In which John Green teaches you about World War II, aka The Great Patriotic War, aka The Big One. So how did this war happen? And what does it mean? We've all learned the facts about World War II many times over, thanks to repeated...

In which John Green teaches you about World War II, and some of the causes behind the war. In a lot of ways, WWII was about resources, and especially about food. The expansionist aggression of both Germany and Japan were in a lot of ways...

When an Armenian resistance movement began to form in the 19th century, Sultan Abdul Hamid II took decisive action. He led the Hamidian Massacres— a relentless campaign of violence that killed over 150,000 Armenians. These massacres were...

In which John Green teaches you about World War I and how it got started. Crash Course doesn't usually talk much about dates, but the way that things unfolded in July and August of 1914 are kind of important to understanding the Great...

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...

Democracy is about having choices — and authoritarianism is about not having them, says lawyer and writer Ian Bassin. Detailing the seven steps of the authoritarian playbook, he invites us all to put aside our differences and rethink our...

Economic crises can and do happen. But for every true crisis, there are many false alarms, says economist Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak. He explains how to live with the media's pervasive economic doomsaying, why we should stop treating...

Every year, hundreds of millions of people voluntarily turn their lives upside down by setting their clocks forward one hour in the spring and back one hour in the autumn on a particular date mandated by the government wherever they...

Prepare to be horrified, and to look into the face of inhumanity with the Grand Guignol. Mike Rugnetta teaches you about one of theater history's most horrible chapters. The Grand Guignol was a French theater based in Paris from the late...

It's time to go Back...to the Future. By which I mean, we're going back into the past to talk about Futurism. Which seems like it would be cool, but it was started by this terrible guy Martinetti, who also wrote the Italian Fascist...

Get ready to get weird. Mike Rugnetta teaches you about the Theater of the Absurd, a 1950s theatrical reaction to the dire world events of the 1940s. You'll learn about Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and the theatrical...

We reference the DSM pretty frequently on SciShow Psych, and for good reason: it’s considered the gold standard for professional mental health diagnosis in the United States, but it was an interesting journey to get there.

Scientists in the nineteenth century discovered a lot about life and matter. But exactly what kind of stuff is the human brain? That one was—and is—tricky.



The brain sciences—with experiments and therapies tied to biological...

In which John Green teaches you about the war that was supposed to end all wars. Instead, it solved nothing and set the stage for the world to be back at war just a couple of decades later. As an added bonus, World War I changed the way...

Machine intelligence is here, and we're already using it to make subjective decisions. But the complex way AI grows and improves makes it hard to understand and even harder to control. In this cautionary talk, techno-sociologist Zeynep...

Early telegraph operators and WWI spies picked up some weird noises on radio waves. As it turned out, they were actually listening to plasma waves in Earth’s magnetic field lines!

World War I was very hard on the Russian Empire. So hard, in fact, that it led to the end of the Russian Empire. As the global conflict ground on, Tsar Nicholas II faced increasing unrest at home. Today we'll learn about the Revolutions...

French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in early 2014 with his book on a simple, brutal formula explaining economic inequality: r > g (meaning that return on capital is generally higher than economic growth). Here, he talks...

Hollywood was riding high until their formula got to be stale. In places like Italy and France (as well as other places in the world we'll talk about soon) filmmakers were starting to break out of the mold and make daring films that...

As we forge ahead into the new year, let’s take some time to thank the intrepid researchers, volunteers, and even the occasional dog who came before us, made sure our food and drugs are free from poison, and built the devices that make...

HEPA filters are the basis of modern filtration - but they also represent a straight line from the Manhattan Project to your living room!

I want you to reimagine how life is organized on earth, says global strategist Parag Khanna. As our expanding cities grow ever more connected through transportation, energy and communications networks, we evolve from geography to what he...

We've spent a lot of time focusing on France and the U.S. as that's where a significant amount of both infrastructure and business models were initially set up for film. But there were other countries adding their own stories to the...

Aphorism enthusiast and author James Geary waxes on a fascinating fixture of human language: the metaphor. Friend of scribes from Aristotle to Elvis, metaphor can subtly influence the decisions we make, Geary says.