Yesterday

Philip Augustus: the Plantagenets’ greatest rival

King Philip Augustus of France was the Plantagenets’ ultimate enemy. A ruler with an iron fist and sharp political instincts, he consistently exploited the squabbles of the English dynasty, all while transforming France into a dominant power in Western Europe. Speaking to Emily B ... Show More

50m 42s

Aug 31

Laura Ingalls Wilder: life of the week

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 'Little House' books have captivated generations with tales of family, hardship and survival on the American frontier. But how closely did Wilder’s fiction reflect her real childhood – and what should we make of its more controversial portrayals? In this ep ... Show More

46m 32s

Aug 30

How bullies shaped 19th-century America

America's Gilded Age is often remembered for rapid expansion and opportunity, but beneath the surface lay a brutal society in which it paid to be a bully. In this episode, Elinor Evans speaks to historian Andrew Wender Cohen about his new book Gangster of New York: A Violent Life ... Show More

42m 45s

Sep 2023

S8: Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest medical Holocaust in Modern History

My special guest is author Catherine Arnold who's here to discuss a pandemic in the early 19th century that left bodies all over the place. Get her book Pandemic 1918 - Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest medical Holocaust in Modern History on Amazon or your local book store. ... Show More

47m 37s

Mar 2021

1918 Flu Pandemic, Revisited - Part 1

Now that we’ve lived through a year of a global pandemic, our approach to looking at the 1918 flu pandemic had shifted. We’re revisiting the events of 1918 with new perspective, comparing then to now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee om ... Show More

43m 1s

Apr 2021

An Unfinished Lesson

<p>More than a century ago, millions of people around the world died in a massive influenza pandemic. The so-called "Spanish flu" outbreak of 1918 revealed a truth about viruses: they don't just infect us biologically. They also detect fissures in societies and fault lines betwee ... Show More

49m 26s

Apr 2020

Lessons from the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic

The influenza outbreak of 1918 was the deadliest pandemic in recent history, killing an estimated 50 million to 100 million people aroundthe world. And it bears some striking similarities to the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, Laura Spinney, science journalist and author of Pale Rider: ... Show More

24 m

Jun 2025

The Spanish Flu

The influenza pandemic of 1918-20 infected about one-third of the world’s population at the time, killing at least 50 million people. Occurring during the First World War, what became known as the Spanish Flu spread rapidly as soldiers moved across continents. It overwhelmed hosp ... Show More

56m 52s

Mar 2020

The Deadliest Pandemic in Modern History

April 5, 1918. The first mention of a new influenza outbreak in Kansas appears in a public health report. That strain, later called the Spanish Flu, would go on to kill at least 50 million people worldwide. In a time before widespread global travel, how did this disease spread so ... Show More

20m 24s

Mar 2020

The 'Spanish' flu

In 1918, more than fifty million people died in an outbreak of flu, which spread all over the world in the wake of the first World War. We hear eye-witness accounts of the worst pandemic of the twentieth century.(Photo: An American policeman wearing a mask to protect himself from ... Show More

9 m

Jun 2020

History's Lessons for Our Post-Virus Future

As soon as the Coronavirus became a pandemic, people began making parallels to the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, and reaching even further back to the black death of the middle ages. It makes sense--past pandemics may be our only reference point for whole populations being strick ... Show More

15 m

Feb 2022

147. Disease, the New World and modern pandemics

How devastating were European arrivals to the Americas in terms of deaths and the introduction of new infectious diseases? Tom and Dominic are joined by Professor Kyle Harper from the University of Oklahoma to discuss the relationship between disease and colonial expansion, the ... Show More

39m 47s

May 2018

Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017)

The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson. But despite a death toll of between 50 a ... Show More

43m 48s

The Spanish Flu pandemic