In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, protests and unrest continued continued across Europe, and the Soviet Union was having increasing trouble holding its sphere of influence together. Today you'll learn about the labor strikes of...

The European Renaissance may have started in Florence, but it pretty quickly moved out of Italy and spread the art, architecture, literature, and humanism across Europe to places like France, Spain, England, and the Low Countries....

The aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact had a huge impact on the countries of Eastern Europe. As the former satellite states turned away from communism and Soviet influence, some of them shifted toward...

The thing about European History is that it tends to leak out of Europe. Europeans haven't been great at staying put in Europe. As human beings do, the people of Europe were very busy traveling around to trade, to spread religion, and in...

The Protestant Reformation didn't exactly begin with Martin Luther, and it didn't end with him either. Reformers and monarchs changed the ways that religious and state power were organized throughout the 16th and early 17th centuries....

The post-World War II decades in Europe are sometimes called the Thirty Glorious Years. As those years wore on, tensions between East and West grew, and economic growth slowed or was unevenly distributed across Europe, protests and...

Our European history is going to start around 1500 with the Renaissance, but believe it or not, that is not the actual beginning of history in the continent. So, today, we're going to teach you the broad outlines of the so-called Middle...

The Renaissance was a cultural revitalization that spread across Europe, and had repercussions across the globe, but one smallish city-state in Italy was in many ways the epicenter of the thing. Florence, or as Italians might say,...

European exploration had a lot of side effects. When the Old World and the New World began to interact, people, wealth, food, animals, and disease began to flow in both directions. In the New World, countless millions were killed by...

We've been talking a lot about kings, and queens, and wars, and religious upheaval for most of this series, but let's take a moment to zoom out, and look at the ways that individuals' lives were changing in the time span we've covered so...

Want a Pineapple? If you want a pineapple, it's possible you can just run down to the store and get one. But, if you wanted to grow one, that's a lot more difficult depending on where you live. In this episode of Crash Course Kids,...

How do characters make a story? In this episode of Crash Course Kids Literature, we’ll investigate the traits of characters from “King and the Dragonflies” by Kacen Callender and uncover the ways they relate to each...

If you want to learn about a new topic, where do you start? In this episode of Crash Course Kids Literature, we synthesize information from two nonfiction books about a woman with an eye for insects: Maria...

You may have noticed that the internet is terrible at religious discourse. Well, this is not a new phenomenon. In the early 16th century, the Roman Catholic church dominated Christianity in Europe, and the institution was starting to...

In different contexts, you might speak a different language or use different terms, grammar, gestures, etc. Code switching can help you learn languages, turn the tides of social interactions, use up mental energy, and affect healthcare...

In 1643, Johann Wirsung was shot and killed outside his home, but not before he named one of the men responsible. One rumor that has emerged over the years is the man was paid by one of Wirsung's former assistants, who claimed Wirsung...

There's a list of the 500 most powerful computers on Earth, and we're downloading the details on the top five.

In a small town in the French Alps, a lot of people started to get the neurodegenerative disease ALS. Could the culprit be mushrooms?

You've probably heard of fool's gold, and it might make you think of prospectors in old timey California seeking their fortunes. But there's another kind of fool's gold called chalcopyrite, and lucky for those that want to strike...

You may have heard of Blue Zones, these isolated pockets of the world where people seem to live into the triple digits way more often than everywhere else. But what's really going on, and does the research say it's as simple as eating...

The famous Irish Potato Famine was thanks to farming practices and p. infestans (among other things). But are the Colorado Potato Beetle and the climate crisis teaming up to bring about the next potato famine? Here's what research suggests.

Between 1485 and 1551, England was hit by at least five epidemics of sweating sickness. But after that, the disease supposedly vanished off the face of the Earth. With fatality rates as high as 90% according to some sources (perhaps...

The Park Grass experiment at Rothamsted Research Centre in England is the world's longest-running ecological experiment. It's also the result of a sort of Victorian Stardew Valley, the enduring friendship between John Bennet Lawes and...

Ivermectin does not work against COVID-19. However, it is almost a miracle drug when it comes to treating parasites. Doctors want to know if they can use ivermectin to prevent malaria. Here's how it's going.