History episodes
15 episodes so far
-
16 min
Heir to the Throne: How Succession Rules Made or Broke Empires
Why the rules of inheritance quietly decided who ruled the world, and who tore it apart
-
22 min
Out of Africa: The Story of Human Migrations
Every ecosystem, language, and civilization on Earth bears the fingerprint of a journey someone once made
-
19 min
The Bone Collectors: How Fossil Hunters Learned to Read Deep Time
From dragon bones and feuding gentlemen to CT scans and ancient proteins, the strange craft of reconstructing vanished animals
-
Free
19 min
Starvation as Policy: How Famine Became a Political Weapon
What really caused the great famines of Bengal, Ukraine and Mao's China, and why hunger is still used as a weapon of war
-
13 min
Counting the Days: How Calendars Conquered and Divided the World
The hidden political, spiritual, and scientific battles behind humanity's obsession with marking the days
-
19 min
The First Farmers: Why Humans Traded Foraging for Fields
What the first farmers gained and lost, and how a handful of seeds went on to reshape the whole planet
-
18 min
The Secret Republic of the Night Shift: Life and Work After Dark
Why people once woke for an hour every midnight, how gas and then electric light opened the night to work, and who pays for a world that never switches off
-
16 min
Mapping Disaster: How Visualizing Crisis Gave Humanity the Power to Survive It
What happens when people map a catastrophe, from a London cholera outbreak to an earthquake in Haiti
-
15 min
The Silk Road's Secret Cargo: Ideas That Traveled Farther than Goods
Monks with sacred texts, merchants with a new way of counting, and fleas carrying a plague, all riding the same caravans
-
16 min
The Unsung Engineers of the Industrial Revolution
How anonymous craftsmen, tinkerers, and self-taught visionaries forged the modern world
-
13 min
Looking Inside: Two Thousand Years of Mapping the Body
Forbidden dissections, body snatchers and X-rays, and what they cost the people on the table
-
20 min
After the Plague: Epidemics That Raised Wages and Forced Change
What the survivors of the Black Death, cholera, the 1918 flu and AIDS won from catastrophe, and what it cost them
-
16 min
The Lost Civilizations of the Deep: Underwater Archaeology's Greatest Discoveries
How sunken cities and shipwrecks are rewriting human history beneath the waves
-
20 min
Reading the Rings: Dendrochronology and the Secret Diaries of Trees
How the growth rings of ancient trees became a precise calendar for climate, collapse, and human history
-
13 min
The Art and Science of Cartography: Mapping Our World
When you pull out your phone and open Google Maps to navigate to a new restaurant, you're participating in a traditio...
Hear any of them in full
Every episode is in the Compound app; Compound+ opens the whole library.