Blog Posts

We are now 1 year into this journey to create and maintain a professional podcast covering history, politics, and religion, and specifically to expose topics that we may have learned and forgotten, or perhaps never learned at all.  The history that …

Episode 504: "The Mossadegh Hour" (coming November 11!) After World War II, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company is the United Kingdom's biggest overseas asset, and it holds a monopoly on the extraction, refinement, and exportation  of Iranian oil. While M…

Sharon Bibee joins us for our latest series, "The U.S. and Iran: What Went Wrong." For more from Sharon, read her column, "Redacted No More," in which she explores history, politics, travel, culture, and whatever else sparks her curiosity. You can …

This gallery of photos, maps, and other images add to our "The U.S. and Iran: What Went Wrong?" audio series about how America's relations with Iran – where the United States once was viewed as a refreshing alternative to predatory imperial powers a…

Listeners who enjoyed our "A Christian Nation?" series might find this video interesting: The United States Is Not A Christian Nation | TheThinkingAtheist | YouTube | October 7, 2026 The speaker is atheist activist Seth Andrews. He gives his perspe…

The map below features four snapshots of the American population and density from 1790 (Top Left) 1800, 1810, and 1820. This is immediately before the country invested heavily in domestic transportation infrastructure, to connect to their massive te…

When John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay talked about “Internal Improvements” and the “American System” in the 1820s, they were imagining an America that did not really exist yet, and was very difficult for most to conceptualize. The country had enormo…

From an A-Cup to a D Cup and in Gold! 'Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, their words and their art.” John Ruskin “St Mark’s Rest: A History of Venice” (1885) One of the more outrageous “improv…

Heritage, not Hate In our series on “America First” we got to see how far nativists would go with their xenophobia in the 1920s and 1930s. Using fashionable but unscientific study of eugenics American nativists assessed Jews, Catholics, Asians, Afr…

This gallery of photos, maps, and other images add to our "Internal Improvements" audio series about America's struggles in the first half of the 19th century to give the United States government the power to develop infrastructure and create a stab…

This gallery of photos, maps, and other images add to our "A Christian Nation?" audio series about whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation. We expand the gallery as the series continues – and sometimes after it has concluded – an…

Listeners interested in a visual representation of the progress of the fighting in the Chinese Civil War during its final phase after World War II — which we discuss in the first portion of Episode 208 ("Cash My Check") of the "Tea, Drugs, and Jesus…