The face of nuclear terror has changed since the Cold War, but disaster-medicine expert Irwin Redlener reminds us the threat is still real. He looks at some of history's farcical countermeasures and offers practical advice on how to...

In which John Green teaches you about the Cold War, which was occasionally hot, but on average, it was just cool. In the sense of its temperature. It was by no means cool, man. After World War II, there were basically two big...

Just like many great duos throughout history, Bulgaria and Germany have a fascinating (though uneven) relationship. In today’s episode, we’re going to take a closer look at the impact of politics on economies as we trace this history of...

Mir taught us a lot, but most days, it was also a mess of mold and electrical problems... even when it wasn't literally on fire.

Sometimes, friendship isn't forever. At the conclusion of World War II, the old structures of power were a shambles. The traditional European powers were greatly weakened by years of total war and widespread destruction. The USSR was...

Our look at World War II continues with a closer examination of just how the war impacted soldiers in the field, and the people at home. For many of the combatants, the homefront and the warfront were one and the same. The war disrupted...

Did you know the Soviet Union had its own Space Shuttle? Learn all about the Buran, what happened to it, and what innovations set it apart from its NASA counterpart.

Once upon a time, there was a lake that was so radioactive, that standing on its shore for more than an hour would almost definitely kill you. Join Olivia to learn how it got that bad in the first place, and what was done to fix it!

Before the Orion of today, the Orion of the 1950s was propelled by nuclear bombs exploding behind it.

Why do societies fail? With lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana, Jared Diamond talks about the signs that collapse is near, and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it.

A sad reality that we have to face when studying outbreak science is that sometimes groups of people use outbreaks intentionally to inflict harm on another group. We call this "weaponizing an outbreak", and it's the focus of this...

We're still leading up to World War II, but first we gotta talk about the rise of the dictators. Today we talk about the rise of militaristic dictatorships in Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Spain, and the economic depression that...

Only a couple of decades after the end of the First World War--which was supposed to be the War that Ended All Wars--another, bigger, farther-flung, more destructive, and deadlier war began. Today, you'll learn about how the war in...

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...

Hank puts the immense power of the sun into perspective through comparison with the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated.

60 years ago, in January 1958, the United States launched its first satellite, Explorer 1.

At the end of World War II, the nations of Europe were a shambles. Today we'll learn about how the various countries and blocs approached the problem of rebuilding their infrastructure and helping their residents recover. You'll learn...

In the decades following World War II, life changed in many ways, and a fair number of those changes were for the better. Many of those improvements were driven by advances in science and technology, in fields like biology,...

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...

In which John Green teaches you about the Cold War, which was occasionally hot, but on average, it was just cool. In the sense of its temperature. It was by no means cool, man. After World War II, there were basically two big...

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...

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...

We talk a lot about Keynesian economics on this show, pretty much because the real world currently runs on Keynesian principles. That said, there are some other economic ideas out there, and today we're going to talk about a few of them....

Omer Bartov is a professor of history at Brown University, where he holds the chair in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. A historian for more than four decades, he began his career by challenging the postwar German myth of a “clean”...