PODCAST · society
15 Minute History
by The University of Texas at Austin
15 Minute History is a history podcast designed for historians, enthusiasts, and newbies alike. This is a joint project of Hemispheres, the international outreach consortium at the University of Texas at Austin, and Not Even Past, a website with articles on a wide variety of historical issues, produced by the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. This podcast series is devoted to short, accessible discussions of important topics in world history, United States history, and Texas history with the award winning faculty and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, and distinguished visitors to our campus. They are meant to be a resource for both teachers and students, and can be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in history. For more information and to hear our complete back catalog of episodes, visit our website!
Episodes
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Episode 154: The Nature of Empire: Power, Ecology and Knowledge
How the environment has been perceived, valued and manipulated by humans since prehistoric times. But in the last millennium, empires brought something new into the mix — the organization of local knowledge and practices into bureaucratic and military systems that centralized power — and indeed,...
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Episode 153: Horses and Humans throughout History
Horses and humans have gone hand in hand for centuries. Our guest today is CU Boulder professor William Taylor, whose new book "Hoof Beats” takes us across thousands of years and miles to explore how horses helped create the human world we live in today. In doing so, Taylor challenges our...
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Episode 152: Rethinking the Slave Trade
Beginning in the 15th century, European history took a dark turn with the rapid expansion of the slave trade. We’re joined today by Emory professor David Eltis, the co- editor of www.slavevoyages.org that draws on thousands of records — ship logs, registers, letters and government records — to...
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Episode 151: Henri Christophe: First and Last King of Haiti
Between 1807 and 1820, Haiti was led by it’s first and last king, Henri Christophe. A contemporary of Robespierre and Napoleon, Washington and Hamilton, his life was as colorful, controversial and as tragic as any from his age. He presided over a Haitian state that was opulent and cultured on one...
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Episode 150: America First: The Debate Then and Now
In the late 1930s, War in Europe seemed inevitable. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a fierce debate was underway — if war comes to Europe, should America get involved or stay out? On one side of the debate was President Franklin Roosevelt — who favored intervention — and on the other, Charles...
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Episode 149: A crisis of confidence – America in 1876
Two years from now, America will enter its 250th year as a nation. For some, it will be a day to celebrate without question. But, for others it may be something of an anti-climax, or at least a chance to reflect upon the continuing gap between the promise and reality of the American project.…
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Episode 148: US China relations in the 1970s
During the 1970s, relations between the US and China were transformed. Previously the two nations were cold war enemies. But Kazushi Minami argues that the '70s saw Americans reimagine China as a country of opportunities, while Chinese reinterpreted the US as an agent of modernization, capable of...
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Episode 147: The Court Packing Crisis
In 1937, American politics was gripped by President Roosevelt's court packing plan. Frustrated with what he perceived to be an aging, obstructionist Supreme Court, Roosevelt pressed congress to expand the court from 9 to 15 members. Stepping into the ensuing maelstrom was Texas congressman Hatton...
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Episode 146: Black Labor in Boston
The historian Henry Adams once wrote that, “the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Changes during that period were indeed profound in Adam’s home town of Boston. And yet, for the majority of the city’s black men and women, life and work in 1900 were not that...
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Episode 145: Student Protests
Over the course of the academic year, student protests have roiled college campuses like at no other time in recent memory. Going further back though, historians see plenty of parallels — as well as some key differences — with student protest movements focused on Vietnam (1960s/70s) and South...
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Episode 144: Partisanship in the Revolutionary era
Political partisanship is not only a hallmark of US democracy today. There is also a long history of dysfunction and division as old as America. H.W. Brands's new book, Founding Partisans is a revelatory history of the Revolutionary era's stormy politics, which includes a look at the nation's...
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Episode 143: Glen Canyon and Water Infrastructure
Climate change and population growth is creating a new appreciation — and anxiety — around water infrastructure, both in the western United States and around the world. We're joined today by Professor Erika Bsumek, whose new book, The Foundations of Glen Canyon, focuses on America’s second…
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Episode 142: World War I and the Hapsburg Empire
The Hapsburg Empire was founded in 1282 (or 1526, depending on who you ask) and lasted until 1918. Despite its increasingly antiquated and illiberal tendencies, it survived the reformation, the thirty years war, the enlightenment, the age of Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, and the...
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Episode 141: Reconstruction From Past to Present
In the wake of the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era emerged as a time of radical change in the 19th century United States. Dr. Peniel Joseph brings this conversation into the 20th and 21st centuries as we discuss his most recent book, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial…
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Episode 140: Ridley Scott’s Napoleon
Ridley Scott's new film, Napoleon, is a monumental historical epic that has endured mixed reviews since its release last month, due to historical inaccuracies and narrative jumps. But do such criticisms miss the point? Today 15 Minute History is joined by Professor Judith Coffin, who studies and...
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Episode 139: New Theory of American History
"How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world's most exemplary democracy?" asks Professor Ned Blackhawk (Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone), author of The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Today, Dr. Blackhawk...
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Episode 138: Sex, Race, and Labor in French Colonialism
Traditionally, we think about European power being built with ships and swords. However, new scholarship uncovers a more nuanced and complex picture. Today, 15 Minute history is joined by Mélanie Lamotte, a historian of the French Empire whose work demonstrates the role that sex, race and labor...
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Episode 137: Jean Paul Sartre In The Arab World
In 1967, the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre traveled to Egypt and Israel on a quest to understand the region and its conflicts. The trip would challenge and change him — and lead to accusations of betrayal. Today, 15 Minute History is joined by Yoav Di Capua, author of “No Exit Arab...
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Episode 136: Afro-Indigenous Histories of the US
Afro-Indigenous histories are central to the history of the United States, tribal sovereignty, and civil rights. Today, Dr. Kyle Mays (Saginaw Chippewa) author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States and Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North…
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Episode 135: Connected Histories of Cuba and the United States
While the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War are important aspects of the United States and Cuba's shared history, they are not the only elements the two share. According to today's guest and author of Cuba: An American History, Professor Ada Ferrer, there are the centuries of interconnected...
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Episode 134: Austin’s Black History
To kick off the new season of 15 Minute History, we sit down with Dr. Javier Wallace, founder and guide of Black Austin Tours. While those familiar with Austin know the George Washington Carver Museum as well as historically Black East Austin, Dr. Wallace unpacks other hidden, and not-so-hidden...
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Episode 133: The 1844 Philadelphia Riots
In 1844, Philadelphia, a hub for Irish immigration to the United States, witnessed a series of violent Nativist riots that targeted Irish Americans and Roman Catholic churches. In our season finale, Zachary Schrag discusses the events leading up to the Philadelphia Nativists Riots of 1844, who…
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Episode 132: History of the Second Ku Klux Klan
Historians argue that several versions of the group known as the Ku Klux Klan or KKK have existed since its inception after the Civil War. But, what makes the Klan of the 1920s different from the others? Linda Gordon, the winner of two Bancroft Prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, writes…
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Episode 131: Climate and Environmental History in Context
How do historians teach Environmental History in an age where climate catastrophe fills the headlines? Megan Raby and Erika Bsumek, both History Professors and Environmental Historians discuss what drew them to the field, how they talk about environmental history with their students, and the 2021...
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Episode 130: Black Reconstruction in Indian Territory
Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) was home to a wide array of groups including Native American Nations, enslaved Indian Freed-people, African Americans, White settlers, and others. In a conversation on Black Reconstruction in Indian Territory, Alaina Roberts discusses what...
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Episode 129: Slavery in the West
In the antebellum years, freedom and unfreedom often overlapped, even in states that were presumed "free states." According to a new book by Kevin Waite, this was in part because the reach of the Slave South extended beyond the traditional South into newly admitted free and slave states. States...
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Episode 128: The Racial Geography Tour at U.T. Austin
For almost two decades, Edmund (Ted) Gordon has been leading tours of UT Austin that show how racism, patriarchy, and politics are baked into the landscape and architecture of the campus. According to the now digitized tour's website, "What began as lectures about UT’s Black history turned into a...
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Episode 127: History of the U.S.-Mexico Border Region
In recent years, conversations about the US-Mexico border have centered around the border wall. However, according to today’s guest, C.J. Alvarez, the wall is one of many construction projects that have occurred in the border region in the last 30 years. "From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to...
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Episode 126: Postwar Lesbian History
Stereotypes of the 1950s family generally include a hardworking husband, a diligent housewife, their children, and a white picket fence. However, research by Lauren Gutterman and others suggests a much more flexible family system that could sometimes include same-sex relationships. In today's...
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Episode 125: Environmental Justice and Indigenous History
In the Spring of 2016, protests concerning the Dakota Access Pipeline dominated national headlines. For many people, it was the first time they'd thought about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and environmental justice. However, what occurred at Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL movement…
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Episode 124: The “Spanish” Influenza of 1918-1920
In the age of coronavirus and COVID-19, comparisons are being made to an unusually long-lived and virulent epidemic of influenza that occurred a century ago. The so-called “Spanish” flu went around the world in three waves, claiming more than fifty million lives–more than perished in the…
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Episode 123: Scientific, Geographic & Historiographic Inventions of Colombia
The historian Andre Gunder Frank has theorized that former colonies cannot develop economically until they have overcome the legacy of their colonial past. The ways that the United States has overcome the legacy of its colonial past with Great Britain is, in many ways, unique, especially by...
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Episode 122: The History of Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy in the U.S.
Sexual orientation conversion therapy, the attempt to change one’s sexual orientation through psychological or therapeutic practice, has now been banned in 17 American states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, three Canadian provinces, one state in Australia and several nations in…
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Episode 121: The Case for Women’s History
In the spring of 2019, a widely circulated column assailed the field of history for being too “esoteric,” in particular calling out subfields like women’s and gender studies. The executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman, wrote a response suggesting that the critic...
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Episode 120: Slave-Owning Women in the Antebellum U.S.
Historians have long assumed that white women in the U.S. south benefited only indirectly from the ownership of enslaved people. Historians have neglected these women because their behavior didn’t conform to the picture we have of the patriarchal culture of the 18-19 century marriage. In an...
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Episode 119: Beatlemania and the 55th Anniversary of the First Beatles Tour to the US
The Beatles arrived for their first concert in the United States on February 11, 1964 to rabid fanfare. Legions of screaming women greeted John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr on every stop of the U.S. tour, leading to observers dubbing the period as “Beatlemania.” As one...
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Episode 118: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science
Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how…
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Episode 117: Albert Einstein – Separating Man from Myth
The subject of endless speculation, fascination, and laudatory writings, German physicist Albert Einstein captured the imaginations of millions after his discoveries transformed the field of physics. Hailed as a god, saint, a miracle, and even a canonized angel by his biographers and…
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Episode 116: Jewish Life in 20th Century Iran
Iran is home to the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel. At its peak in the 20th century, the population of Jews was over 100,000; today about 25,000 Jews still live in Iran. Iranian Jews rejected the siren call of the Zionist movement to instead participate in the...
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Episode 115: Violent Policing of the Texas Border
Between 1910 and 1920, an era of state-sanctioned racial violence descended upon the U.S.-Mexico border. Texas Rangers, local ranchers, and U.S. soldiers terrorized ethnic Mexican communities, under the guise of community policing. They enjoyed a culture of impunity, in which, despite state...
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Episode 114: Slavery in Indian Territory
Many American Indian cultures, like the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, practiced a form of non-hereditary slavery for centuries before contact with Europeans. But after Europeans arrived on Native shores, and they forcibly brought African people into labor in the beginning of the 17th century…
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Episode 113: 1968 – The Year the Dream Died
The year 1968 was a momentous and turbulent year throughout the world: from the Prague Spring and the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F Kennedy, to the Tet offensive and the surprise victory of Richard Nixon...
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Episode 112: Harvey Milk, Forty Years Later
On November 27, 1978, Harvey Milk and George Moscone were murdered in San Francisco’s City Hall. Milk was one of the first openly gay politicians in California, and his short political career was not only emblematic of the wider gay liberation movement at the time, but his death and legacy…
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Episode 111: The Legacy of World War I in Germany and Russia
On November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent in Europe as the armistice with Germany ended World War One. World War I changed the face of Europe and the Middle East. The war had brought bloodshed on an unprecedented scale: tens of millions of people were dead, and millions more displaced. The…
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Episode 110: The Legacy of WWI in the Balkans and Middle East
On October 30, 1918, the Ottoman Empire signed a treaty of capitulation to the Allied Powers aboard the HMS Agamemnon, a British battleship docked in Mudros harbor on the Aegean island of Lemnos. Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were the first of the Central Powers to formally end their...
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Episode 109: The Tango and Samba
The first notes of the samba and the tango instantly capture ones attention, transporting the listener to Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and the River Plate in Argentina. Seen as national symbols for their respective countries, the samba and the tango are more than just popular musical and...
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Episode 108: A History of the U.S. Marine Corps
The US Marine Corps may now proudly boast to be the home of the few and the proud, but this wasn’t always the case. In the early part of the 20th century, it was the poorest funded and least respected branch of the military, and at the end of World War Two there was actually a movement to shut…
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Episode 107: The Yazid Inscription
Like digging through archaeological layers, documenting the development of language and writing provides important clues about historical events. Recent discoveries in the deserts of Syria and Jordan are yielding clues not only about the origins of the Arabic writing system, but also about the…
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Episode 106: The Blood Libel
In Kiev, in 1911, a Jewish factory manager named Mendel Beilis was indicted for murdering a young boy. Many believed that Beilis had carried out the murder as part of a ritual known as the “blood libel,” in which Jews used the blood of gentile children for baking Passover matzo. Where the idea of...
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Episode 105: Slavery and Abolition
Host: Brooks Winfree, Department of History, UT-Austin Guest: Manisha Sinha, Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut It’s well known in American history that slavery was abolished with the 13th amendment to the constitution, however, the debate over slavery and the movement to...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
15 Minute History is a history podcast designed for historians, enthusiasts, and newbies alike. This is a joint project of Hemispheres, the international outreach consortium at the University of Texas at Austin, and Not Even Past, a website with articles on a wide variety of historical issues, produced by the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. This podcast series is devoted to short, accessible discussions of important topics in world history, United States history, and Texas history with the award winning faculty and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, and distinguished visitors to our campus. They are meant to be a resource for both teachers and students, and can be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in history. For more information and to hear our complete back catalog of episodes, visit our website!
HOSTED BY
The University of Texas at Austin
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does 15 Minute History have?
15 Minute History currently has 154 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is 15 Minute History about?
15 Minute History is a history podcast designed for historians, enthusiasts, and newbies alike. This is a joint project of Hemispheres, the international outreach consortium at the University of Texas at Austin, and Not Even Past, a website with articles on a wide variety of historical issues,...
How often does 15 Minute History release new episodes?
15 Minute History publishes regularly with 154 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to 15 Minute History on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts 15 Minute History?
15 Minute History is created and hosted by The University of Texas at Austin.
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