After World War II, Europe was changing radically, and its place in the world was changing as well. European powers had colonized around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in the 20th century, it all came crashing down. Of...

Much has been written about what exactly caused World War I. As befits a true global war, the reality is that there isn't a single cause. There aren't even three causes. There are a vast array of causes. Today we'll get into just a few...

In 2007, researchers surveyed 180 teachers to understand if they held stereotypes about their students. The most commonly held opinion was that Asian students were significantly more industrious, intelligent, and gentle. This might seem...

In which John Green teaches you about the economic malaise that beset the United States in the 1970s. A sort of perfect storm of events, it combined the continuing decline of America's manufacturing base and the oil shocks of 1973...

Decades after the fall of the Third Reich, it feels impossible to understand how Adolf Hitler, the tyrant who orchestrated one of the largest genocides in human history, could ever have risen to power in a democratic country. So how did...

Empire, imperialism, and colonialism are all interrelated tactics of geopolitics that are used to achieve similar goals of one state maintaining economic, political, or even cultural dominance over other territories. Today, we’re going...

John Green teaches you about Virginia Woolf's modernist novel, To the Lighthouse. Let's face it. You're not reading To the Lighthouse for the plot. There's not a whole lot of plot, unless you count the tension about the beef stew. You're...

You may not think much about moss, but it has a hidden super power, and it's been used to save countless lives.

There are lots of different ways to encrypt a message, from early, simple ciphers to the famous Enigma machine. But it’s tough to make a code truly unbreakable.

In which John Green teaches you about American women in the Progressive Era and, well, the progress they made. So the big deal is, of course, the right to vote women gained when the 19th amendment was passed and ratified. But women made...

Like the Industrial or the Einsteinian Revolution, the Space Race is a trope, or way of organizing historical events into a story that makes sense. In this story, the two great powers that emerged after World War Two—the United States...

We’ve explored the origins of modern biology, the earth sciences, and even the sciences of outer space. Now it’s time to put these disciplines together. It's Ecology time!!!

Remember how Darwin and Mendel lived around the same time, but everyone forgot about Mendel until 1900, and even then biologists saw Darwinism and Mendelism as two competing grand theories about how life works?

Well, in this episode...

Computers and computing have changed a lot over the History of Science but ESPECIALLY over the last 100 years. In this episode of Crash Course History of Science, we have a look at that history around World War Two and how that conflict...

The story picks up where we left off last time, with Einstein writing the president of his new homeland, the United States, urging him to build a nuclear weapon before Hitler. This is the tale of the most destructive force humans have...

There was physics before Einstein in the same way that there was biology before Darwin. Einstein didn’t just add some new ideas to physics. And he didn’t just add a unifying framework for doing physics, like Newton. Einstein took what...

When he was a child, George Takei and his family were forced into an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, as a "security" measure during World War II. 70 years later, Takei looks back at how the camp shaped his surprising, personal...

Today we're going to tell the story of a quiet revolution in the 1960s that shifted our entire understanding of how the Earth works. We currently believe that the Earth's broken outer shell rises from the mantle and folds back in - kind...

In which John Green teaches you about conflict in Israel and Palestine. This conflict is often cast as a long-term beef going back thousands of years, and rooted in a clash between religions. Well, that's not quite true. What is true is...

During World War II, Nazi Germany undertook the imprisonment and summary execution of many of its own citizens, and citizens of the nations they occupied. One of the groups that came under assault was the European Jewish population. More...

In which John Green teaches you about World War II, a subject so big, it takes up two episodes. This week, John will teach you how the United States got into the war, and just how involved America was before Congress actually...

Sometimes, a single decision can change the course of history. Join journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson as she tells the story of the Great Migration, the outpouring of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to cities...

European powers had a lot of wars in the 18th century, and they weren't confined to Europe. Conflict raged across the globe, in what might be called a World War...but we don't call it that, because we already have a couple of those...

Europe's system of alliances and centuries-old tensions erupted into war in August of 1914. This week on Crash Course Euro, we're talking about the military history of World War I, and taking a look at the broad strokes of how the war...