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Everywhere around us are echoes of the past. Those echoes define the boundaries of states and countries, how we pray and how we fight. They determine what money we spend and how we earn it at work, what language we speak and how we raise our children. From Wondery, host Patrick Wyman, PhD (“Fall Of Rome”) helps us understand our world and how it got to be the way it is.
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2025-02-20 |
Interview: Professor Lyndal Roper on the German Peasants' War The German Peasants' War was the largest popular revolt in Europe before the French Revolution, but it's largely been forgotten. Why? Professor Lyndal Roper of the University of Oxford joins me to discuss her absolutely outstanding new book, Summer of ... |
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2025-02-13 | Pyrrhus of Epirus won costly but clear victories over the Romans in their first battlefield meetings, but couldn't win the war. Rome's dogged determination eventually won the war for them and placed them on the path to seemingly inevitable conflict wit... | |
2025-02-06 |
Duels, Violence, and Conflict in Early Modern Europe: Interview with Professor Stuart Carroll Early modern Europe was a violent place, full of duels, bloody encounters, and decades-long feuds. In many ways, it was more fractious and dangerous than it had been during the Middle Ages. Professor Stuart Carroll is an expert on the social and cultur... |
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2025-01-30 | By 281 BC, Rome controlled much of Italy, but the city was still a minor player on the larger Mediterranean scene. That changed when King Pyrrhus of Epirus crossed the Adriatic with a powerful army of Macedonian pikemen and war elephants, setting in mo... | |
2025-01-27 | Vienna is working a delivery job when she hears about Cop City, a massive police training facility planned for Atlanta. She decides to join the activists trying to stop construction. When Vienna arrives in the South River Forest, she quickly finds a co... | |
2025-01-23 |
King Pyrrhus of Epirus and a New Age of Mediterranean Politics While the Punic Wars mark the stage of Roman history with which most people are familiar, Rome's entrance onto the stage of Mediterranean power politics actually came a decade earlier, with a bloody, grinding war against the Hellenistic king Pyrrhus of... |
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2025-01-16 | As the fourth century drew to a close, Rome wasn't the only rising power in the central Mediterranean; Syracuse and Carthage were battling for dominance in Sicily and beyond, fighting devastating wars of ever-increasing scale that led directly to the e... | |
2025-01-09 |
Excavating a Scythian Royal Burial Mound: Interview with Dr. Gino Caspari Dr. Gino Caspari returns to discuss the extraordinary finds at his most recent excavation of an early (maybe the earliest) Scythian royal burial mound in Siberia! We discuss horse sacrifice, state formation, the earliest Scythians, and the trials of ex... |
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2025-01-02 |
What If: Alexander the Great had Died at the Granicus River? How would history look different if Alexander the Great had died in 334 BC? Would Macedonia still have conquered most of Asia?Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, eb... |
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2024-12-26 | Carthage spent most of the fifth century BC building up its economy, but in the aftermath of the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily, the Carthaginians decided that the time was ripe to create a new Mediterranean empire.Patrick's book is now avail... |