Ideas, goods, and fashions bounced around from place to place in the Iron Age Mediterranean, the most recognizable of which was a particular style of art that we call "Orientalizing." But this distinctive and widespread artistic style, rooted in the imagery of the ancient Near East, was only a byproduct of the movements of actual people through an interconnected sea.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new review podcast of the TV series Rome: https://bit.ly/PWrome

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Iberia is the hinge between worlds: Europe and Africa, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. That was never more true than at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, when a new civilization - the Tartessians - arose in southern Iberia at the meeting point of these different worlds.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new review podcast of the TV series Rome: https://bit.ly/PWrome

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What was Rome like before it became one of the biggest cities in the ancient world? How did its early inhabitants adapt to the threat of flooding, and change the landscape to suit their needs? Dr. Andrea Brock of the University of St. Andrews is an expert on the archaeology of Rome's first few centuries and especially the local environment.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new review podcast of the TV series Rome: https://bit.ly/PWrome

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James Dolan was born into immense privilege. He could have done anything with his life. But he chose the family business — a cable television empire that came to include ownership of the New York Knicks, one of the most beloved franchises on earth. What happened from there is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Dolan didn’t just lead the Knicks to disaster (and the worst record in the NBA in the 21st Century); he also built a laboratory of shame, dysfunction, and, well, unintentional hilarity.

Join host David Greene as he unpacks this trainwreck, over 5 riveting episodes, while chasing the answer to one elusive question: Why the hell won’t James Dolan just sell the team? From SmartLess Media, and Campside Media, Reign of Error is the series James Dolan doesn’t want you to hear.

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Rome eventually became the heart of one of the largest and most powerful empires the world has ever known, but in the beginning, it was just a collection of villages on the Tiber River. How those villages merged and became a city, then a state, is one of the crucial stories in human history.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new review podcast of the TV series Rome: https://bit.ly/PWrome

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When we think of the ancient Mediterranean, our minds first turn to familiar names, such as the Greeks and Romans. Yet the ancient world was full of peoples, all of them living in sophisticated societies that were no less interesting than those we we know well. Professor Peter van Dommelen is an expert in these less traveled places of the ancient world, especially Sardinia, and how they fit into the broader world beyond.

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The Etruscans are often called "mysterious," but we actually know quite a bit about them, from their unique language to their amazing metalwork and impressive cities. But where did the Etruscans come from, and how did they come into being?

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One of the best ways to understand how the ancient world functioned is to think in terms of networks and interactions between people and places. Dr. Lieve Donnellan of the University of Melbourne is an archaeologist who specializes in applying network theory to southern Italy and the Greek world in the Iron Age, and she's come up with some fascinating and innovative ways of understanding the ancient Mediterranean.

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At the beginning of the Iron Age, around 950 BC, Italy was a land of farming villages; just a few centuries later, it was one of the wealthiest and most densely urbanized parts of the Mediterranean world. This dramatic change was a product of a new world driven by metalworking, cities, and powerful elite groups.

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Archaic Greece went through some of the most explosive and rapid transformations of any ancient society, but why? What stands out the most is the intense strand of competition running through every aspect of society, from athletics to the economy to politics.

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In the space of just a few decades toward the end of the 8th century BC, Greek colonies sprang up across across southern Italy and Sicily. These new foundations would become the heart of the Greek world, just as Greek in every way as the better-known cities of Greece itself.

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Chris Wiggins and Matthew Jones, authors of the new book How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, join Patrick to discuss the history of data, why enumerating things isn't a neutral act, and the ethics of building a world on the foundation of data.

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Despite their obvious importance to understanding the Iron Age and Classical Mediterranean, the Phoenicians remain something of an enigma. Professor Carolina Lopez-Ruiz is one of the world's leading experts on the Phoenicians, and she joins Patrick to talk about trade, migration, and what made the Phoenicians who they were.

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In the year 800 BC, Greece was an unremarkable corner of the Aegean. Over the next century, however, it underwent a remarkable transformation. Greece's population exploded, cities came into being, long-distance trade boomed, and the first overseas colonies - the beginnings of an extended Greek world - had been founded. The roots of a recognizable ancient Greece had begun to sprout.

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Soon after 1000 BC, Phoenicians began to take ever-longer voyages away from their homeland. Within just a few decades, they were already present at the far end of the Mediterranean and even further, past the Straits of Gibraltar on the Atlantic coast of Iberia. The process of creating an interconnected Mediterranean had begun.

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Few places weathered the Bronze Age Collapse better than the Levant, the strip of land bordering the eastern Mediterranean that runs from Syria to Egypt. One small part of that coastline, mostly in what's now Lebanon, became a launching pad for some of the most ambitious and wide-ranging commercial ventures in history. The Phoenicians, natives of this area, were the primary builders of the ancient Mediterranean.

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Every historian I know has a secret dream of writing historical fiction, but few ever do it. Dan Jones, a longtime friend of Tides of History and an outstanding historian, has actually done it: Essex Dogs, his fantastic debut novel about a group of soldiers during the Hundred Years' War, is out now. I talk to Dan about writing historical fiction and what it can do that pure history can't.

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After the Bronze Age Collapse, Greece changed dramatically. The palaces were gone, long-distance trade declined, and crafts became much simpler. Most of all, there were fewer people living in Greece than there had been during the Mycenaean period. For all these reasons, scholars have often called this time the "Greek Dark Age." But how dark was it, and what was life like after the palaces fell?

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Sergeant Jill Evans is a small town cop in Wales with an impressive record in her job, and a less than impressive record in her love life. After three engagements, two divorces and one affair, she’s beginning to worry that love is only true in fairy tales. That is until she meets: Dean. He’s a wealthy beauty entrepreneur with his own range of toiletries.

Girl meets boy. Boy meets girl. They kiss and fall in love. Roll credits.

But that would be boring, wouldn’t it? Instead, this is a love story like no other. It’s all going so well for Jill and Dean, until Halloween night, when Dean disappears. And Sgt. Jill is left to pick up the pieces.

From Wondery and Novel, comes a new series. Hosted by Kerry Godliman.

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The Iron Age Mediterranean's new density of connections between people and places was about more than the economy and trade; it also remade the culture of the whole region, bringing new ideas and practices - such as wine-drinking and the alphabet - across its entire expanse. Professor Tamar Hodos is one of the world's leading experts on the Iron Age Mediterranean, and she joins me to talk about archaeology, globalization, and the tools we can use to understand the past.

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What happened after the Bronze Age Collapse and the end of the palaces that had defined Mycenaean Greece? It's easy to present this time as a "dark age," but is that really the best way to understand it? Professor Alex Knodell is an expert on the archaeology of Greece from the Bronze Age through to the Iron Age, and his perspective on this oft-neglected period is fascinating.

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Prior to the Iron Age, the Mediterranean had already been a highway moving around goods, people, and ideas for millennia. But as a new era dawned, the Mediterranean became something very different: an interconnected space, bringing together all of its shores for the first time.

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When the end came for the Assyrian Empire, it came quickly. Former enemies pounced on the weakened state, and brought home the violence that for so long had characterized Assyrian conquests abroad.

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On History Daily, we do history, daily. Every weekday, host Lindsay Graham (American Scandal, American History Tellers) takes you back in time to explore a momentous event that happened ‘on this day’ in history. Whether it’s to remember the tragedy of December 7th, 1941, the day “that will live in infamy,” or to celebrate that 20th day in July, 1969, when mankind reached the moon, History Daily is there to tell you the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world—one day at a time. So if you’re stuck in traffic, bored at work—wherever you are, listen to History Daily to remind yourself that something incredible happened to make that day historic.

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The Assyrian Empire had a well-deserved reputation for brutality, but brutality alone doesn't explain why it lasted for so long; its residents must have bought into the imperial system for some reason. Professor Bleda During, an expert on the archaeology of empires, shows how people outside the center of Assyria interacted with the empire, and what they got out of it.

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The Neo-Assyrian Empire has been almost forgotten in comparison to the other massive states of the ancient world, but at its peak, it stretched from the Nile to the Caspian Sea and central Turkey to the Persian Gulf. Assyria was a brutal and dominating force for centuries, and it pioneered the infrastructure and ideology of empire, laying the ground work for everything that came after.

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The sheer amount of time separating the establishment of the first cities in the ancient Near East, and the invention of cuneiform writing, from the end of the period that they define is mind-boggling: almost 3,000 years, far longer than the span that separates us today from the end of that period. Professor Amanda Podany has written a fantastic book on this whole age, entitled Weavers, Scribes, and Kings, that looks at both kings and everyday people in a fascinating time and place.

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Welcome to the Iron Age, and to a new season of Tides of History! The first millennium BC saw the emergence of two huge and enduring empires at either end of Eurasia - Rome and China - but it was also the time of Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha, and much more. Let's start getting settled in a brand-new world.

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After two and a half years and 126 episodes, Season 4 of Tides is coming to an end. Patrick recaps what we've learned, how things have changed in a rapidly shifting field, and why the study of prehistory and the deep human past matters.

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I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of great people during this season, and Professor Shane Miller of Mississippi State University has been incredibly generous with his time on multiple occasions. He and I catch up on the state of the debate about who came first to the Americas, what agriculture in the eastern United States looked like, and how to find really old dirt.

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"Collapse" is an evocative and powerful term, but what does it really mean? And how can we use it to help us understand the actual processes and events through which ancient people lived? Professor Guy Middleton is both one of the world's leading experts on collapse as a concept and an accomplished archaeologist of the late Bronze Age Aegean, and we discuss the usefulness of ""collapse"" and how Bronze Age people experienced their famous time of troubles.

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More than 3,000 years ago, two armies met in a titanic Bronze Age battle along a river in northern Germany. We don’t know why they fought or who won, but thanks to stunning archaeological discoveries, we know how they died, where they come from, and what their lives were like.

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What ties the long history of ancient Egypt together into a meaningful whole? Professor Toby Wilkinson, one of the most renowned Egyptologists on the planet, visits to talk about the unity of ancient Egyptian history through the lens of the fascinating array of objects found in Tutankhamun's tomb. Check out his new book, Tutankhamun's Trumpet!

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As dramatic and transformative as collapses are, they're rarely a complete apocalypse. People survived the Bronze Age Collapse, and then they had to wake up in the morning, care for their children, tend their crops, make their tools, and go about creating a new world.

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It's mailbag time! Patrick answers a variety of questions about topics covered (and not covered) in this season of Tides, ranging from Svante Pääbo's Nobel Prize in paleogenomics to Indo-European origins to changing sea levels.

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What is an empire? It sounds straightforward enough, but figuring out what the term means - much less whether it really helps us understand past political units - is actually pretty complicated. Professor Claudia Glatz is an expert on the dynamics of empire in general and the Hittites in particular, and she walks us through how these ancient empires functioned - and often didn't.

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When assigning blame for the Bronze Age Collapse, the most common culprits are said to be the Sea Peoples: nomadic raiders and sackers of cities who plied the sea-lanes of the late Bronze Age world and brought to an end centuries of flourishing trade and culture. Yet who were the Sea Peoples? And were they actually responsible for all of this devastation?

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Mycenaean Greece was one of the glittering jewels of the late Bronze Age world, but it fell to pieces in dramatic fashion: burned palaces, abandoned settlements, and the end of a centuries-old political tradition. Nor was Greece the only place in the Aegean to suffer: On the Asian side of the sea, a city we know as Troy was among those destroyed at this time. Was this the context that, centuries later, gave rise to Homer's famous tale of the Trojan War?

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We're often told that trade was central to the interconnected world of the late Bronze Age, but what were people really trading? Why did trade matter so much? And what happened when that trade disappeared? Professor Sarah Murray is an archaeologist and an expert on the economy of Mycenaean Greece - and how and why it fell apart.

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The term "Bronze Age Collapse" is by now common, but what do we actually mean when we talk about "collapse?" Is it a matter of political reorganization or something rather more drastic? In the case of the Bronze Age, we have a copious material and written record to help us understand what actually happened around 1200 BC, and how it affected the people who lived through it - and didn't.

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The late Bronze Age was a time of powerful empires and intense competition between them. Never before had true states covered such a large area, or had such resources to devote to politicking and fighting with one another. The result was war on a scale never before seen in human history.

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What was it like to be a regular person in ancient Egypt? What did people do when they got sick or injured? Professor Anne Austin is an Egyptologist and bioarchaeologist who studies health and disease using both texts and human remains, allowing us to answer questions about the bodily experience of ancient life in ways we never thought possible. 

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We know the late Bronze Age world eventually collapsed, but what made it a world in the first place? The answer lies in the intense connections - trade, politics, and culture - that tied together a vast area of the ancient world, from Mycenaean Greece to Elamite Iran and the Caucasus Mountains to the Upper Nile in Nubia.

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When we think about ancient Egypt, the vast majority of our attention goes to its elite: pharaohs, queens, priests, and nobles. But the elite made up only the tiniest portion of the population. What about the people who built the pyramids, royal tombs, great temples, and palaces? What can we know about them? A great deal, as it turns out.

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If we know one thing about the Bronze Age world, we know that it collapsed. But what made it a world? And why did it fall apart? There's nobody better to ask than Professor Eric Cline, who literally wrote the book - 1177 BC - on the end of the Bronze Age.

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Kings are one of the constants of ancient Egypt's long history. But what, exactly, were kings supposed to do, and how did ancient Egyptians understand the role of their king? Professor Laurel Bestock is one of the world's leading experts on the institution of kingship in ancient Egypt, as well as an experienced archaeologist, and she brings several fascinating viewpoints to help us understand the central role of the pharaoh.

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Egypt's New Kingdom lasted for more than 400 years. In that time, Egypt changed dramatically, weathering ups, downs, and turmoil of all kinds. Much of that turmoil centered around a religious visionary who also happened to be pharaoh: Akhenaten, father of the famous Tutankhamun, whose incredible tomb and less-than-impressive reign was a reflection of those unsettled times.

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Most of what we think we know about ancient Egypt is actually things we know about the New Kingdom, the last of Egypt's three classical golden ages: an empire stretching into the Near East and Nubia, warrior kings leading armies of chariots, the lavish tombs of the Valley of the Kings, and the well-preserved faces of royal mummies.

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Sea levels rise, hills erode, and rivers change course over decades and centuries, dramatically affecting how people choose to live in their landscapes. Professor Mike Carson is an expert in the study of archaeological landscapes in the ancient Pacific, and his work has provided incredible insights into how the ancient speakers of the Austronesian languages saw and lived in their world.  

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When we think of the Middle Ages, the first thing that comes to mind is usually knights in shining armor. Chivalry - the ideal of behavior that guided knights - was a major force in medieval life. Honor and piety, bravery and reputation: these were core values for the secular elite. We explore what they actually meant to medieval people.

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Star Carr, located in the Yorkshire region of northern England, is one of the world's richest archaeological sites, a waterlogged window onto the European Mesolithic more than 11,000 years ago. Professor Chantal Conneller spent more than a decade excavating at Star Carr, and she joins me to talk about this enigmatic and little-known but incredibly fascinating period of human history.

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Of all the Austronesian-speaking peoples, none have gone further than the Polynesians. Professor Patrick Vinton Kirch of the University of Hawaii is one of the world's leading experts on the Polynesian voyages and colonization of the Pacific, and we discuss how, why, and with what impact the Polynesians spread out over half of the planet.

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The first wave of migration out of Taiwan brought speakers of Austronesian to the northern reaches of the Philippines, the homeland of the Malayo-Polynesians. From there, they spread out over a vast swathe of Southeast Asia and Oceania, eventually moving to the distant reaches of Indonesia and the previously uninhabited spaces of Remote Oceania.

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More than 4,000 years ago, a remarkable migration - one of the great journeys in human history - began in Taiwan. Within just a thousand years, people speaking the Austronesian languages spread out everywhere from the Philippines to Borneo to the previously uninhabited islands of Vanuatu and Fiji in Remote Oceania.

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The harsh, unforgiving conditions of the Andes and the nearby Pacific coastline make it one of the best places in the world to study the relationship between people and their environment. Professor Jason Nesbitt is an expert on the archaeology of the Andes and has extensively worked on how ancient people in the region organized themselves to deal with El Nino events and other climatic disasters.

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China's Shang Dynasty is something of an enigma. It produced the earliest written evidence in China, in the form of inscribed oracle bones, and decades of archaeology have shed light on its capital city and society. Yet much about it is still unclear, including precisely how the Shang understood themselves and their world. Professor Rod Campbell is one of the world's leading experts on the Shang, and his work has done a great deal to illuminate the Shang worldview and why they did the things they did, including human sacrifice on an enormous scale.

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The arid shoreline between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific seems like an unlikely place to host one of the world's earliest complex societies. But more than 5,000 years ago, the people of the Norte Chico Culture built cities, temples, and monuments that laid the foundation for thousands of years of Andean civilization.

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Mesoamerica is one of only a few places in the world where "civilization" - states, writing, cities, monumental building, and so on - emerged independently. The first society to do all this were the enigmatic Olmecs more than 3,000 years ago. Today the Olmecs are known mostly for their colossal carved stone heads, but they were the pioneers of a distinctively Mesoamerican form of civilization that lasted for millennia.

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Over the past several decades, ancient DNA and other archaeological sciences have transformed our understanding of Europe in prehistory. Professor Kristian Kristiansen has worked with these new methods since the very beginning, and combines them with a deep grounding in both traditional archaeology and big-picture thinking about what it all means.

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The Eurasian steppe is central to grasping the past 5,000 years of human history, and in the past couple of decades, new tools of analysis have transformed our understanding of the place and its importance. Professor Michael Frachetti has developed and applied a whole series of innovative approaches to understanding the people of the Bronze Age steppe and much more, ranging from ancient DNA to isotope analysis to more traditional archaeology.

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Four thousand years ago, the sprawling cities of the Indus Valley Civilization dominated much of South Asia; a millennium after that, however, the cities were in ruins, and new migrants ultimately deriving their ancestry from the Eurasian steppe had established themselves throughout much of the region. These new arrivals have become known as Indo-Aryans, and they left behind some of the earliest writing in an Indo-European language - the texts of the Rigveda.

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More than a billion people around the world speak a language of the Indo-Iranian family today. These languages all trace their origin to a group of innovative people living on the steppes of southern Russia more than 4000 years ago, people who inhabited a surprisingly far-flung, complex, and mutable world.

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The Indus Valley Civilization doesn’t get much attention compared to Mesopotamia or Egypt, but it covered an area of a million square kilometers, was home to hundreds of thousands or millions of people and a unified culture, and lasted for the better part of a millennium. More than that, the Indus Civilization doesn’t seem to fit the models we have for how early states functioned. Dr. Adam Green of Cambridge University joins me to explain the unusual way in which the Indus Civilization was organized, its lack of powerful elites, and how and why it eventually fell apart.

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Language is fundamental to how people experience the world, but how can we know what languages people spoke in the distant past? By 1200 BC, the linguistic outlines of the world were becoming a bit clearer, thanks to an explosion in written texts. Follow along as we go on a historical linguistic tour of the globe around 1200 BC, from the first Bantu-speakers of western Africa to the Indo-Iranians of the steppe to the Austronesians of southeast Asia.

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About one in every five people alive on the planet today speaks a language belonging to the Bantu family, and Bantu-speaking peoples have shaped the history of Africa in profound ways. But how did they expand from their original homeland, and how can we tell? Professor Kathryn de Luna joins me to talk about historical linguistics, archaeology, and how they can shed light on one of the most important processes of the past several thousand years.

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The state - a centralized administration that exerts control over a territory and can coerce the people living there - is one of the driving forces of the last several thousand years of history. But when and where did states appear, and why? And can we really call all of the various forms of political control that emerged around the world “states?” We can’t understand the world today without understanding the state, but that’s no easy task.

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Ancient DNA and new archaeological work have changed our understanding of many different parts of the global past, but nowhere more so than Africa. Professor Mary Prendergast sits on the very cutting edge of both fields, having worked on both the largest-scale studies of ancient DNA in Africa and some of the most fascinating and innovative work being done on the continent.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge 

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The most striking environmental shift on the planet in the Holocene epoch was the greening of the Sahara. For thousands of years, the now-deserts of northern Africa were a mosaic of savannahs, river valleys, and shallow lakes. This unique environment produced the ways of life that eventually brought pastoralism and food production, as well as a variety of language families and populations, to the furthest corners of the continent.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge 

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Africa is rightly known as the “Cradle of Humanity,” because that’s where the most recent wave of modern human migrants originated and so much of our species’ evolutionary history took place there. But the reality is far more complex. Africa is a big place, and its relationship with our species spans hundreds of thousands of years, different environments, and multiple instances of interbreeding with other archaic human groups.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge 

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Human sacrifice is an ugly but essential topic in understanding the Shang Dynasty, but we know very little about precisely who these people were, where they came from, and what their lives were like prior to their deaths. Dr. Christina Cheung is a bioarchaeologist specializing in the study of stable isotopes, and she has produced some of the first work to shed light on who the sacrificial victims were. But that’s just one part of Dr. Cheung’s fascinating body of work, which extends all the way to Roman Britain and Neolithic France.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge 

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Professor Jennifer Raff, a longtime friend of the show, returns to discuss her work on the genetic ancestry of America’s Indigenous peoples. We talk about Beringia, waves of migration, the troublesome relationship between science and Indigenous peoples, and her fantastic new book, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, which is available now.

Get Origin here: https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/jennifer-raff/origin/9781538749715/  

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge 

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More than 3,000 years ago in China’s Central Plains, the Shang Dynasty crossed the threshold from prehistory to history. For the first time in China, we have access to the written word, in the form of the famous inscribed oracle bones. Thanks to that writing, we can peer inside their society and understand its logic - the logic of violence, authority, and the power of the ancestors.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge 

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The reality of the Bronze Age Near East was much messier and harder to understand than a straightforward story of city-states, empires, and kings. Different ethnolinguistic groups, lifestyles, dynasties of would-be rulers, migrating mercenaries, and ephemeral states were all essential pieces of the fabric of that world. Professor Aaron Burke of UCLA joins us to talk about mobility, migration, and the formation of identities in the ancient Near East.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge 

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China’s written history goes back more than 3,000 years, stretching deep into the Bronze Age. But just how far back does it go, and how reliable are those first legendary texts when discussing a world that had already been lost for centuries? They speak of powerful kings and capital cities, and a dynasty called the Xia, but can we find them in the rich archaeological record?

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge.

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How did Latin splinter into the Romance languages? In this episode, we explore how Latin transformed from a single, widely dispersed language into a series - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and so on - of related but no longer mutually intelligible tongues.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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China’s late Neolithic period saw the emergence of increasingly powerful groups of elites who buried themselves in lavishly decorated tombs and built palaces and public buildings at the hearts of their fortified settlements. From these political centers, the elites built and ruled a patchwork of small, competing states. But by around 2000 BC, all of these early states had fallen apart, destroyed by changing climatic conditions, social upheaval, and interstate conflict.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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States have defined China from the very beginning of its recorded history more than 3,000 years ago, but how did they come into being? Professor Li Liu of Stanford University is one of the world’s leading experts on the prehistoric archaeology of China, and she returns to Tides for the second time to tell us about states, elites, and why they’re so central to the story of the Chinese past.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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The late Bronze Age world of the Near East was an incredibly rich and complex place, full of long-distance trade, the exchange of ideas, bickering kings, and empires rising and falling. Among those empires, one of the most powerful and enigmatic was that of the Hittites, whose ruling dynasty survived more than five centuries of intrigue and war to build a state stretching across the region. Professor Trevor Bryce literally wrote the books on the Hittites, and I ask him about the Hittites, the people of Troy, and the world they inhabited.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Viewed from the perspective of international trade, political complexity, and written culture, the late Bronze Age world of the Aegean and Near East marked a high point before the fall. But how did this world come into existence? The empires of the Hittites, Mittani, and Assyrians - along with Egypt’s New Kingdom - marked the beginning of something new, an age of intense war and political competition on a scale larger than ever before.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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If we know the name of an ancient Near Eastern ruler, it’s probably that of Hammurabi, thanks to his famous Code. But Hammurabi was just one ruler in a time of conflict throughout the region, and the state he built in his lifetime didn’t last beyond his death. This was an age of fragmentation that lasted for centuries, where ambitious would-be conquerors fought one another in endless rounds of warfare and bloodshed.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Archaeology has come a long way since the first crude excavations at Stonehenge more than a century ago. Our guest, Mike Parker Pearson, spent the better part of a decade excavating in the vicinity of Stonehenge, offering new interpretations of the monument that form the backbone of current understanding. And Stonehenge is just one of Professor Parker Pearson’s areas of interest over the course of a long career that has redefined our understanding of British prehistory.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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The societies of the European Bronze Age lacked writing, but their illiteracy shouldn’t fool us: These were rich and sophisticated civilizations that existed in a time of deep and fundamental transformations, when new technologies, ways of understanding the world, and forms of power reshaped Europe and its people. 

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory.

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The societies of the European Bronze Age lacked writing, but their illiteracy shouldn’t fool us: These were rich and sophisticated civilizations that existed in a time of deep and fundamental transformations, when new technologies, ways of understanding the world, and forms of power reshaped Europe and its people. 

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory.

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Friend of the Show, TV presenter, author extraordinaire, and historian Dan Jones returns to Tides to discuss his new book, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages. It’s a wonderful book and a tremendous achievement, written with both a consummate grasp of the huge scope of medieval history and a cinematic style of storytelling that keeps the reader engaged. How can we say something new about a very old period, and do it in entertaining fashion? That’s the key question for one of the most accomplished popular historians working today.

Get Powers and Thrones here.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Ancient Egypt didn’t exist in isolation from the world around it. Trade goods, ideas, and especially people flowed in and out over the millennia, but never more so than during the Second Intermediate Period, when a foreign dynasty of kings known as the Hyksos ruled much of Egypt. But were the Hyksos really the invading marauders the Egyptians portrayed them as? I talked to Dr. Anna-Latifa Mourad of Macquarie University to get the cutting-edge story of who the Hyksos really were.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Just to the south of ancient Egypt, a civilization we think we know well, was a deeply connected but unique world that existed along the Middle Nile: Nubia, or Kush, which produced its own distinctive cultures and states that held strong for many thousands of years.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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The discovery of 21,000-23,000-year-old human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico is one of the most exciting developments in the study of the deep past in recent years. But do these footprints hold up to real scrutiny? And if they’re real, how do they change our understanding of the first people in the Americas? 

I asked two experts on the earliest inhabitants of the Americas what they thought of this incredible new evidence: Dr. Jessi Halligan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University, and Dr. Shane Miller, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Mississippi State University. Both have extensive experience on the topic, and help us understand precisely what these footprints tell us about the human past in North and South America.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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The Middle Kingdom, beginning around 2000 BC, was the second of ancient Egypt’s classical ages. Powerful pharaohs ruled from the cataracts of the Nile to the Mediterranean, building enormous monuments and patronizing exceptional art and literature. But on either side of the Middle Kingdom lay two ages of chaos, the Intermediate Periods, when the pharaoh’s rule - the defining feature of ancient Egyptian history - essentially disappeared.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Located to the south of Egypt, in today’s Sudan, ancient Nubia had a complicated relationship with the old state of the Nile, and scholars have traditionally understood it through the shadow of its much better understood northern neighbor. But, as Dr. Geoff Emberling of the University of Michigan explains, Nubia had a long and fascinating history of its own and a stunning array of achievements, spanning thousands of years and many different cultures.

If you’d like to learn more about Dr. Emberling’s excavations at Jebel Barkal, you can do so here; if you’d like to learn more about community archaeology in Sudan, check out the “Narrating Nubia” project here.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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When we think of Ancient Egypt, we think of the pyramids: vast, eternal monuments to the glory of long-dead pharaohs. But we shouldn’t take them for granted: They belong to a specific place and time, and the people who built them had their reasons for doing so. The world that produced the pyramids was Egypt’s Old Kingdom, one of its three classic ages. We’ll explore it here today.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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We can’t understand the past without understanding when things happened, because if we can’t place them in some sort of chronological order, we can’t understand the relationship between them. But how do we know when things happened in the distant past? Professor Sturt Manning of Cornell University is an expert on chronology, using tree-rings, radiocarbon, and historical sources to date events and archaeological sites from many thousands of years ago. 

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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The Late Bronze Age was a remarkable time in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. An interconnected world sprang up, tying together the lands from Greece and Crete in the west all the way to Mesopotamia in the east and the Nile cataracts in the south. Let’s explore the Aegean during this time, looking at how palaces on Crete continued to grow and how Minoan civilization reached an apex of sophistication and reach. And on the Greek mainland, a new people - the Mycenaeans - emerged, building their own palaces and society, the foundations of the Greek world that would later encompass so much of the Mediterranean and beyond.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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It’s not an exaggeration to say that the whole of human history can be divided into two parts: before the Industrial Revolution, and after. Economist Duncan Weldon joins me to talk about the Industrial Revolution, why it started in Britain, and the trajectory of the British economy over the past two centuries. 

Get Duncan’s book, Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through, here.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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From mainland Greece to Minoan Crete and the famous city of Troy, what made the Aegean Sea one of the constituent pieces of the Bronze Age world? All of these cities are linked, not just by their proximity, but by much bigger things: trade, the emergence of cities and elite classes, the development of state structures and the written word.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the Worldin hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Bestselling author and history podcaster extraordinaire Mike Duncan returns to Tides to talk about his new book, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. It’s a wonderful book about a fascinating character who lived through and shaped impossibly eventful times, and I highly recommend both it and Mike’s other work.

Get Hero of Two Worlds here.

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More than 4,000 years ago, a ruler came to power in the fractious, war-torn lands of Mesopotamia. He ruled a small state north of the region's ancient heartland, a place called Akkad, but over the course of his life, Sargon built something sprawling and unique: the world's first empire, the Akkadian Empire.

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To mark the release of Patrick's book The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World, he did a virtual event with Powell's Bookstore in Portland, hosted by history podcaster extraordinaire and bestselling author Mike Duncan. Mike and Patrick discussed the book, but also the art of doing popular history, key periods in history, and a whole variety of other topics in the course of their talk.

You can get the book through Powell's here, or elsewhere here.

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Friend of the Show Dr. Keith Pluymers returns to tell us about how people thought about and fought over resources, especially wood, in early modern England. Scarcity, Keith argues, is more about perception than an actual lack of resources. Different groups within society had different perceptions, and they fought constantly about what to do about this shortage, including colonizing North America.

Check out Keith's book, No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic, available here.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the Worldinhardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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We're often told that ancient Mesopotamia was the "Cradle of Civilization," but what made the region stand out in comparison to its neighbors and contemporaries? More than anything else, it was living in cities and working in a hyper-specialized economic role as subjects of kings that defined life in Mesopotamia.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.

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Listen to an exclusive sneak peak of Patrick's book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, which comes out today, July 20th! This chapter looks at the one-armed German mercenary knight Goetz von Berlichingen, and the emergence of large-scale gunpowder warfare in the 16th century.

Listen to the rest of The Verge on Audible here.

You can order a hard copy or e-book of The Verge here.

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Patrick's book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, comes out next Tuesday, July 20th! He worked really hard on it, people like Mike Duncan and Dan Jones say it's good, and you should read it if you liked the seasons of Tides of History on the late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods.

But what's it about? And what's it like to sell, write, edit, and release a book? To answer these questions, Patrick chats with two wonderful people: ex-Tides of History producer Leah Sutherland, now the Podcast Director for Headspace; and Rachel Kambury, who bought and edited The Verge for Twelve Books, an imprint of Hachette.

Get the audiobook version of The Verge on Audible here.

You can order a hard copy or e-book of The Verge here.

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While Mesopotamia and even the Indus Valley get the lion's share of the attention, sophisticated and long-lasting societies inhabited the lands fringing the Caspian Sea for thousands of years. The people of the Kura-Araxes Culture, the Oxus Civilization, and Elam left their mark everywhere from Anatolia to Mesopotamia to South Asia, shaping future cultures for millennia to come.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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When we think of the open grasslands of the Eurasian steppes, we usually imagine nomadic herders taking their livestock from place to place on horseback. But the steppes are a vast and varied place, and so too were the ways of life that ancient people developed to live there. Professor Alicia Ventresca Miller of the University of Michigan joins me to talk about diet, mobility, and how chemical isotopes can tell us more about the diversity of life on the ancient steppes.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Things didn't stop happening on the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppes once the first waves of migrants had departed to make their mark on Europe and beyond. New societies, languages, and ethnic groups emerged. The chariot was invented, and bronze metallurgy spread far and wide. One of those innovative societies on the steppe gave rise to the Indo-Iranians, whose descendants would spread out everywhere from Siberia to Syria.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Professor David Anthony is one of the world's foremost experts on the archaeology of the ancient Eurasian steppes and sits at the cutting edge of Indo-European studies. We discuss the unique nature of the Yamnaya and the prehistoric steppe, the people who lived there, what ancient DNA can tell us about these past societies, and why they matter even 5000 years later.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Human bones are one of our most valuable and illuminating sources of information about the past, but how do we use them, and what can they tell us about prehistory? I talked to Dr. Jess Beck, a bioarchaeologist and expert on later European prehistory, about the incredible insights we can glean from the study of human remains and about her specialty, the Copper Age (c.3250–2200 BCE) in the Iberian peninsula.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Around 4,500 years ago, bell-shaped ceramic drinking vessels called "beakers" begin showing up with the dead in tombs all over western Europe. Everywhere from Portugal to Sicily to Scotland to Slovakia, these distinctive containers show up, often accompanied by archery equipment and upheaval in the societies established in these places. The Bronze Age and metallurgy would soon follow. But what were the Beakers for? Who used them, and why? Thanks to ancient DNA and cutting-edge archaeological science, we can explore the Beaker Phenomenon in all its manifestations, from marriage networks and trade to prehistoric genocide.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Five thousand years ago, small groups of herders began making their way from the open grasslands of the Eurasian steppe into the hills and forests of northern Europe. They moved west, intermarrying with the local farmers and sometimes fighting them, eventually reaching as far as present-day Belgium. These were the people of the Corded Ware Culture, and they brought their language - Indo-European - and genes into the heart of Europe.

I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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At the heart of the ancient Middle East, a sophisticated, urbanized, and long-lived world, was a writing system: cuneiform, used for everything from heroic epic to receipts and medical texts, and first developed in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago. Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid of Oxford joins me to talk about cuneiform literature, medicine, and mental health in this fascinating and little-known ancient world.

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More than 5,000 years ago, a group of wandering herders on the Eurasian steppes - the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European - began to move outward from their homeland. With their wagons, horses, and livestock, they traveled hundreds of miles through the Danube Valley and into Central Europe, forever shaping the linguistic, cultural, and genetic future of the continent and beyond.

I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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What do Achilles and Gilgamesh, two of the most renowned literary figures of the ancient world, have in common? A great deal more than you might expect. I talked to Professor Michael Clarke of the National University of Ireland, Galway, one of my favorite people in the world and an enormously creative and thoughtful scholar, about his recent book - Achilles beside Gilgamesh: Mortality and Wisdom in Early Epic Poetry. We discussed Homer, the world of the Bronze Age, how literature moved, and why so many of the same motifs appeared at various places and times in heroic literature.

Get Professor Clarke's book, Achilles beside Gilgamesh, here.

I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Egypt and Mesopotamia are the most famous civilizations of the ancient world, but at the same time in South Asia - today's Pakistan and India - an even larger and more populous society came into being: the Indus Valley Civilization, whose peak lasted from 2600 to 1900 BC. But the Indus Valley Civilization challenges much of what we think we know about ancient societies, from inequality and violence to political control.

I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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South Asia - encompassing Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan - is one of the cradles of human civilization, and today it's home to one in every four people in the world. But who were the early inhabitants of South Asia, where had they come from, and what led them to develop agriculture, writing, cities, and some of the ancient world's most complex and populous societies?

I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Professor Tim Denham is one of the world's leading experts on Kuk Swamp, the most important archaeological site for understanding the origins of agriculture in New Guinea. He explains how we can use cutting-edge techniques in the study of ancient soils and tiny bits of plant to understand these fascinating past developments. We also talk about "civilization," the invention of agriculture in global context, and why it took so long to understand New Guinea as an agricultural center.

I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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The Highlands of New Guinea are one of the most remote places on the planet, a maze of crosscutting valleys and enormous mountains that weren't reached by outsiders until the 1930s. Yet they're also one of the world's original centers of agriculture, a place responsible for domesticating crops like taro and the omnipresent banana. Crops on which millions of people rely today trace their origin all the way back to the isolated high valleys of New Guinea many thousands of years ago.

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Professor David Wengrow is one of the world's leading experts on Egypt before the pharaohs. He's also one of the most creative and wide-ranging archaeologists working right now, and he has fascinating insights into the primordial emergence of inequality, hierarchies, states, and all of the other things. Check out his new book, co-authored with the late David Graeber: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Tattoos, and other forms of body decoration, are as old as humanity itself. But what can we know about the skin of long-past people that no longer exists? I talk to Aaron Deter-Wolf, Prehistoric Archaeologist for the State of Tennessee’s Division of Archaeology and one of the world's experts on the archaeological study of tattooing, to get some answers.

Follow Aaron on Instagram @archaeologyink - it's a fascinating page.

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Understanding the first migrants to the Americas more than 13,000 years ago is a big task. So is figuring out how the ancestors of indigenous peoples transformed themselves from hunters of mammoth and mastodon to farmers to the builders of complex societies. Professor Shane Miller, an archaeologist working in the American southeast (and a Tides listener!) joins me to talk about cutting-edge archaeology and how our understanding of the early Americas is changing.

I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Language is one of the foundational pieces of being human, but in the absence of writing, what can we know about it in the deep past? Historical linguistics and the comparative method shed valuable light on these long-lost languages, and uncover the roots of some of today's most widely spoken tongues.

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There are still people living now who make their living by foraging, and understanding them is an essential component of grasping the breadth of human experience. Today's hunter-gatherers aren't living fossils from a bygone age, but studying them can give us deep insights into the more distant past. In this episode, I discuss ethnography, ethnoarchaeology, and how we can apply these tools to prehistory.

I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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Kings are practically synonymous with ancient Egypt, and it's not just because their monuments - like the pyramids - still tower above the desert and the Nile. Egyptian society was organized around the pharaohs in many different ways, but how did they come into being? What turned Egypt into one of the world's longest-lived kingdoms?

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What can we learn about the deep human past by studying present-day hunter-gatherers? I asked that question to Professor Robert Kelly of the University of Wyoming, who's both one of the world's experts on hunter-gatherers and an accomplished archaeologist. Today's hunter-gatherers aren't living fossils who provide a direct window onto the distant past, but their lifeways do offer fascinating insights into that past.

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More than 5,000 years ago, the city of Uruk in what's now Iraq was the heart of a new civilization. Cities, kings, armies, monumental temples, and writing were all new developments. But why here? Why then? And who suffered so that civilization could rise?

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Pyramids, mummies, and pharaohs define our understanding of ancient Egypt, a timeless and eternal land. But the Nile wasn't always ruled by god-like kings, and long before they emerged, Egypt was home to other peoples and other ways of life. As Egyptian civilization emerged, these older traditions didn't disappear, but remained, shaping thousands of years of subsequent history.

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I wrote a book! It's called The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World. The book comes out in July, but you can pre-order it here.

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Boxing has a long past, one deeply connected to race, labor, and broader developments in American history. Professor Louis Moore joins me to talk about those topics and about his outstanding book, I Fight For a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915.

Find Professor Moore's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Fight-Living-Manhood-1880-1915-Society/dp/0252082877.

This episode originally aired on August 8, 2019.

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Civilization first emerged in the fertile floodplains of Mesopotamia - present-day Iraq - with priest-kings and cities full of temples and ziggurats, pictographs and cuneiform writing. But what were the conditions and processes that led up to this complex of developments? How and why did it happen, and why there?

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I'm not just talking about the wonderful Sid Meier game series, which I've spent far too many hours playing; how do we define "civilization," how does it come into being, and why does it matter?

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Stanford University's Professor Li Liu is one of the world's leading experts on prehistoric East Asia and one of the world's primary inventions of farming. I ask her about that, the deep continuities of Chinese civilization, and her recent research on the origins of brewing and alcohol.

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Agriculture was invented in no fewer than three, and probably four, places in the Americas. It went along with sedentary living and complex societies, but in complicated ways: fishing villages along the Andean coast grew into the cities of Norte Chico, but hunter-gatherers produced the first great mound complexes of the American southeast. How did farming change, and not change, the diverse societies of the Americas?

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The initial migrations to the Americas get most of the attention, but people didn't stop living there in the aftermath of those first movements of peoples; they spread out over the Great Plains and the forests of the eastern United States, south into the deserts and jungles of Mesoamerica, and into every corner of South America. In the process, they invented agriculture no fewer than three different times.

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The relationship between agriculture, migration, and the distribution of today's most prominent language families is direct but complex. Professor Peter Bellwood, one of the world's leading experts on prehistory, explains how farming led to population growth and movements of people that still shape our world today.

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Plague, war, and a worsening climate drastically changed Europe in the years and decades after 1350. This new state of affairs laid the groundwork for the explosion around 1500 that gave rise to the modern world.

This episode originally aired on June 28, 2018.

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East Asia was one of the world's primary centers of agricultural innovation. Farming was invented there, rice and millet domesticated, and the people who did so grew in numbers and sophistication. Some of the world's most-spoken language families grew out of Neolithic China, and so did the roots of Chinese civilization.

If you'd like to see some pictures of things covered in today's episode, check out the Substack post that goes along with it.

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Hominins have lived in East Asia - what's now China, Korea, and Japan - for millions of years, at least as far back as Homo erectus if not further. And as the glaciers began to recede for the last time after 20,000 years ago, people in this part of the world developed humanity's first pottery, rice-farming, and complex societies of incredible diversity and resilience.

If you'd like to see visuals of some of what we've discussed here, check out the accompanying Substack post.

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Professor Stephen Shennan is one of the world's leading experts on the early farmers of the Fertile Crescent and Europe. In this interview, I pick his brain about why early farmers were so, uh, fertile, and produced so many descendants; how those farmers spread outward from their regions of origin; and how we can understand their Neolithic world. Professor Shennan also one of the world's most accomplished archaeological theorists, and he answers my questions about archaeology in the age of Big Data, statistics, and new ways of understanding the past.

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Peasants and common folk were oppressed by their social superiors, but they didn't accept that as a natural state of affairs: They resisted in small, everyday ways, and they rebelled, sometimes spectacularly.

This episode originally aired on September 20, 2018.

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What were Neanderthals really like? Our closest relatives shared an incredible amount in common with us, argues Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of the wonderful new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art. But we shouldn't pigeonhole them; Neanderthals persisted for hundreds of thousands of years across time and space, living diverse and varied lives everywhere from mountains to deserts to icy tundra.

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Five thousand years ago, a man died more than 10,000 feet high in the Alps of northern Italy. He had been shot in the back with an arrow, the corpse left behind, where he was frozen into a glacier along with all of his belongings. He stayed there until two hikers found him - still half covered in ice - in 1991. What was Ötzi's life like? And what can we learn about his final days and hours? Thanks to incredible scientific studies, we know more about Ötzi than almost anybody who's ever lived.

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If you'd like to see pictures of Ötzi and his equipment, check out the accompanying post.

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Today, everywhere from Bengal to British Columbia, some 3.2 billion people speak an Indo-European language. All of these diverse languages are descended from a common ancestor spoken long before the advent of writing. But where and when was that, and who were the speakers of Proto-Indo-European? Follow us more than 5,000 years back in time to a story about livestock herding, horseback riding, chieftains, burial mounds, and powerful new gods.

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The first farmers of Europe and their descendants persisted for thousands of years. In the Neolithic heartland of eastern Europe, along the Danube River and through the northern Balkan Mountains, they built a unique civilization: Old Europe, with its artificial mounds, gorgeous pottery, and for the first time, the use of metal. The first cities in the world grew out of this long-lived Neolithic just before it disappeared forever.

If you'd like to see visuals of the things discussed in today's episode, check out the accompanying post on my Substack, and be sure to subscribe.

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When we think of the medieval world, our minds usually turn to knights, royalty, and clergy. But the backbone of the medieval economic and social order was the humble peasant. In this rebroadcast from 2018, we explore the world and lives of the vast bulk of the people who actually lived in the Middle Ages, and why they matter.

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How do we know what we know about the deep past? What languages did people speak in prehistory? And why, if the life of an early farmer seemed to be so miserable, did farmers have so many children? I answer all of these questions and more in our first prehistory mailbag episode.

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It didn't take long for the first pioneering farmers of Europe to establish mature and stable societies. The monuments of these societies are still with us today: enormous earthen tombs and standing stones, silent reminders of a lost civilization.

If you'd like to see some pictures of the monuments I talk about in today's episode, check out the accompanying post here.

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Farming came into existence in the Fertile Crescent, but it didn't stay there. By 5000 BC, agriculture had spread east and west, reaching both Central Asia and the Atlantic Ocean. But how did this happen? Did indigenous hunter-gatherers adopt farming, or did the farmers themselves move and bring their way of life with them?

If you'd like to see some visuals of the things we talk about in this episode, check out the accompanying post on Substack.

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The domestication of animals has transformed the way that people eat, clothe themselves, and live over the past 10,000 or so years, but what in the world does "domestication" even mean? How did this happen, and why did people start doing this? I talk with Professor Greger Larson of Oxford University about the genetics of animal domestication and how cutting-edge science is helping us answer these age-old questions.

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The domestication of plants and animals has remade the way that people feed themselves, organize their societies, and interact with the landscapes around them. But for most of the human past, this isn't how people subsisted. When, where, and how did people start farming? And most importantly, why?

If you'd like to see some visuals of the things we talk about in this episode, check out the accompanying post on Substack.

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For most of Homo sapiens' time out of Africa, we lived in a world defined by ice. But by around 20,000 years ago, the ice had begun to melt, the glaciers retreating back toward the poles and mountain ranges. This left behind a new world, a whole different series of environments, opportunities, and perils for the people who had made it through the Ice Age.

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Professor John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the world's best communicators on the deep human past and paleoanthropology, joins me to talk about archaic humans, genomics, and whether the concept of different human species even makes sense these days. Check out his blog, which is an amazing resource, and follow him on Twitter.

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Our understanding of the past is constantly in flux, and there's no field where that's clearer than with the early settlement of the Americas. I'm joined by Professor Jennifer Raff of the University of Kansas, an anthropological geneticist, to discuss the game-changing (or not?) recent work pushing back the date of first settlement to 30,000 years ago or more.

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The Americas were the last continents Homo sapiens reached. Why did it take so long for people to enter this vast and promising expanse of land? Who were they, and where had they come from? In today's episode, we explore the latest - just days old! - science of the First Americans, and discover the descendants they've left behind even today.

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Twenty thousand years ago, the world was locked in ice. The glaciers advanced from the poles and mountain ranges, swallowing huge portions of the planet's surface and making the rest colder and drier, a more difficult place to live. Yet people nevertheless thrived, spreading out across the continents and creating some of the most incredible art in human history.

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Ancient DNA is the key that's unlocking the deep history of humanity, allowing us to answer questions about our collective past that we never dreamed of addressing even 20 years ago. Eske Willerslev is a pioneer in the field of extracting, sequencing, and analyzing the preserved DNA of people who lived thousands upon thousands of years ago; on top of that, he's a fascinating person with unique perspectives on how to understand the human past.

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Until very recently, Homo sapiens - our species - was only one of several varieties of humans on this planet. As our ancestors spread outward from Africa in their great migration, they encountered those other species. The results of those encounters left us a genetic legacy that is still with us today.

If you'd like to see some visuals of the things in this episode, check out this post on my Substack blog.

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Welcome to a new season of Tides of History! Over the next year, we'll be traveling from the very origins of our species through the peopling of the planet, the Ice Age, and then to the beginnings of agriculture, cities, metalworking, and states. Today, we cover our deepest past, from the divergence from our closest ape relatives to the first appearance of anatomically modern humans.

To see visuals of our earliest ancestors, and how-to videos for making ancient stone tools, check out Patrick's website.

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How do we tell when one period ends and another begins? What are the fundamental characteristics of the early modern period? My dear friend (and friend of the show!) Keith Pluymers, assistant professor of history at Illinois State University, returns to chat with me about periodization, the Great Divergence, and riots in the early modern period.

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Around the year 1000, merchants, explorers, and missionaries linked the world together from Newfoundland to China. Trade goods, people, and above all ideas flowed across a rich assortment of routes, connecting previously distant places into a single unit. This was the first instance of what we can call globalization, according to Professor Valerie Hansen of Yale, who wrote a compelling new book on the topic: The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began.

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Alaric was one of the most famous barbarians of antiquity, and yet we know little about him - or at least, we knew very little, until Douglas Boin's excellent new book came out. It's entitled Alaric the Goth: An Outsider's History of the Fall of Rome. In today's episode, I chat with Professor Boin about the book, the Goths, and how we should understand this period of Roman - and Gothic - history.

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John Maynard Keynes was one of the most important figures of the 20th century, creating the economic structures and ideas that defined the Second World War and its aftermath. I spoke with Zach Carter, author of the wonderful new Keynes biography The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, about Keynes's wild life and enduring legacies.

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We reach the epic conclusion of our series on the early modern period with the Great Siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto.

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For much of the 16th century, the Habsburgs of Spain and the Ottoman Empire waged an epic conflict for control over the Mediterranean. Follow along with two composite characters, a Barbary corsair and a Hospitaller knight, as they raid, pillage, and fight a holy war for decades on end.

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Charles V controlled more of Europe than any ruler in centuries, with resources other monarchs could only dream of. But that was never enough to give the Holy Roman Emperor more than a momentary victory; there was always a new enemy, some unforeseen calamity, waiting around the corner.

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DISCLAIMER: If you do not think that this pandemic is a big deal; if you do not want to hear our personal political views; if you don’t care about present-day politics; if you think that this will somehow offend you; then please don't listen to this episode.

Author and history podcaster extraordinaire Mike Duncan joins me to talk about pandemics, social instability, and present-day politics.

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Charles V was the most powerful European ruler since Charlemagne: king of Spain and Naples, Holy Roman Emperor, and ruler of a whole bunch else besides. How did all of these vast territories, and the central political role that went along with them, come into his possession? The answer wasn't ability or merit; it was inheritance.

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All of us are dealing with the ongoing pandemic in different ways, and I decided to wedge myself into my closet to record an informal talk with you all about pandemics throughout history and what, if anything, they might help us understand about what we're dealing with today. Economic effects, political upheavals, and disease all play together, so let's try to figure out the connections.

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Genetics has radically transformed our understanding of prehistory over the past two decades, revealing everything from the existence of brand-new, unknown species to interbreeding between Neanderthals and our human ancestors. I talked to geneticists Spencer Wells and Razib Khan, two of the world's most knowledgable communicators on genetics and prehistory, to get a sense for how things have changed.

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In light of current events, we are re-posting one of my favorite episodes (from December, 2017) on natural disasters and the fall of the Roman Empire.

Justinian was the last great Roman emperor, but his reign was plagued by disasters beyond his control: volcanic eruptions, a changing climate, and a plague of epic proportions. Those disasters created a turning point that we can, with good reason, call the end of the Roman Empire.

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Few books have influenced my view of American history and politics more than Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. We've been divided since the beginning, Woodard argues, and this has influenced every aspect of American history, not to mention its future. He has a new book coming out in May, Union, which expands this thesis further.

Get American Nations here.

And get Colin's new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, here.

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In light of current events, we are re-posting one of my favorite episodes (from June, 2018) on the Black Death.

Between 1346 and 1351, the Black Death killed tens of millions of people - at least half the population - in Europe and the Middle East. This great mortality, one of the worst disasters of any era, fundamentally reshaped European society and set the stage for the world that followed.

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The reign of Suleiman the Magnificent was the high point of the Ottoman Empire, but for centuries, it has also been pegged as the beginning of the empire's long, slow decline into irrelevance. Is this true? Was Suleiman's reign simultaneously the best of times and the beginning of the end?

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Suleiman the Magnificent ruled the Ottoman Empire for forty-six years. During that time, his armies fought everywhere from Iran to Vienna. His navies touched Indonesia and the Straits of Gibraltar. Under his reign, the Ottoman Empire reached its glorious peak.

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Leah returns to chat with Patrick about one of their favorite topics - pirates. It wouldn't be a Leah episode if we didn't range widely, so we also chat about essays and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

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The Muslim world was a vast and diverse place, home to a variety of traditions and schools of thought. The Safavids began as a brotherhood of Sufi mystics, but soon transformed themselves from a religious order to the seeds of a powerful extremist state in Iran under the leadership of a teenaged prodigy, Shah Ismail I. A clash with the Ottomans and Selim the Grim was inevitable.

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While the Ottoman Empire spent most of its early history expanding into Christian Europe, it also faced east, toward the vast, wealthy, and dynamic Muslim world. As the Ottomans grew in prestige and power, a clash with the Mamluks of Egypt for supremacy became inevitable.

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The Pilgrims and the Puritans dominate our understanding not just of early New England, but also early America and the entire future course of American history. Yet their success and long-term influence weren't foreordained, and they weren't inevitable. Peter Mancall, Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford and Mellon Professor of the Humanities at USC, joins us to talk about his new book, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England.

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Mehmet the Conqueror captured Constantinople for the Ottoman Empire in 1453 and ended the thousand-year reign of the Byzantine Empire after an epic siege, but he was far from done. For the next three decades, Mehmet led Ottoman armies against Serbs, Hungarians, Venetians, Wallachians, and Turkoman tribesmen, expanding his empire and drenching two continents in blood and war.

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What was it like to be on the cutting edge of the Age of Exploration, and what made these enormous leaps possible? To answer those questions, we follow the life of a composite character, a Portuguese sailor named Pedro, on his journeys to the coast of Africa and then India beyond.

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What brought the son of a German shoemaker to a blood-soaked English field in June, 1487? In today's episode, we follow the life of a composite character, Hans, an artisan-turned mercenary, on his journey from Augsburg to Stoke Field and try to understand how the currents of the late Middle Ages made his life possible.

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Leah declared mutiny and there was a small defenestration from the 8th Floor Wondery Studio as she took full creative control of Tides of History. Well, not quite, but she did control the interview. Patrick Wyman guests today to talk about his upcoming book, The Crunch!

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What was it like to be a regular person in the late Middle Ages? We follow the life of a composite character, a brewer in London named Margaret, through her family, work, and marriage. She was a product of her time, everything from the Black Death to shifting expectations of work and gender, and she's a great window onto a period of upheaval and change.

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Leah is back on the show today to discuss The King on Netflix starring Timothee Chalamet as King Henry V, our favorite Sadboi King, as he becomes the greatest king England's ever seen. Overall, we liked it! And if you need something that everyone in your family can agree on, it's that Robert Pattinson is doing something, we aren't sure what, but a definite thing as the Dauphin.

Watch it here.

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Popular historian Roger Crowley returns to the show to discuss his new book, The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades, which covers the last great siege of the Crusades at the city of Acre. It's a really fun read, I highly recommend it, and you can get it here.

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Was history destined to happen as it did? That's what counterfactuals - alternative scenarios of how things might have gone - are useful for answering. In this episode, we apply them to the Protestant Reformation, one of the key processes of the past millennium.

Tides is supported by our friends at Parcast. If you love myths as much as we do, you'll love their series Mythology. Check it out.

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The medieval economy underwent a profound transformation, becoming ever more commercialized and monetized. Merchants helped drive that change, moving goods from place to place and profiting on the returns. Today, we meet some of them: an Italian named Francesco Datini, one of the richest men in Europe, and the Cely family of English wool merchants.

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Religious freedom is a core value of the modern West, but how did it emerge, and why does it matter? Economic historian Mark Koyama, of George Mason University, joins me to discuss his recent book (co-authored with Noel Johnson), Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom.

Check out the book here, and follow Professor Koyama on Twitter @MarkKoyama.

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The roots of the modern economy, based on markets, money, and exchange, lie deep in the Middle Ages. The Commercial Revolution remade the European economy, paving the way for the explosive growth that followed centuries later.

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Venice was a commercial hub, the hinge of the medieval economy, but it was also the center of a remarkable empire that spanned the sea lanes and trade routes of the Mediterranean. The Venetian Empire was an odd beast, beset on all sides by more powerful neighbors, but it survived for centuries thanks to Venice's unique combination of wealth and stability.

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Here's the rest of our conversation with historian and bestselling author Dan Jones. In Part 1, which you should absolutely listen to if you haven't already, we covered the Crusades in general; this time out, we discuss some of Dan's favorite crusaders, the most fascinating figures from four centuries of holy war.

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Alone among the world's regions, western Europe only had one major, long-lived imperial experience: that of Rome. When it fell, nothing like it ever returned again. According to Stanford's Professor Walter Scheidel, that fact had enormous consequences for the long-term development of Europe, and was a necessary precursor to the rise of modernity.

Check out Professor Scheidel's new book, Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, which comes out October 15th.

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When it comes to medieval and early modern economic history it is important to understand guilds, how they functioned, and their effects on society. Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie joins me to talk about guilds and her most recent book, The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis.

Find Professor Ogilvie’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/European-Guilds-Economic-Analysis-Princeton/dp/0691137544

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The Crusades defined the Middle Ages and left a long legacy behind them. We chat with Dan Jones, author of the upcoming book Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Land, about why this long series of conflicts mattered so much to medieval people and why they're still important today.

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There’s an interesting history when it comes to books, printing, and the Reformation, all tied together through new technology and business. Professor Andrew Pettegree joins me to talk about all of this and more, as well as his new book, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age.

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A swampy lagoon on the Adriatic coast of Italy was not a promising place for a city, but Venice grew from a collection of huts on spits of land to a glittering center of commerce and the heart of a maritime empire. Today, we explore the beginnings and rise of this fascinating city from late antiquity to the Black Death.

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Boxing has a long past, one deeply connected to race, labor, and broader developments in American history. Professor Louis Moore joins me to talk about those topics and about his outstanding book, I Fight For a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915.

Find Professor Moore's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Fight-Living-Manhood-1880-1915-Society/dp/0252082877

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The Italian Wars changed the face of Europe, but what was it like living through them? Today, we follow the lives of two composite characters to see both how war changed and how it affected the people who participated in them.

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Planning a summer vacation and looking for something fun to read? Patrick and Leah have you covered with a few suggestions.

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In our second episode on the Italian Wars, we explore how Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's vast territories ratcheted up the conflict from a dynastic squabble to a continent-spanning contest of great powers.

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What creates civilization, in the most basic sense? According to Professor David Frye, who joins me this week, it's walls - Hadrian's Wall, the Great Wall of China, city walls, and thousands more over the millennia.

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The Italian Wars were the defining conflict of the sixteenth century, bridging the gap between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Today, we explore their origins in medieval dynastic infighting and their opening stages, as King Charles VIII of France rolled south into Italy and changed European politics forever.

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It's a concept! It's a feeling! It's... been a long time since we talked about it. We're throwing it back to 2017 and tracing the evolution of war in the 15th and 16th centuries.

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Friend of the show Keith Pluymers returned for a great chat about fuel, environmental history, and why the seventeenth century is worth studying.

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In Renaissance Italy, war was simultaneously art, science, and big business, waged for profit and glory by hired contractors known as condottieri. Today, we follow one condottiere as he makes his way through the dangerous world of mercenary warfare in the fifteenth century.

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Renaissance Italy was a political minefield, where backstabbing dukes, ambitious republics, and disloyal mercenaries created a laboratory for political innovation. This environment produced professional armies, the roots of state finance, and modern diplomacy, a legacy Italy left for the rest of Europe.

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We're revisiting an episode of Tides of History we originally released in January 2018. Pay close attention, we're going to be spending a LOT of time in Italy this summer.

What was it like to have a front-row seat to the explosion of learning, art, and culture in Renaissance Florence? In this episode, we follow two people as they lived in the linked worlds of business and humanistic learning in the fifteenth century. These early knowledge workers combined a genuine interest in the wisdom of the classical past with a practical desire for the skills that would help them rise up the economic and social ladder.

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We catch up a bit more on Jakob Fugger's personality - or lack thereof - along with some of the other important south German trading firms of the age, the development of the Antwerp financial market, and the connection between banking and the patronage of Renaissance art.

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At the end of the fifteenth century, the center of European banking suddenly swung from its birthplace in Italy to south Germany. The key figure in that transition was Jakob Fugger of Augsburg, maybe the richest man who ever lived.

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The Medici name still carries echoes of power and labyrinthine politics. But the Medici got their start as bankers, and built a financial empire that spanned fifteenth-century Europe. Popes, kings, and merchants all did business with the Medici, and the family's power over Florence grew out of its fiscal wizardry - at least until it all fell apart.

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The Civil War and its decades-long aftermath continue to define American life well into the twenty-first century. Today we chat with Stanford's Professor Richard White, author of The Republic For Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, to get a grip on this pivotal and under-discussed era of history.

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Let's chat about some of the other interesting things Patrick discovered in his research for this month's episodes: messianic rulership and military revolutions in the Spain of Isabella and Ferdinand.

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Queen Isabella of Castile was one of the great state-building monarchs of the later Middle Ages, but state-building had a dark side: the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews, and the beginnings of a decades-long war that would consume western Europe for three generations.

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Queen Isabella of Castile was the greatest of the state-building rulers of the late Middle Ages. During her rule, she sent Columbus to America, married Ferdinand of Aragon to launch modern Spain, and finished the centuries-long Reconquista, ending centuries of Muslim rule in Iberia.

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We talked to bestselling novelist Philippa Gregory about her views of history and historical fiction, and her perspective on the Wars of the Roses, where she has spent many years.

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1492 was a big year, and not just because a certain Genoese navigator set sail into the unknown. Europe was on the cusp of enormous changes. Follow along as we travel all across the continent and get a feel for Europe on the brink.

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1492 was a truly wild year, and there is no one better to talk about it with than one of Patrick's favorite historians, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of many excellent books on Columbus and exploration.

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States didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps, driven solely by the will of indomitable rulers; instead, they benefited from the services of a class of highly educated and dedicated civil servants. They administered finance and justice and executed the royal will with competence and ruthlessness.

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When Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, met the business end of a Swiss halberd in 1477, his 19-year-old daughter Mary was set to inherit all of his vast possessions. But her position was precarious, surrounded by rapacious neighbors and rivals. The decisions she made about her future set in motion a chain of political events that would define Europe for centuries to come.

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The Valois dukes of Burgundy were kings in all but name. Originally a branch of the French royal family, they fought for control of the French crown, accumulated vast lands, and nearly carved out a kingdom for themselves in the borderlands between France and the Holy Roman Empire. But eventually their ambition stretched too far, and they disappeared in a haze of gunpowder and blood.

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Surprise: Patrick loves Game of Thrones. Bigger surprise: GoT is actually a pretty accurate portrayal of late medieval politics - except for the dragons. Patrick's friend Albro Lundy, a very funny and smart TV writer, joins us to talk about it. Follow him on Twitter @bromanconsul.

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The Wars of the Roses are infamous, but practically every European kingdom, not just England, was wracked by serious bouts of infighting in the second half of the 15th century. In a time period known for the growth of state power, why were there so many civil wars - and why were they all happening at the same time?

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By 1461, the Wars of the Roses had already claimed thousands of lives and shaken England's political system to its foundations. The bloodiest battle ever fought in England would soon follow, along with decades more of instability and periodic crisis.

Love Tides of History? You can follow Patrick on Twitter @Patrick_Wyman and Leah at @leahgoeswhere. You can follow the show @TidesHistory. Send us your questions and love letters! If you have hate mail address it to: Tides of History, Attn: Charles, Duke of Burgundy. He'll be sure we get it.

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The Wars of the Roses brought what had once been Europe’s most stable and well-governed kingdom to its knees. Weakness at the center, in the form of the useless King Henry VI, reverberated outwards throughout the political system. Could England survive Henry VI, and at what cost?

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Leah and I had the opportunity to give a public talk at the Sound Education Conference at Harvard. We talked about the Reformation, why it matters, and how historians think about it today.

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YES we're talking to THAT Raksha Dave, the one from Time Team, Patrick and Leah's favorite show! She tells us about her future digs, all the cool stuff she's done since Time Team, how she became an archaeologist, and why we should all treat old stuff with respect.

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You can listen to Mythology wherever you listen to Tides of History.

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Medieval politics, full of assassinations and betrayal, was not for the faint of heart. But even within that landscape, one man stands out for his cruelty: Vlad the Impaler, prince of Wallachia, the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. This episode examines the real person behind the legend and the world that made him.

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Nathaniel Philbrick - one of Patrick's favorite authors of popular history - stopped by to chat about his latest book, In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown. The bestselling author filled us in on the dramatic final days of the Revolutionary War and the strategic vision of George Washington.

You can get Nat's book here.

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Professor Judith Bennett joined Patrick to talk about the difference between ale and beer, and how work - and women's work in particular - changed over time.

Check out Judith's Books!

A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344

Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages

Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague

Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World 

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In 1453, after more than 60 years of trying, the Ottomans finally besieged and captured the city of Constantinople. This marked the end of one phase of Ottoman expansion and the beginning of another as the dominant power of the region. It was also the end of the Byzantines, the last vestige of a Roman Empire that had once stretched over the entire Mediterranean and beyond.

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The Ottoman Empire rose from humble beginnings in Anatolia to dominate a vast swathe of territory. Holy war, gaza, was a powerful driving force behind that expansion. At the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, Ottoman holy war clashed directly with its Christian equivalent: crusading.

If you're interested in learning more, you can check out:

The great book by Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds

If you prefer to watch your history, try Resurrection: Ertugrul on Netflix.

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Archaeology shows up all the time on Tides of History, and it's one of Patrick's favorite topics. Leah joins to chat about what it can tell us, how it works, and why it's so dang cool.

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The dark side of the late medieval Church was its emphasis on control and conformity. A concept of orthodoxy produced a conception of unacceptable difference, which manifested itself in hunts for heretics, witches, and the institution of the Inquisition.

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The late Middle Ages were a time of upheaval for the universal Church, caught between the glories and overwhelming power of the High Middle Ages and the crisis of the Protestant Reformation.

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History shapes our world in ways both seen and unseen. In the introductory episode of Tides of History, we explore two major tides - the Fall of Rome and the Rise of the Modern World - and why history matters in the here and now.

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History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, said Mark Twain. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the rise of the modern world: history ebbs and flows over the centuries, driven by great tides of economic, social, political, religious, and cultural change that shape the world and everyone who lives on it. In this new series from Wondery, PhD historian Patrick Wyman (Fall of Rome) brings the cutting edge of that history to listeners in plain, relatable English. Premieres July 20th.

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