Tides of History

Latest Episodes:

Bronze Age Europe Nov 18, 2021

Show notes

The societies of the European Bronze Age lacked writing, but their illiteracy shouldn’t fool us: These were rich and sophisticated civilizations that existed in a time of deep and fundamental transformations, when new technologies, ways of understanding the world, and forms of power reshaped Europe and its people.

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.

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Writing a New History of the Middle Ages: Interview with Dan Jones on Powers and Thrones Nov 11, 2021

Show notes

Friend of the Show, TV presenter, author extraordinaire, and historian Dan Jones returns to Tides to discuss his new book, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages. It’s a wonderful book and a tremendous achievement, written with both a consummate grasp of the huge scope of medieval history and a cinematic style of storytelling that keeps the reader engaged. How can we say something new about a very old period, and do it in entertaining fashion? That’s the key question for one of the most accomplished popular historians working today.

Get Powers and Thrones here.

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.

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The Hyksos - Foreign Kings in Ancient Egypt: Interview with Dr. Anna-Latifa Mourad Nov 04, 2021

Show notes

Ancient Egypt didn’t exist in isolation from the world around it. Trade goods, ideas, and especially people flowed in and out over the millennia, but never more so than during the Second Intermediate Period, when a foreign dynasty of kings known as the Hyksos ruled much of Egypt. But were the Hyksos really the invading marauders the Egyptians portrayed them as? I talked to Dr. Anna-Latifa Mourad of Macquarie University to get the cutting-edge story of who the Hyksos really were.

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.

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Ancient Nubia Oct 28, 2021

Show notes

Just to the south of ancient Egypt, a civilization we think we know well, was a deeply connected but unique world that existed along the Middle Nile: Nubia, or Kush, which produced its own distinctive cultures and states that held strong for many thousands of years.

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.

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Interview with Shane Miller and Jessi Halligan on the White Sands footprints Oct 21, 2021

Show notes

The discovery of 21,000-23,000-year-old human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico is one of the most exciting developments in the study of the deep past in recent years. But do these footprints hold up to real scrutiny? And if they’re real, how do they change our understanding of the first people in the Americas?

I asked two experts on the earliest inhabitants of the Americas what they thought of this incredible new evidence: Dr. Jessi Halligan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University, and Dr. Shane Miller, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Mississippi State University. Both have extensive experience on the topic, and help us understand precisely what these footprints tell us about the human past in North and South America.

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.

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Egypt’s Middle Kingdom Oct 14, 2021

Show notes

The Middle Kingdom, beginning around 2000 BC, was the second of ancient Egypt’s classical ages. Powerful pharaohs ruled from the cataracts of the Nile to the Mediterranean, building enormous monuments and patronizing exceptional art and literature. But on either side of the Middle Kingdom lay two ages of chaos, the Intermediate Periods, when the pharaoh’s rule - the defining feature of ancient Egyptian history - essentially disappeared.

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.

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Ancient Nubia and the Kingdom of Kush: Interview with Dr. Geoff Emberling Oct 07, 2021

Show notes

Located to the south of Egypt, in today’s Sudan, ancient Nubia had a complicated relationship with the old state of the Nile, and scholars have traditionally understood it through the shadow of its much better understood northern neighbor. But, as Dr. Geoff Emberling of the University of Michigan explains, Nubia had a long and fascinating history of its own and a stunning array of achievements, spanning thousands of years and many different cultures.

If you’d like to learn more about Dr. Emberling’s excavations at Jebel Barkal, you can do so here; if you’d like to learn more about community archaeology in Sudan, check out the “Narrating Nubia” project here.

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.

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Old Kingdom Egypt Sep 30, 2021

Show notes

When we think of Ancient Egypt, we think of the pyramids: vast, eternal monuments to the glory of long-dead pharaohs. But we shouldn’t take them for granted: They belong to a specific place and time, and the people who built them had their reasons for doing so. The world that produced the pyramids was Egypt’s Old Kingdom, one of its three classic ages. We’ll explore it here today.

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.

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When Did Things Happen in the Ancient World? Interview with Professor Sturt Manning Sep 23, 2021

Show notes

We can’t understand the past without understanding when things happened, because if we can’t place them in some sort of chronological order, we can’t understand the relationship between them. But how do we know when things happened in the distant past? Professor Sturt Manning of Cornell University is an expert on chronology, using tree-rings, radiocarbon, and historical sources to date events and archaeological sites from many thousands of years ago.

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.

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Mycenaean Greece and Minoan Crete Sep 16, 2021

Show notes

The Late Bronze Age was a remarkable time in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. An interconnected world sprang up, tying together the lands from Greece and Crete in the west all the way to Mesopotamia in the east and the Nile cataracts in the south. Let’s explore the Aegean during this time, looking at how palaces on Crete continued to grow and how Minoan civilization reached an apex of sophistication and reach. And on the Greek mainland, a new people - the Mycenaeans - emerged, building their own palaces and society, the foundations of the Greek world that would later encompass so much of the Mediterranean and beyond.

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.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.