10:00 AM Pacific Time: Monday - Thursday
Letters & Politics seeks to explore the history behind today’s major global and national news stories. Hosted by Mitch Jeserich.
In concluding our series of conversations on the ancient world, today, we look at the Caliphates of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries in Baghdad and Cordoba. Guest: Violet Moller is a historian and writer who specializes in intellectual history. She is the author of the book The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History … Continued
More than two thousand years ago, in ancient Rome lived a poet named Lucrecious whose work on the nature of things revolutionized the way people understood the universe. Lucrecious thought that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very … Continued
We continue our series of conversations on the ancient world by looking East and the first global empire of Persia. The first ruler Cyrus the Great, brought by conquest or gentler mean a dominion stretching from the Aegean Sea to the Hindu Kush and encompassing some tens of millions of people. Acclaimed for ruling with … Continued
The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. It is about how we find community, how we find who gets to be in a particular community, and what does it mean that some people … Continued
Historians frequently see the late 1900 and earliest century as a period of time that represents the fiercest battle between labor and capital. Today we examine this period to the times of Eugene V. Debs, the perennial socialist candidate who in 1920 ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America’s … Continued
We continue our series of conversations on the history of socialism, this time with Professor and author Gary Dorrien. In this episode, we discuss the American religious tradition of the social gospel and the black social gospel. These traditions would provide the intellectual underpinnings for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Guest: Gary Dorrien is Reinhold … Continued
Today we continue our series of conversations on the history of socialism. In this episode we talk about the raise of socialism and socialist politics, both in Europe and in the United States with Gary Dorrien. Guest: Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion … Continued
Today we begin a series of conversations on socialism. We are join by Bhaskar Sunkara who discusses what exactly socialism is, why America needs socialism, and what would a socialist system in the U.S. look like. Guest: Bhaskar Sunkara, founder and editor of the Jacobin Magazine, the most successful American ideological magazine launched in the … Continued
Today, we hear part three of the part series of Ancient Rome: From Republic to Empire. In this episode, we focus on the rise of the ancient empire that came out of the destruction of the republic with a leading expert on ancient military history Barry Strauss. Guest: Barry Strauss is a professor of history … Continued
Today, we hear part two of Ancient Rome: From Republic to Empire series. In this episode we continue our conversation with Edward J. Watts diving in to what tore the ancient Roman Republic apart. We talk about what happened in the more than one hundred years in which the Roman republic descended into chaos caused … Continued
