Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchHow Gunpowder Destroyed the Songhai Empire
Episode 6303
In 1591, at the Battle of Tondibi, one of the largest and wealthiest empires in African history deployed its trump card: thousands of trained cattle …
1 week, 3 days ago
How Ethiopia Defeated Italy at Adwa
Episode 6302
In 1896, at the height of the Scramble for Africa, a fully equipped European army marched into the Ethiopian highlands expecting a routine colonial c…
1 week, 3 days ago
How Eli Whitney Accidentally Started the War
Episode 6301
Imagine inventing a machine so consequential it helps cause a civil war, then manufacturing the weapons used to fight it. That is the actual, deeply …
1 week, 3 days ago
How Death Valley s Sailing Stones Move
Episode 6300
On a perfectly flat, sun-baked lake bed in Death Valley, heavy rocks, some weighing hundreds of pounds, sit at the end of long trails scraped deep in…
1 week, 3 days ago
How Cotton and Gold Forced Native Removal
Episode 6299
By the 1830s, the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations had done exactly what the United States demanded of them: built large …
1 week, 3 days ago
How Catherine the Great Seized the Throne
Episode 6298
A 15-year-old girl from a minor, cash-poor German noble family arrives in a freezing foreign country, speaks not a word of the language, and is marri…
1 week, 3 days ago
How Anna Delvey Scammed New York Elite
Episode 6297
No hackers, no vault, no elevator shafts. Anna Sorokin scammed major banks, luxury hotels, and New York's elite out of hundreds of thousands of dolla…
1 week, 3 days ago
How Al-Khwarizmi Invented Algebra and Algorithms
Episode 6296
Every time you run a search, open an app, or follow a digital map, you are using a concept named after a ninth-century scholar. Muhammad ibn Musa al-…
1 week, 3 days ago
How a Firing Squad Made Dostoevsky
Episode 6295
On December 23rd, 1849, a 28-year-old former military engineer stood third in line before a firing squad in St. Petersburg, dressed in a white death …
1 week, 3 days ago
Zheng He and the Vanished Treasure Fleet
Episode 6485
In 1405, the horizon off the Chinese coast disappeared behind a wall of wood and canvas: 317 ships carrying 28,000 men, a floating city of soldiers, …
1 week, 3 days ago