A dozen conversations to change the way you think about the past.

Pre-history: 

  • Geologist-Paleontologist Andrew Knoll on the first 4 billion years of Earth’s history.
  • Archaeologist David Wengrow on the book he co-authored with the late David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity 
  • Anthropologist Brian Fagan on Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival From Our Ancestors 
  • Science writer Annalee Newitz on her book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age 
  • Mark Bittman on Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal

Native peoples and colonialism: 

  • Damon Akins on We Are the Land: A History of Native California 
  • David Silverman author of This Land is Their Land, on the real history of Thanksgiving
  • Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her book Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion 

Black life and liberation: 

  • Frederika Newton with a personal history of the early years of the Black Panther Party 
  • Berry Reid Soskin on the book about her remarkable century on this planet, Sign My Name to Freedom: A memoir of a pioneering life 
  • Malik Al Nasir on Gil Scott-Heron
  • David F. Walker on The Black Panther Party
  • David F. Walker on Frederic Douglass

Photo by Benigno Hoyuela on Unsplash