Journal 1824-1825: The Making of a Prime Minister" (Sutton Publishing, 2025)
Episode 1801
A North American Tour Journal 1824-1825: The Making of a Prime Minister (Sutton Publishing, 2025) follows Edward Stanley's 1824-25 journey through No…
1 year, 1 month ago
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, "Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
Episode 1800
Claire McCardell forever changed fashion—and most importantly, the lives of women. She shattered cultural norms around women’s clothes, and today muc…
1 year, 1 month ago
Susana M. Morris, "Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler" (Amistad Press, 2025)
Episode 1799
A magnificent cultural biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad, 2025) charts the life of one of our greatest …
1 year, 1 month ago
Tracy Slater, "Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp" (Chicago Review Press, 2025)
Episode 1798
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced Executive Order 9066, which authorized the confinement of tens of thousands of Japanese a…
1 year, 2 months ago
Micaela Sahhar, "Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family" (Newsouth, 2025)
Episode 1797
"If we were different people, to write down these words might be to leave them behind us. But words are our artifacts, and I am seeding a trail for t…
1 year, 2 months ago
Tom Arnold-Forster, "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Episode 1796
From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers…
1 year, 2 months ago
LaShawn Harris, "Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City" (Beacon, 2025)
Episode 519
On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months be…
1 year, 2 months ago
Brendan Simms, "Hitler: A Global Biography" (Basic Books, 2019)
Episode 107
Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immens…
1 year, 2 months ago