In which John Green teaches you WHY World War I started. Or tries to anyway. With this kind of thing, it's kind of hard to assign blame to any one of the nations involved. Did the fault lie with Austria-Hungary? Germany? Russia? Julius...

The eruption of Mt Vesuvius buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and one ancient library was burned to a crisp. However, scientists are now using machine learning and AI to decipher the writing on them and recover lost works of...

Scientists have developed a new AI that can teach itself how to be the master of an ancient board game.

Musty, with hints of vanilla, coffee, and maybe fresh cut grass-- why do old books smell the best?

In a new book, Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer assemble a team of fellow historians to push back on what they see as the biggest myths and rampant misinformation about major issues facing this country and some of its most defining...

In which John introduces you to quite a lot of Chinese history by discussing the complicated relationship between the Confucian scholars who wrote Chinese history and the emperors (and empress) who made it. Included is a brief...

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

In which you are introduced to the life and accomplishments of Alexander the Great, his empire, his horse Bucephalus, the empires that came after him, and the idea of Greatness. Is greatness a question of accomplishment, of impact, or...

As archaeologists pored over ancient tombs in western China, they discovered some surprisingly well-preserved and familiar relics. Though hardened over 1,000 years, there sat little crescent-shaped dumplings. So who invented these plump...

In which John Green teaches you about the War of 1812. The War of 1812 was fought between the United States and its former colonial overlord England. It started in, you guessed it 1812. The war lasted until 1815, and it resolved very...

Scientists have developed a new AI that can teach itself how to be the master of an ancient board game.

In this episode of Crash Course History of Science, we travel to the Americas to ask the question, "When are we?" and get some answers. We'll look at the Maya, Inca, and Olmec civilizations and how they recorded their science.

During our last several episodes, Europe and the European-controlled world have been in crisis. Wars, disease, climate changes, and shifts in religious and political power threw the European world into turmoil. People were looking for a...

Musty, with hints of vanilla, coffee, and maybe fresh cut grass-- why do old books smell the best?

In which John Green teaches you about the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the largest of the ancient civilizations. John teaches you the who, how, when, where and why of the Indus Valley Civilization, and dispenses advice on how to be...

In which John Green teaches you about the New Deal, which was president Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan to pull the united States out of the Great Depression of the 1930's. Did it work? Maybe. John will teach you about some of the most...

When the Protestant Reformation broke out in Western Europe, the Catholic Church got the message, at least a little bit. Pope Paul III called a council to look into reforming some aspects of the Catholic Church and try to stem the tide...

In which John Green investigates the dawn of human civilization. John looks into how people gave up hunting and gathering to become agriculturalists, and how that change has influenced the world we live in today. Also, there are some...

In which John Green teaches you how Russia evolved from a loose amalgamation of medieval principalities known as the Kievan Rus into the thriving democracy we know today. As you can imagine, there were a few bumps along the road. It...

In which John Green teaches you about the Mughal Empire, which ruled large swaths of the Indian Sub-Continent from 1526 to (technically) 1857. While John teaches you about this long-lived Muslim empire, he'll also look at the idea of...

At the end of our journey through modern European history, we're taking an episode to look back at how the practice of history developed and what the aim and goals and purpose of history have been. We'll also take time to consider how we...

The American Civil War is one of the deadliest in US History, and let's just get this out of the way: it was about slavery. In the more than 150 years since the end of the Civil War, there have been many attempts to litigate the reasons...

In which John Green teaches you about the Crusades embarked upon by European Christians in the 12th and 13th centuries. Our traditional perception of the Crusades as European Colonization thinly veiled in religion isn't quite right. John...

In which John Green teaches you about the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the largest of the ancient civilizations. John teaches you the who, how, when, where and why of the Indus Valley Civilization, and dispenses advice on how to be...