15 Minute History: Recent Episodes
The University of Texas at Austin
15 Minute History is a history podcast designed for historians, enthusiasts, and newbies alike. This is a joint project of Hemispheres, the international outreach consortium at the University of Texas at Austin, and Not Even Past, a website with articles on a wide variety of historical issues, produced by the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
This podcast series is devoted to short, accessible discussions of important topics in world history, United States history, and Texas history with the award winning faculty and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, and distinguished visitors to our campus. They are meant to be a resource for both teachers and students, and can be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in history.
For more information and to hear our complete back catalog of episodes, visit our website!
Texas Podcast Network is brought to you by The University of Texas at Austin. Podcasts are produced by faculty members and staffers at UT Austin who work with University Communications to craft content that adheres to journalistic best practices. The University of Texas at Austin offers these podcasts at no charge. Podcasts appearing on the network and this webpage represent the views of the hosts, not of The University of Texas at Austin.
How the environment has been perceived, valued and manipulated by humans since prehistoric times. But in the last millennium, empires brought something new into the mix — the organization of local knowledge and practices into bureaucratic and military systems that centralized power — and indeed, funded it. We’re joined today by Sumit Guha, a UT […]
Horses and humans have gone hand in hand for centuries. Our guest today is CUBoulder professor William Taylor, whose new book “Hoof Beats” takes us across thousands ofyears and miles to explore how horses helped create the human world we live in today. In doingso, Taylor challenges our understanding of prehistory and reflects on what […]
Beginning in the 15th century, European history took a dark turn with the rapidexpansion of the slave trade. We’re joined today by Emory professor David Eltis, the co-editor of www.slavevoyages.org that draws on thousands of records — ship logs,registers, letters and government records — to understand the mechanics of the trade.His new book, Atlantic Cataclysm, […]
Between 1807 and 1820, Haiti was led by it’s first and last king, Henri Christophe. A contemporary of Robespierre and Napoleon, Washington and Hamilton, his life was as colorful, controversial and as tragic as any from his age. He presided over a Haitian state that was opulent and cultured on one hand, brutal and repressive […]
In the late 1930s, War in Europe seemed inevitable. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a fierce debate was underway — if war comes to Europe, should America get involved or stay out? On one side of the debate was President Franklin Roosevelt — who favored intervention — and on the other, Charles Lindbergh — the most […]
Two years from now, America will enter its 250th year as a nation. For some, it will be a day to celebrate without question. But, for others it may be something of an anti-climax, or at least a chance to reflect upon the continuing gap between the promise and reality of the American project. Today, I’m joined […]
During the 1970s, relations between the US and China were transformed. Previously the two nations were cold war enemies. But Kazushi Minami argues that the ’70s saw Americans reimagine China as a country of opportunities, while Chinese reinterpreted the US as an agent of modernization, capable of enriching their country. Crucial to this process was […]
In 1937, American politics was gripped by President Roosevelt’s court packing plan. Frustrated with what he perceived to be an aging, obstructionist Supreme Court, Roosevelt pressed congress to expand the court from 9 to 15 members. Stepping into the ensuing maelstrom was Texas congressman Hatton Sumners, chair of the House judiciary committee, ally of Roosevelt […]
The historian Henry Adams once wrote that, “the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Changes during that period were indeed profound in Adam’s home town of Boston. And yet, for the majority of the city’s black men and women, life and work in 1900 were not that […]
Over the course of the academic year, student protests have roiled college campuses like at no other time in recent memory. Going further back though, historians see plenty of parallels — as well as some key differences — with student protest movements focused on Vietnam (1960s/70s) and South Africa (1980s/90s.) Today we’re joined today by […]
Political partisanship is not only a hallmark of US democracy today. There is also a long history of dysfunction and division as old as America. H.W. Brands’s new book, Founding Partisans is a revelatory history of the Revolutionary era’s stormy politics, which includes a look at the nation’s earliest political parties — those of Hamilton and […]
Climate change and population growth is creating a new appreciation — and anxiety — around water infrastructure, both in the western United States and around the world. We’re joined today by Professor Erika Bsumek, whose new book, The Foundations of Glen Canyon, focuses on America’s second highest concrete-arch dam. Not simply a massive piece of physical infrastructure it is also […]
The Hapsburg Empire was founded in 1282 (or 1526, depending on who you ask) and lasted until 1918. Despite its increasingly antiquated and illiberal tendencies, it survived the reformation, the thirty years war, the enlightenment, the age of Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, and the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 — but not World War I. […]
In the wake of the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era emerged as a time of radical change in the 19th century United States. Dr. Peniel Joseph brings this conversation into the 20th and 21st centuries as we discuss his most recent book, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.
Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon, is a monumental historical epic that has endured mixed reviews since its release last month, due to historical inaccuracies and narrative jumps. But do such criticisms miss the point? Today 15 Minute History is joined by Professor Judith Coffin, who studies and teaches French history at UT Austin, including the […]
“How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” asks Professor Ned Blackhawk (Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone), author of The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Today, Dr. Blackhawk discusses what it would look like to build a new theory […]
Traditionally, we think about European power being built with ships and swords. However, new scholarship uncovers a more nuanced and complex picture. Today, 15 Minute history is joined by Mélanie Lamotte, a historian of the French Empire whose work demonstrates the role that sex, race and labor played in the global expansion of French power […]
In 1967, the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre traveled to Egypt and Israel on a quest to understand the region and its conflicts. The trip would challenge and change him — and lead to accusations of betrayal. Today, 15 Minute History is joined by Yoav Di Capua, author of “No Exit Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, […]
Afro-Indigenous histories are central to the history of the United States, tribal sovereignty, and civil rights. Today, Dr. Kyle Mays (Saginaw Chippewa) author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States and Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America, discusses the intersections of Black and Indigenous history through the […]
While the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War are important aspects of the United States and Cuba’s shared history, they are not the only elements the two share. According to today’s guest and author of Cuba: An American History, Professor Ada Ferrer, there are the centuries of interconnected history between Cuba and the US.
To kick off the new season of 15 Minute History, we sit down with Dr. Javier Wallace, founder and guide of Black Austin Tours. While those familiar with Austin know the George Washington Carver Museum as well as historically Black East Austin, Dr. Wallace unpacks other hidden, and not-so-hidden elements of Black history in the […]
In 1844, Philadelphia, a hub for Irish immigration to the United States, witnessed a series of violent Nativist riots that targeted Irish Americans and Roman Catholic churches. In our season finale, Zachary Schrag discusses the events leading up to the Philadelphia Nativists Riots of 1844, who was there, and how it fits into the broader […]
Historians argue that several versions of the group known as the Ku Klux Klan or KKK have existed since its inception after the Civil War. But, what makes the Klan of the 1920s different from the others? Linda Gordon, the winner of two Bancroft Prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, writes in The […]
How do historians teach Environmental History in an age where climate catastrophe fills the headlines? Megan Raby and Erika Bsumek, both History Professors and Environmental Historians discuss what drew them to the field, how they talk about environmental history with their students, and the 2021 Institute for Historical Studies Conference, "Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented" (April 22-23). "Among many other questions, the conference will ask: Can history offer an alternative to visions of the future that appear to be determined by prevailing climate models, and help provide us with new ways of understanding human agency?"
Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) was home to a wide array of groups including Native American Nations, enslaved Indian Freed-people, African Americans, White settlers, and others. In a conversation on Black Reconstruction in Indian Territory, Alaina Roberts discusses what Reconstruction might have meant for Black people in what is now called Oklahoma in the years immediately following the Civil War, and why it should be included in broader conversations about Reconstruction. Roberts' new book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land in Indian Territory that had been taken from others.
In the antebellum years, freedom and unfreedom often overlapped, even in states that were presumed "free states." According to a new book by Kevin Waite, this was in part because the reach of the Slave South extended beyond the traditional South into newly admitted free and slave states. States like California found their legislatures filled with former Southerners who hoped to see California and others align with their politics. "They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states." But it didn't end there. The "continental South" as Waite calls it, had visions of extending into Central and South America as well as the Pacific. In West of Slavery, Waite "brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage."
For almost two decades, Edmund (Ted) Gordon has been leading tours of UT Austin that show how racism, patriarchy, and politics are baked into the landscape and architecture of the campus. According to the now digitized tour’s website, “What began as lectures about UT’s Black history turned into a more sustained research project about the […]
In recent years, conversations about the US-Mexico border have centered around the border wall. However, according to today’s guest, C.J. Alvarez, the wall is one of many construction projects that have occurred in the border region in the last 30 years. "From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet."
Stereotypes of the 1950s family generally include a hardworking husband, a diligent housewife, their children, and a white picket fence. However, research by Lauren Gutterman and others suggests a much more flexible family system that could sometimes include same-sex relationships. In today's episode, we talk to Dr. Gutterman about the postwar family, her book, Her Neighbor's Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage, the stories of the women who "who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States" and how this new history expands the landscape of LGBTQ history in this period to include the "homes of married women, who tended to engage in affairs with wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: through work, at church, or in their neighborhoods."
In the Spring of 2016, protests concerning the Dakota Access Pipeline dominated national headlines. For many people, it was the first time they'd thought about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and environmental justice. However, what occurred at Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL movement was part of a long history of Indigenous resistance and protest. In today’s episode, Dina Gilio-Whitaker describes the importance of those events and how they are connected to other movements, past and present. Her most recent book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock, Gilio-Whitaker (a citizen of the Colville Confederated Tribes) explores this history through the lens of “Indigenized Environmental Justice” through the " fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle.”
In the age of COVID19 and coronavirus, lots of people are talking about the Spanish flu. What was the Spanish flu, and what can it teach us about the current crisis?
Today's guest, Lina del Castillo, recently published a book titled Crafting Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia, which offers a new understanding of how Gran Colombia--which split from Spain at the beginning of the 19th century, and then further subdivided into Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador--came to deal with its own past, and the role that science, geography, and history came to play alongside politics as the former colonies grew into nationhood.
Sexual orientation conversion therapy, the attempt to change one's sexual orientation through psychological or therapeutic practice, has now been banned in 17 American states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, three Canadian provinces, one state in Australia and several nations in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Beyond the merits of sexual orientation conversion therapy as a medical practice, however, lies a social importance of what the practice represents for a segment of American society.
Today's guests are the editors of the Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History. Ellen Hartigan O'Connor and Lisa Matterson, both professors of history at the University of California, Davis, join us to discuss the field of women's studies, which as they've argued in the introduction to the book, is not an esoteric topic at all, but actually quite critical to our understanding of American history.
Historians have long assumed that white women in the U.S. south benefited only indirectly from the ownership of enslaved people. Historians have neglected these women because their behavior didn’t conform to the picture we have of the patriarchal culture of the 18-19 century marriage. In an extraordinary new book, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers shows that “slave […]
The Beatles arrived for their first concert in the United States on February 11, 1964 to rabid fanfare. Legions of screaming women greeted John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr on every stop of the U.S. tour, leading to observers dubbing the period as “Beatlemania.” As one of the most commercially successful and […]
Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean […]
The subject of endless speculation, fascination, and laudatory writings, German physicist Albert Einstein captured the imaginations of millions after his discoveries transformed the field of physics. Hailed as a god, saint, a miracle, and even a canonized angel by his biographers and contemporaries alike, Einstein seems a figure worthy of his larger than life status. […]
Iran is home to the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel. At its peak in the 20th century, the population of Jews was over 100,000; today about 25,000 Jews still live in Iran. Iranian Jews rejected the siren call of the Zionist movement to instead participate in the Iranian nationbuilding process, welcoming European refugees during World War II, and participating in international exchanges between Iran and Israel.
Between 1910 and 1920, an era of state-sanctioned racial violence descended upon the U.S.-Mexico border. Texas Rangers, local ranchers, and U.S. soldiers terrorized ethnic Mexican communities, under the guise of community policing. They enjoyed a culture of impunity, in which, despite state investigations, no one was ever prosecuted. This period left generations of Texans with […]
Many American Indian cultures, like the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, practiced a form of non-hereditary slavery for centuries before contact with Europeans. But after Europeans arrived on Native shores, and they forcibly brought African people into labor in the beginning of the 17th century, the dynamics of native slavery practices changed. Supporting the Confederacy during […]
The year 1968 was a momentous and turbulent year throughout the world: from the Prague Spring and the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F Kennedy, to the Tet offensive and the surprise victory of Richard Nixon (possibly the most normal thing that […]
On November 27, 1978, Harvey Milk and George Moscone were murdered in San Francisco’s City Hall. Milk was one of the first openly gay politicians in California, and his short political career was not only emblematic of the wider gay liberation movement at the time, but his death and legacy inspired a new generation of […]
In this second roundtable on the legacy of The Great War, we are joined by David Crew and Charters Wynn from UT's History Department to discuss the war's impact on Germany and Russia.
On October 30, 1918, the Ottoman Empire signed a treaty of capitulation to the Allied Powers aboard the HMS Agamemnon, a British battleship docked in Mudros harbor on the Aegean island of Lemnos. Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were the first of the Central Powers to formally end their participation in World War I. Five days […]
The first notes of the samba and the tango instantly capture ones attention, transporting the listener to Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and the River Plate in Argentina. Seen as national symbols for their respective countries, the samba and the tango are more than just popular musical and dance genres. A deeper dive into the development of these musical genres reveals a conflict between African slaves, indigenous people, and European migrants over musical identity and Latin American state formation.
The US Marine Corps may now proudly boast to be the home of the few and the proud, but this wasn’t always the case. In the early part of the 20th century, it was the poorest funded and least respected branch of the military, and at the end of World War Two there was actually […]
A new archaeological find seems to provide the first contemporary evidence of a major figure in the early history of Islam–and even more fascinating, it appears to have been written by a loyal Christian Arab subject.
In Kiev, in 1911, a Jewish factory manager named Mendel Beilis was indicted for murdering a young boy. Many believed that Beilis had carried out the murder as part of a ritual known as the “blood libel,” in which Jews used the blood of gentile children for baking Passover matzo. Where the idea of the […]
Host: Brooks Winfree, Department of History, UT-Austin Guest: Manisha Sinha, Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut It’s well known in American history that slavery was abolished with the 13th amendment to the constitution, however, the debate over slavery and the movement to abolish it is as old as the American republic itself. Who […]
During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), which pitted a left-leaning Republic, suported by the Soviet Union, against right-leaning nationalists, supported by the Nazi, more than 35,000 people from more than 50 countries went to Spain to fight against fascism for the Republic. Today’s guest, Lisa Kirschenbaum, talks about who some of those people were and […]
Guest Julia Gossard shares her research into the fascinating world of child ambassadors who were expected to live in two worlds and create lasting relationships between France and a global network of allies.
Lauren Henley describes the events of 1884-85, but also discusses how these murders tell us something about the uneasy racial history of the postbellum south, and also asks what drives our fascination with serial killers and unsolved mysteries.
Today's guest, Sheila Fitzpatrick, discusses some of the myriad interpretations that have been given to the 1917 revolutions, judgments about its success and importance, and offers insight into Russia's own subdued attitude toward the centenary.
In which we take the occasion to ask the important questions like: how in the world did we get to 100 episodes?
As we near the 99th anniversary of Armistice Day, Ben Wright from UT’s Briscoe Center for American History, takes a look at World War One on our very own home front: the storied Forty Acres of the University of Texas at Austin.
Guest Gustavo Cerqueira explores the cultural sterotypes that centuries of slavery left in post-emancipation Brazil, and the ways that teatro negro sought to re-position Afro-Brazilian people--literally--on the national stage.
Guest Tatjana Lichtenstein has studied the Zionist movement in Czechoslovakia and gives us a glimpse into the interwar period when Czech Jewish leaders saw the possibility of being accepted into European society.
Julia Gossard walks us through the connections between Louis XIV's absolutist rule and a fantastic series of events that's become known as "The Affair of the Poisons."
Returning guest Jeremi Suri (UT-Austin) takes a long historical look at what has made presidents successful in the role of chief executive, and asks whether the office has evolved to take on too much responsibility to govern effectively.
Our guest for this episode, Dr. Steven Hahn of New York University helps us turn this political buzzword into a historical phenomenon from a time period in American history that has a number of parallels with our own.
Guest Andrea Gutierrez introduces us to epic South Asian poems from the beginning of the first millennium that past the Bechdel test, when women's narrative critiqued, cajoled, narrated, and provided guidance for the devout.
First year history graduate student John Carranza, specializing in disability history, sheds some light on historical representations of disability, and how modern understanding of disability is informed by the past.
Steven Mintz has long been interested in the transformations of family life through the ages and, in this episode, talks about how nearly everything we think we know about family life would be unrecognizable even a century ago.
Preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph, discusses Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century.
How does a fossil become a celebrity? Lydia Pyne shares vivid examples of how human ancestors have been remembered, received, and immortalized.
Our guest today, Heather Williams, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Help Me Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery.
Brian McNeil specializes in history of United States foreign relations, and is currently revising his book manuscript titled, Frontiers of Need: the Nigerian Civil War and the Origins of American Humanitarian Intervention, the subject of this episode.
A few years ago, scholars suggested that the Agricultural Revolution in mankind's deep past might have been nothing short of a disaster. Not so fast, says Rachel Laudan, this week's guest, while raising some new questions of her own.
Philippa Levine from UT's Department of History and Program in British Studies walks us through the contemporary British politics and rocky history of Britain and the EU that contributed to this historic decision.
On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman climbed the iconic Main Building tower on the University of Texas at Austin campus with a small arsenal of weapons and opened fire.
Simone de Beauvoir's seminal work, The Second Sex, is a dense two volume work that can be intimidating at first glance, combining philosophy and psychology, and her own observations.
Guest Ahmad al-Jallad shares his research that’s shedding new light on the writings of a complex civilization that lived in the Arabian peninsula for centuries before Islam arose.
Guest Ashley Dean just completed her doctorate in history at Emory University examining the impacts of this pre-modern trans-Pacific linkage whose far-reaching impact touched nearly every part of the globe.
Guest Ben Weiss discusses the earliest encounters between indigenous Africans and European medical practitioners.
Guest Kristin Wintersteen has worked on the history of industry subject to the temperaments of on-again off-again current cycles in the Pacific, and how the boom and bust of one of the first superfoods has led to new discussions about global nutrition.
Guest R. Joseph Parrott takes a look at the indecisive position the United States took on decolonization after helping liberate Europe from the threat of enslavement to fascism.
This episode takes a new look at how the Paris Commune's radical government managed to find support from rich and poor, conservative and liberal, to try to regain dignity in the face of France’s brutal defeat.
Guest Kristie Flannery found Diego's story in the Spanish colonial archives, and narrates his tale in the broader context of the powerful political and economic forces at work in Spain's global empire.
Guest Christopher Rose has been following the headlines and puts the discovery of the Birmingham Qur'ān within the larger field of Islamic and Qur'ānic Studies, and explains how the text might raise as many questions as it answers.
James Joshua Hudson describes surprising finds he made conducting fieldwork in Hunan that offer a glimpse into the deeply layered social tensions on the eve of the downfall of the Qing dynasty.
In the early part of the 20th century, Texas became more integrated into the United States with the arrival of the railroad. With easier connections to the country, its population began to shift away from reflecting its origins as a breakaway part of Mexico toward a more Anglo demographic, one less inclined to adapt to existing Texican culture and more inclined to view it through a lens of white racial superiority. Between 1915 and 1920, an undeclared war broke out that featured some of the worst racial violence in American history; an outbreak that's become known as the Borderlands War.
Guest John Moran Gonzales from UT's Department of English and Center for Mexican American Studies has curated an exhibition on the Borderlands War called "Life and Death on the Border, 1910-1920," and tells us about this little known episode in Mexican-American history.
Our first roundtable features three experts who've taken the destruction of sites where they've worked and lived seriously, and are working to raise awareness of the importance of antiquities in danger around the world.
Guest Mike Loader gives an enthusiastic look at high drama at the peak of the cold war, which gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of the Soviet Union from a different perspective.
Our first episode of Season 4 explores the little known history of slavery in Iran, how it came to be abolished in the 19th century, and how Iranian society has slowly forgotten its involvement with the human trade.
Guest Jessica Werneke has just completed her doctorate that looks at this oft-overlooked aspect of Soviet society, and discusses the turbulent world of amateur photography in the Soviet Union.
Dominic Lieven of the London School of Economics has spent his career examining problems of political stability in Europe in the 19th century, and helps us understand the world on the eve of its first global war.
Imagine the pressures of translating a sacred text whose language is well known and imbued with religious significance and symbolism. Leonard Greenspoon from Creighton University has done just that with translators of the Jewish Bible over the centuries.
Guest James Martin from UT’s Department of History describes the motivations for President Nixon’s historic unilateral reaction and how it affected both Americans as well as our ally across the southern border.
Adam Shapiro from Birkbeck University describes how evolution was first received in the United States, and the debates that led up to its most famous test–the Scopes “Monkey Trial” held in Dayton, Tennessee, in the 1920s.
Professor Julia Guernsey from UT's Department of Art and Art History combines the methodology of history, art history, and archaeology to offer a new look into this mysterious period at the beginning of recorded history in the Americas.
Guest Richard Bautch from St Edward's University in Austin discusses current thinking about the formation of the Pentateuch during the time of Ezra.
Art Historian Stephennie Mulder has spent the past decade working in Syria and shares a new look at history of Sunni and Shi'a in Syria during the medieval period; and how both histories are threatened by ISIS and the Syrian Civil War.
Shainool Jiwa illuminates an often overlooked chapter in the history of Islamic sectarianism, one in which religious differences were used to unify diverse populations under the rule of a minority government, rather than to divide and alienate them.
Ben Wright of UT’s Briscoe Center for American History has been working with the Bexar archives to document how Spain’s–and Texas’s–efforts to divert sources of food and funding to American colonial troops.
Guest Henry Wiencek explores the deep contradictions and equally varied representations of John D. Rockefeller, the self-made millionaire whose name became synonymous with industry and free enterprise.
In picking up where Episode 57 left off, guest Shahrzad Ahmadi describes the tragic turn of events that sent shockwaves through the nascent Islamic community, and that continue to reverberate today.
Nearly every world history textbook on the market explains the origins of sectarianism in the Islamic world as a dispute over the succession to Muhammad. It seems simple—but was it?
Guest Michelle Daneri helps us understand contemporary thinking about the ways that Spanish and Native Americans exchanged ideas, knowledge, and adapted to each others' presence in the Southwest.
Guest Brian Levack explains that medieval accusations of witchcraft are not supernatural at all, but based in the human need to explain the ordinary cycles of birth, death, sickness, wellness, and the constant struggle between rich and poor.
Daina Ramey Berry, from UT's Department of History, and Leslie Harris, from Emory University, have spent the past year collaborating on a new study aimed at re-discovering this forgotten aspect of slave experience in the United States.
Guest Francesca Consagra helps us make connections across centuries and genres and underscores our complex relationships to cats and dogs, revealing the many ways in which they say as much about us as we do about them.
Ann Twinam from UT's Department of History discusses three of the major Mesoamerican civilizations: the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec (Mexica), and their once-forgotten contributions to human civilization.
Fred M. Donner has spent much of his career studying the earliest history of Islam. He offers his hypothesis on what the early Islamic community may have looked like, and describes an exciting new find that may shed new light on an old puzzle.
Guest Carla Kaplan, author of Miss Anne in Harlem: White Women of the Harlem Renaissance, joins us to talk about the ways white women crossed both racial and gender lines during this period of black affirmation and political and cultural assertion.
Guest Frank Guridy joins us to discuss the multifaceted, multilayered movement that inspired a new generation of African-Americans—and other Americans—and demonstrated the importance of Black culture and its contributions to the West.
In the late 15th century, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and conquered the Indian Ocean, bringing the rich trade under the direct control of the crowned heads of Europe and their appointed Indian Ocean Trading Companies. Or did he? Did Europe ever really come to dominate the 90,000 year old trade, […]
In the first of a two part episode guest Susan Douglass describes the murky beginnings of trade and travel in the Indian Ocean basin, and the cultural exchanges and influences that the trade had in the days before the Europeans arrived.
Guest Charles E. King from Georgetown University discusses the state of Ukranian-Russian relations, and historical developments in Ukraine itself to help us understand the situation in Ukraine today.
Guest Samuel Thrope offers a fascinating look at a time when Iranian socialists looked at Israel as a possible model for what Iran could become—and how that vision soured after the 1967 Six Day War.
Guest Sam White from Ohio State University makes the convincing argument that environmental and climactic factors are as influential in human history as economic, social, political, and cultural factors.
Guest Karl Hagstrom Miller helps us understand how popular music came to be segregated as artists negotiated the restrictions known as the "Jim Crow" laws in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Guest Daina Ramey Berry she discusses teaching the "senses of slavery," a teaching tool that taps into the senses in order to connect to one of the most important eras in US history and bring it to the present.
Guest Jacqueline Jones, one of the foremost experts on the history of racial history in the United States, helps us understand race and race relations by exposing some of its astonishing paradoxes from the earliest day to Obama's America.
Guest Seth Garfield shows how a little-known chapter of World War II history illuminates the ways outsiders’ understandings of the nature of the Amazon have evolved over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century.
Guest Robert Olwell describes the Royal Proclamation of 1763, its effects on the history of colonial North America, and ponders whether it is really the smoking gun that caused the American Revolution as some have claimed.
Guest Chris Dietrich explains the origins of the oil crisis and the ways it shifted international relations in its wake.
Guest Mary Neuburger walks us through current historical thinking about the five hundred year legacy of Ottoman rule in southeastern Europe, and gives us an alternate explanation for the turbulence of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Guest Joseph Parrott helps us understand the system of "separateness" that dominated the lives of South Africans of all races for so long, and introduces us to the key organizations and players that fought against it and finally dismantled it.
Guest Sahar F. Aziz helps us understand the political earthquakes in Egypt's bumpy transition from authoritarian rule to what comes next, and sheds light on what it might take for the country to arrive at the democracy its people demanded in the streets.
Guest Michelle Daneri from UT's Department of History helps us sort through the political forces that brought Andrew Jackson to office, and the long lasting impact of his presidency.
In this second of a two-part episode, guest James M. Vaughn walks us through the long and often painful process that took our founding fathers to the decision to split off from the world's most powerful empire and go their own way.
Guest James M. Vaughn helps us understand the little known international context of a well-known national moment, pondering questions of politics, economics, and ideas that transcend national boundaries.
Carter Vaughn Findley has spent a career working on the Turkic peoples and helps us trace their long migration from the Gobi to the Bosphorus, adapting, absorbing, and transforming themselves and the societies they interact with along the way.
Guest Denise A. Spellberg sheds light on a little known facet of American history: our earliest imaginings of the Islamic world, and comes to some surprising conclusions about the extent of religious freedoms envisioned by one of the key founding fathers.
Guest Thomas Garza takes us on the trail of vampires from their eleventh century origins to the days of Stoker, Harris, and Meyer, and helps us learn a thing or two about how society copes with its deepest fears along the way.
In this supernatural-themed episode (just in time for Halloween!), guest Brian Levack talks about his research into the deeper social causes and meanings of alleged “demonic possessions” in early modern Europe.
Guest Barbara Petzen returns to walk us through the cobbled lanes of Istanbul, past bath houses and coffee houses, to help us look at the Ottoman Empire as a nuanced, complex, and changing entity that defies the traditional story of "decline and fall."
Guest Barbara Petzen helps to shed some light on the origins and rise of the empire that rivaled Europe for centuries.
In the second half of a two part podcast, guest and co-host Christopher Rose from UT’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies discusses the lingering effects of 20th century European imperialism in the region and the transition to independence.
In this first of a two part podcast, guest and co-host Christopher Rose from UT’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies walks us through the beginnings of European imperialism in the Middle East.
In the century and a half since the war’s end, historians, politicians, and laypeople have debated the causes of the U.S. Civil War: what truly led the Union to break up and turn on itself?
In the century and a half since the war’s end, historians, politicians, and laypeople have debated the causes of the U.S. Civil War: what truly led the Union to break up and turn on itself?
After the chaos of the American Civil War, Congress and lawmakers had to figure out how to put the Union back together again–no easy feat, considering that issues of political debate were settled on the battlefield, but not in the courtroom nor in the arena of public opinion. How did the defeated South and often […]
Aarti Bhalodia discusses the push for South Asian independence from British colonial rule which resulted in the mass migration of 100 million people, one of the most pivotal, and traumatic, events of the 20th century.
Philippa Levine explains the wide-reaching effects of the eugenics movement, which at its best inspired the eradication of harmful diseases, but at its worst led to compulsory sterilization, and the horrific experiments of the Nazi death camps.
Who was the historical Buddha? When and where did he live? And what were the social currents and forces in his own time that shaped his worldview and led him to renounce the world in an effort to save humanity from itself?
Madeline Y Hsu discusses the tumultuous experience of Chinese immigration to the U.S., the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and sheds light on the lingering immigration issues first discussed in the 19th century.
Guest Patrick Olivelle from UT’s Department of Asian Studies describes the Maurya and Gupta Empires and the flourishing period of South Asian history “between the empires.”
Guest Robert Olwell takes a deeper look to get insight into Jefferson, the workings of the Congress, and the psyche of the American colonists on the eve of revolution—plus, we’ll put that whole treasure map thing to rest once and for all.
Guest Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra from UT’s Department of History discusses the intricacies of Simón Bolívar, an enigma who is still revered and reviled two centuries after his death.
World War I ended the long-standing American policy of neutrality in foreign wars. What forces conspired to bring the United States into World War I, and what was the reaction at home and abroad?
Guest Natalie Arsenault from UT’s Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies discusses the Haitian Revolution and its significance within the narrative of the political revolutions of the 18th century.
Guest Miriam Bodian from UT’s Department of History separates truth from legend and reveals the intricacies of the Spanish Inquisition’s processes and inner workings.
Guest Snehal Shingavi from UT’s Department of English examines the nature of British colonialism in South Asia and its lasting legacy sixty years after decolonization.
Historian Jeremi Suri discusses the beginnings of the Cold War, its origins in the “unfinished business” of World War II, and the ways that it changed the United States in just five short years between 1945 and 1950.
In the second episode discussing the tumultuous year 1917 in Russia, we examine the reasons for the failure of the February Revolution (discussed in Episode 1).
Guest Natalie Arsenault from the University of Chicago explores the oft-ignored impact of the slave trade on other parts of the Americas.
Guest Chloe Ireton looks at the intriguing history of maps as propaganda and the role of two publishing houses not only in rewriting the history of the Mexican-American war, but in influencing the outcome of the war even as it was still ongoing.
In this episode, we’ll examine some of the lesser known Founding Fathers, and examine the ranges of opinions they held about issues from slavery to states’ rights and their opinions on the form of the new American Republic.
This episode provides an overview of the Scramble for Africa and how the 1885 Berlin Conference changed European colonialism on the continent.
In this episode, we tackle “that pesky standard” in the Texas World History course that requires students to understand the development of “radical Islamic fundamentalism and the subsequent use of terrorism by some of its adherents.”
Guest Joan Neuberger from UT’s Department of History discusses the long-simmering causes of the revolution and discontent in Russia, and what finally lit the spark that caused the uprising that toppled the three hundred-year old Romanov dynasty.