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 investigates war, and what exactly it may or may not be good for. Was war a result of human beings organizing into larger and more complex agricultural social orders, or did war maybe create agriculture and...

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 presents Mesopotamia, and the early civilizations that arose around the Fertile Crescent. Topics covered include the birth of territorial kingdoms, empires, Neo-Assyrian torture tactics, sacred marriages, ancient labor...

In which Stan Muller subs for John Green and teaches you about energy and humanity. Today we discuss the ideas put forth by Alfred Crosby in his book, Children of the Sun. Historically, almost all of the energy that humans use has been...

In which John Green teaches you a little bit about drought, which is a natural weather phenomenon, and famine, which is almost always the result of human activity. Throughout human history, when food shortages strike humanity, there was...

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 Imperialism, but not from the perspective of the colonizers. This week John looks at some Asian perspectives on Imperialism, specifically writers from countries that were colonized by European...

In which John Green talks about the methods of writing history by looking at some of the ways that history has been written about the rise of the West. But first he has to tell you what the West is. And then he has to explain the Rise of...

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,...

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 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....

In which John Green teaches you about how Islam has interacted with politics during it's history, and how it continues to do so today. Islamist movements are in the news a lot lately, but how did that happen. John will point out that...

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

In 2009, a man named Edwin Rist planned a museum heist. His target wasn't jewels, or fossils, or the Declaration of Independence. It was bird skins. It took just over a year for authorities to track him down, largely because the...

While the word "mummy" may conjure up an image of King Tut (or a 1999 Brendan Fraser action/adventure movie), ancient Egyptians were far from the only culture that mummified their dead. Around the world, and across millennia, people...

Science can help solve the world’s most important problems, and what could be more important than keeping pee off your shoes? Yes, even the lowly urinal—and those who use it—can benefit from the occasional peer-reviewed study. So let’s...

Squeaks is back from his trip around the world! In this episode, he and Jessi discuss the second stop on his trip: Fiordlands National Park (aka Te Rua-o-te-moko) in New Zealand (aka Aotearoa)<br/>

Squeaks is heading on a trip around the world! He's going to experience so many things, using senses he didn't even know he (or his human friend Jessi) has! In this episode, he learns about senses beyond the common 5 (sight, hearing,...

Oil companies may seem invincible, but they are more vulnerable than you think, says climate justice litigator Melinda Janki. She tells the story of how she took on ExxonMobil in her home country of Guyana, notching historic wins against...

Africa’s booming youth population is often seen as a "jobless generation." But in Kenya alone, young people are already adding more than 530 million dollars a month to the economy through informal businesses. Social entrepreneur Anuj...

The number of forcibly displaced people across the world is on the rise. While aid systems often focus on providing basic necessities like food and shelter, Julienne Oyler and her team at the nonprofit Inkomoko have a more ambitious...

Maps have long helped us understand the world — now, they can help us shape it. Digital cartographer Peter Wilczynski introduces the Living Globe: a real-time, data-rich digital twin of Earth that fuses satellite imagery, sensor data and...

Exhausted from carrying water up a hill to keep her small farm in Kenya thriving, Josephine Waweru received an unexpected call that offered a nearly unbelievable solution. She shares how one simple device allowed her crops (and her...