In which John Green teaches you about World War II, aka The Great Patriotic War, aka The Big One. So how did this war happen? And what does it mean? We've all learned the facts about World War II many times over, thanks to repeated...

In which John Green teaches you about World War II, and some of the causes behind the war. In a lot of ways, WWII was about resources, and especially about food. The expansionist aggression of both Germany and Japan were in a lot of ways...

In which John Green teaches you about war! Specifically, John talks about whether humanity is naturally warlike, hard-wired to kill, or if perhaps war is a cultural construct. John will talk about the Hobbes versus Rousseau debate, the...

In which John Green teaches you about the Bronze Age civilization in what we today call the middle east, and how the vast, interconnected civilization that encompassed Egypt, The Levant, and Mesopotamia came to an end. What's that you...

In which John Green teaches you about nonviolence and peace movements in the 20th century. What is nonviolence? What is a peace movement? Well. traditionally, humans often resort to violence when they come into conflict. In the 20th...

In which John Green teaches you about the Protestant Reformation. Prior to the Protestant Reformation, pretty much everyone in Europe was a Roman Catholic. Not to get all great man, but Martin Luther changed all that. Martin Luther...

In which John Green teaches you about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which used to be Zaire, which used to be The Belgian Congo, which used to be the Congo Free State, which used to be the region surrounding the Congo River Basin...

In which John Green teaches you about the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age was a period of global cooling that occurred from the 13th to the 19th centuries. This cooling was likely caused by a number of factors, including unusual solar...

In which John Green teaches you about the Holy Roman Empire by teaching you about Charles V. Charles Hapsburg was the holy Roman Emperor, but he was also the King of Spain. And the King of Germany. And the King of Italy and the Lord of...

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,...

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...

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...

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 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...

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.

This video description is brought to you by language. But how long have humans been able to use our gift of gab? The answer is a lot more complicated than you might think. From studying fossil brains and ear bones to DNA migration...

The Sahara is rather famously a desert, but it wasn't always that way. And during the time of lush green forests, there were plenty of people who lived there, but they've been hard to study. However, new genetic analysis has given us...

Humans love to decorate, and that's been true for a long time. Early humans have been painting on the walls for tens of thousand of years, and their work helped us understand a lot about their world and our own. From Lascaux Cave in...

The Giant's Causeway is a rock formation that is so otherworldly that it seems like it was made by supernatural beings. But these incredible hexagonal columns of rock aren't the result of giant masons. They formed through a quirk of...

When humans are gone, nature will reclaim our cities and break down much of what we've built. But some of the things we've made will last much longer than others, and they're probably not the things you'd expect.