Profiles in Contrast

The conservative estimate of the death toll from the Mongol conquests is forty million people.  The same campaigns reopened the Silk Road, transmitted Chinese technology to the West, established the first international postal system, and produced a legal code with more religious tolerance than anything contemporary Europe was offering.  These facts belong to the same biography, the same man, and t...

She headed the Platonic school at Alexandria, revised her father's commentary on Ptolemy's Almagest so comprehensively that he replaced his own version with hers, taught algebra through commentary on Diophantus, instructed students from across the Mediterranean regardless of their religion, and was consulted by the Roman prefect of Alexandria on civic affairs.  She was also murdered by a...

He liberated six nations from Spanish colonial rule, rode seventy-five thousand miles in the saddle doing it, and died at forty-seven believing his life's work had failed.  He was wrong about the failure - the nations stayed free - but his final assessment, "he who serves a revolution is plowing the sea," remains one of the most honest things a revolutionary has ever said about the...

He never spoke English, was barely literate, and had more influence on the English language than any other person before or since.  He killed the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, gave their land to his Norman followers, commissioned the most comprehensive administrative survey of a country in medieval history, and built the institutional foundations on which English common law and parliamentary governance...

He spent fourteen years in a small Scottish coastal town writing a nine-hundred-page book that created the discipline of economics, coined the phrase "invisible hand," and has been invoked in support of almost every economic policy position since 1776 - including several he would have strongly opposed.  The man who argued that merchants and manufacturers meeting together end up conspirin...

He produced the most widely read mathematics textbook in history.  It has been continuously in print for approximately two thousand three hundred years.  It shaped the thinking of Newton, Galileo, Einstein and every mathematician who came between and after them.  We know almost nothing about him - not where he was born, not what he looked like, not anything about his life beyond the single fact th...

He wrote the prototype for Superman in 1930 and got no credit.  He warned about nuclear war before Hiroshima and was put under house arrest by Army Intelligence for knowing too much.  He coined "Momism" in 1942 and was denounced as a misogynist for an argument that was considerably more subtle than his enemies allowed.  He predicted ecological catastrophe decades before the environmental...

He may or may not have existed.  The text attributed to him was probably written, revised and compiled over more than a century.  The story of how he proved his military theories by having two of the king's concubines executed is almost certainly apocryphal.  None of this has prevented The Art of War from being read continuously for two and a half thousand years, in every language, by soldier...

She arrived in Russia at sixteen as Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst, daughter of a minor Prussian prince nobody had heard of, speaking no Russian, with nothing to recommend her beyond an acceptable lineage and the specific quality of ambition that would, over thirty-four years, make her the most powerful ruler in Europe.  She spent seventeen years reading Montesquieu and cultivating the right regiments. ...

He crossed the Alps with elephants in late autumn because the expected route was defended and he was constitutionally unable to take the expected route.  He then spent fifteen years winning every significant battle in Italy - Trebia, Lake Trasimene, Cannae - without ever losing one, and without ever quite winning the war.  In this episode Sophie examines the most instructive military biography in...

Five ships left Seville in 1519.  One came back.  Of the 270 men who set out, 18 completed the first circumnavigation of the globe - and the man who planned it, navigated the unknown strait at the bottom of South America, crossed the Pacific Ocean, and named it "peaceful" (with some irony, having nearly starved crossing it) was not among them.  Magellan died in a shallow-water skirmish i...

When you flip a light switch, that is Tesla.  When an X-ray is taken, that is Tesla.  When a radio signal crosses the ocean, that is Tesla.  The alternating current electrical system that powers virtually every building on earth is his invention - and he died alone in a New York hotel room, his bills paid by the company he once saved from bankruptcy by voluntarily tearing up his own royalty contra...

He looked through the telescope, saw the moons of Jupiter, and understood that almost everything the authorities had said about the universe was wrong.  Then he published it, named the geocentric spokesman in his masterpiece "Simplicius," and managed to offend the one Pope who had previously been his most powerful supporter.  In this episode Sophie examines the life of Galileo Galilei -...

She didn't say "let them eat cake."  She also didn't cause the French Revolution, didn't empty the treasury, and wasn't the scheming traitor of revolutionary mythology.  In this episode Sophie cuts through two centuries of propaganda - much of it begun while Marie Antoinette was still alive - to find the actual woman beneath the powdered wig: a fourteen-year-old sent...

He was imprisoned twice, exiled repeatedly, censored constantly, and outlived all of it to become the most celebrated mind in Europe.  In this episode Sophie examines the life of François-Marie Arouet - better known as Voltaire - whose wit, satirical genius and tireless advocacy for civil liberties made him the defining voice of the Enlightenment and a direct intellectual ancestor of both the Fren...

Set aside the cape, the castle and the coffins. In this episode Sophie cuts through twelve decades of gothic fiction to find the real Vlad III of Wallachia - a fifteenth-century military commander of genuine strategic brilliance who deployed terror not as sadism but as a calculated instrument of statecraft in a small principality squeezed between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary.  His...

Nearly everyone knows the legend of Lady Godiva - the noble Saxon woman who rode naked through the streets of Coventry to win tax relief for its suffering citizens.  Far fewer know the woman beneath the legend: a major landowner in her own right, a prolific patron of the Church, and the only woman in Norman England to retain significant estates after the Conquest.  In this episode, Sophie separate...

In this episode Sophie discusses the complex life of the very able, but conflicted and at times cruel, Roman administrator Pontius Pilate.  Known most famously for presiding over the trial of Jesus of Nazareth before reluctantly authorizing his crucifixion, Pilate's influence as Roman governor of Judea was considerably more far-reaching.  Sophie's choice of a controversial mid-level, but...

Mary Stuart, a woman widely known as Mary Queen of Scots, led a remarkable life marked by tragedy, abdication, imprisonment and execution.   Sophie traces the arc of her tumultuous life and links her to a universally loved and admired 20th century woman, who was constrained by institutional rather than physical captivity and whose time was also cut far too short, and in tragic fashion. This is a w...

Sophie's profile of Thomas Manners is especially poignant and personal, as she counts the Tudor-era nobleman and courtier of Henry VIII among her ancestors.  Her comparison with a long-serving statesman and diplomat from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is appropriate and compelling. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely c...

Sophie once again steps outside of her comfort zone to examine the life and myriad contributions of famed Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler.  Euler not only introduced much of our modern mathematical notation but also defined the value of essential constants and published prolifically. The parallels, including the multi-disciplinary expertise, of Sophie's choice as modern-era contrasting figu...

Regarded as among the most skilled leaders of the British military during the American Revolution, Banastre Tarleton waged a vicious campaign against patriots in the south. Sophie has chosen a similarly controversial 20th century military leader whose origin coincidentally begins in the very place where "Bloody Ban's" ruthless tactics inspired the slogan Tarleton's Quarter. Thi...

Sophie leverages her extensive knowledge of British history in this intriguing expose on Oliver Cromwell - statesman, farmer and, ultimately, Lord Protector.  Fittingly, and in typical fashion, she chooses as her modern subject a highly controversial political and religious leader, who was, and is, both revered and reviled. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or de...

Sophie's selection for this episode is Scottish freedom-fighter and inspiration for the movie Braveheart, William Wallace.  The parallels of his life from youth to the Battle of Stirling Bridge and his gruesome execution are partially echoed by her comparison to a revered modern leader. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely co...

In her most intellectually serious pairing in the series so far, Sophie tackles  Charlemagne - medieval emperor, king, and leader of the Carolingian Renaissance. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959