medieval

A 2018 lecture, with subtitles available, by former Finnish intelligence colonel Martti J. Kari on Russian strategic culture. He walks through the historical layers of Russia and explains why the country behaves as it does.

The first class of Timothy Snyder's Yale course on the making of modern Ukraine. It introduces the course and asks what it means for a nation to exist in light of the Russian invasion.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum tells how a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet came to him for examination. It revealed the oldest known account of Noah's Ark and led to a book and a documentary.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

Joseph Tainter lectures at a 2010 sustainability conference on why complex societies such as Rome collapse. His thesis is that rising complexity brings diminishing returns until societies cannot afford to maintain it.

Archaeologist Eric Cline lectures on the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1177 BC, when interconnected Mediterranean empires fell in rapid succession. He discusses the Sea Peoples and the combined causes of the collapse.

Historian Timothy Snyder explains the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity, two ways of thinking about time that frame his books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom.

An ESOTERICA episode tracing Yahweh from a warrior-storm god near Mt Seir to the god of the Israelites in the Judean highlands. It examines how Yahwism absorbed and contended with Canaanite religion.

A 78-minute Richard Feynman lecture of anecdotes about working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, followed by about ten minutes of audience Q&A in which he tells three safe-cracking stories.

A 1983 Los Angeles lecture by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov on how the Soviets carried out ideological subversion of target societies through propaganda. He walks through demoralization and normalization stages.

A panel at The National WWII Museum on the Battle of Kursk, moderated by Keith Huxen with historians Robert Citino and John Parshal. The discussion covers the armored engagement and the German, Soviet and US approaches to tank production.

Political economist Mark Blyth gives a lecture tracing two versions of capitalist 'software': the postwar Great Compression era and the neoliberal era from 1980 to 2008. He explains the bug that crashed the first and the design of the second.

Hillsdale historian Burt Folsom lectures at a 2011 seminar on the 'robber barons' of the Gilded Age. He argues that figures like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller were market entrepreneurs rather than monopolists.

The first lesson from Timothy Snyder's short video series accompanying On Tyranny, arguing that most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given when people comply in advance. It runs about eight minutes.

Eric Cline presents the thesis of his book 1177 BC on the collapse of the interconnected Late Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations. The talk covers the Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Canaanites and their trade networks.

Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback and Sorrows of Empire, lectures on parallels between the decline of the Roman and Soviet empires and the United States. He argues the US shows the same symptoms: overextension, corruption, and an inability to reform.