Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

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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Top 10 Tides of History Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Tides of History episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Tides of History for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Tides of History episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

The Greco-Persian Wars, Part 1: The Ionian Revolt to the Battle of Marathon

Tides of History

10/05/23 • 41 min

The wars between the Persians and the Greeks have become a cornerstone of the idea of "Western Civilization," a defining moment when Greeks became Greeks in opposition to the outside world. But this series of conflicts was far more complicated than a simple civilizational clash; it was born of a particular world, and to properly understand the Persian Wars, we need to grasp the background that made them possible.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

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4 Listeners

Venice through the Ages, from Salt-Panners to Maritime Empire to Tourism: Interview with Professor Dennis Romano

Tides of History

01/11/24 • 48 min

Venice's lagoon is an unstable environment, but it has hosted one of the longest-lasting and most stable cities in world history. The history of Venice is many different things: politics on an imperial scale, industrial production, cultural influence, tourism, and above all, trade. Professor Dennis Romano is one of the most eminent historians of medieval and early modern Venice and author of the new book Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City. He joins me to talk about La Serenissima and its place in the last 1500 years.

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3 Listeners

The Hallstatt Culture, the Celts, and the Rise of the European Iron Age

Tides of History

06/22/23 • 43 min

The Hallstatt Culture defines the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age in Continental Europe. It was a time of long-distance connections between rich and powerful elites, migration, trade, and the remaking of Europe's ethnic and linguistic map, when the people we know as Celts emerged into history.

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2 Listeners

Carthage, Syracuse, and the Battle for Sicily

Tides of History

04/11/24 • 40 min

By 480 BC, the same year Xerxes and the Persians descended on Greece, Sicily had become a battleground for the rising powers of the Central Mediterranean: Carthage, on one side, and the Greek colony of Syracuse on the other. The result was a massive battle, and its remains still survive in the archaeological record.

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2 Listeners

Cities, the Etruscans, and Global Urbanism: Interview with Professor Simon Stoddart

Tides of History

11/30/23 • 55 min

Cities are one of the defining features of the Iron Age Mediterranean, as urbanism spread across the sea and beyond to form the backbone of the classical age that would follow. Professor Simon Stoddart is one of the world's leading experts on this process, specifically how it happened in Etruria, and how that particular example compares to urban formation elsewhere.

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2 Listeners

The Death of Alexander the Great

Tides of History

10/31/24 • 38 min

The last years of Alexander the Great's reign were a troubled time. The king wanted to keep fighting, but his soldiers were spent after years of campaigning. Then, quite suddenly, the king died, and it was up to his generals to determine the fate of the empire he'd built.

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2 Listeners

China in the Eastern Zhou: Spring and Autumn

Tides of History

01/18/24 • 41 min

The Spring and Autumn period, lasting from 771 to 481 BC, marked the high point of aristocratic power in ancient China. This was an age of nobility and political fragmentation, as the Zhou Dynasty's power dwindled away and small states fought one another in endless cycles of violence. Rulers fell prey to plots and assassinations, and new families rose to power, upending the established order.

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1 Listener

The Western Zhou, 1046-771 BC

Tides of History

12/28/23 • 40 min

The Zhou Dynasty ruled for longer than any other in Chinese history. Much of the cultural foundation of China was laid down during that age, from Confucius to Sun Tzu. While a powerful state at its inception, centralized power only functioned for a century at most during the Zhou; afterward, the ruling dynasty became increasingly irrelevant as a political force, and regional lords rose to rule independent states.

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1 Listener

The Rise of China's Warring States

Tides of History

02/08/24 • 38 min

The Warring States period in China (c. 481-221 BC) was an era of mass-mobilization warfare unlike any other the world had seen to that point. Armies of hundreds of thousands of men fought on an increasing scale for centuries, wiping out state after state until only one - Qin - would remain to rule all of China.

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1 Listener

The Iron Age Steppe and the Emergence of the Scythians

Tides of History

11/09/23 • 40 min

For millennia, the Eurasian steppe has been the highway connecting the distant ends of Europe and Asia. But at the beginning of the Iron Age, something important changed. A new people, the Scythians, rose to prominence, exploding outward from southern Siberia from the 9th century BC onward.

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1 Listener

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