15 Minute History

Daina Ramey Berry, from UT's Department of History, and Leslie Harris, from Emory University, have spent the past year collaborating on a new study aimed at re-discovering this forgotten aspect of slave experience in the United States.

Guest Francesca Consagra helps us make connections across centuries and genres and underscores our complex relationships to cats and dogs, revealing the many ways in which they say as much about us as we do about them.

Ann Twinam from UT's Department of History discusses three of the major Mesoamerican civilizations: the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec (Mexica), and their once-forgotten contributions to human civilization.

Fred M. Donner has spent much of his career studying the earliest history of Islam. He offers his hypothesis on what the early Islamic community may have looked like, and describes an exciting new find that may shed new light on an old puzzle.

Guest Carla Kaplan, author of Miss Anne in Harlem: White Women of the Harlem Renaissance, joins us to talk about the ways white women crossed both racial and gender lines during this period of black affirmation and political and cultural assertion.

Guest Frank Guridy joins us to discuss the multifaceted, multilayered movement that inspired a new generation of African-Americans—and other Americans—and demonstrated the importance of Black culture and its contributions to the West.

In the late 15th century, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and conquered the Indian Ocean, bringing the rich trade under the direct control of the crowned heads of Europe and their appointed Indian Ocean Trading Companies. Or did he? Did Europe ever really come to dominate the 90,000 year old trade, […]

In the first of a two part episode guest Susan Douglass describes the murky beginnings of trade and travel in the Indian Ocean basin, and the cultural exchanges and influences that the trade had in the days before the Europeans arrived.

Guest Charles E. King from Georgetown University discusses the state of Ukranian-Russian relations, and historical developments in Ukraine itself to help us understand the situation in Ukraine today.

Guest Samuel Thrope offers a fascinating look at a time when Iranian socialists looked at Israel as a possible model for what Iran could become—and how that vision soured after the 1967 Six Day War.

Guest Sam White from Ohio State University makes the convincing argument that environmental and climactic factors are as influential in human history as economic, social, political, and cultural factors.

Guest Karl Hagstrom Miller helps us understand how popular music came to be segregated as artists negotiated the restrictions known as the "Jim Crow" laws in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Guest Daina Ramey Berry she discusses teaching the "senses of slavery," a teaching tool that taps into the senses in order to connect to one of the most important eras in US history and bring it to the present.

Guest Jacqueline Jones, one of the foremost experts on the history of racial history in the United States, helps us understand race and race relations by exposing some of its astonishing paradoxes from the earliest day to Obama's America.

Guest Seth Garfield shows how a little-known chapter of World War II history illuminates the ways outsiders’ understandings of the nature of the Amazon have evolved over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Guest Robert Olwell describes the Royal Proclamation of 1763, its effects on the history of colonial North America, and ponders whether it is really the smoking gun that caused the American Revolution as some have claimed.

Guest Chris Dietrich explains the origins of the oil crisis and the ways it shifted international relations in its wake.

Guest Mary Neuburger walks us through current historical thinking about the five hundred year legacy of Ottoman rule in southeastern Europe, and gives us an alternate explanation for the turbulence of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Guest Joseph Parrott helps us understand the system of "separateness" that dominated the lives of South Africans of all races for so long, and introduces us to the key organizations and players that fought against it and finally dismantled it.

Guest Sahar F. Aziz helps us understand the political earthquakes in Egypt's bumpy transition from authoritarian rule to what comes next, and sheds light on what it might take for the country to arrive at the democracy its people demanded in the streets.

Guest Michelle Daneri from UT's Department of History helps us sort through the political forces that brought Andrew Jackson to office, and the long lasting impact of his presidency.

In this second of a two-part episode, guest James M. Vaughn walks us through the long and often painful process that took our founding fathers to the decision to split off from the world's most powerful empire and go their own way.

Guest James M. Vaughn helps us understand the little known international context of a well-known national moment, pondering questions of politics, economics, and ideas that transcend national boundaries.

Carter Vaughn Findley has spent a career working on the Turkic peoples and helps us trace their long migration from the Gobi to the Bosphorus, adapting, absorbing, and transforming themselves and the societies they interact with along the way.

Guest Denise A. Spellberg sheds light on a little known facet of American history: our earliest imaginings of the Islamic world, and comes to some surprising conclusions about the extent of religious freedoms envisioned by one of the key founding fathers.