Predictive History, Professor Jiang, No Ads

In 44 BCE, an eighteen-year old Octavian arrived in Rome without an army and without political alliances, and seventeen years later he became Rome’s first emperor. How did he do it? In this lecture to his Chinese students Jiang Xueqin explores and explains the birth of the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar saw himself as a man of destiny who would save the Roman Republic, a myth that was met with much s...

In this talk to his Chinese high school students Jiang Xueqin examines the life and times of Julius Caesar. What motivated him? What made him so successful? Why was he assassinated? In 100 BCE, Julius Caesar was born into the "Imperial Republic" of Rome, a contradiction that led to inequality, corruption, and division. He came to believe he was a man of destiny who would restore the unit...

In 216 BCE, Hannibal Barca of Carthage defeated Rome at the Battle of Cannae. After three devastating defeats to Hannibal, Rome had lost twenty percent of its adult male population, and one-third of its Senate. The Roman Republic chose to continue fighting, and eventually it triumphed in the Second Punic War. In his lecture to Chinese students Jiang Xueqin explains that it was the three distinguis...

Plato and Aristotle are considered the two most influential philosophers of Western antiquity. But there are three central paradoxes surrounding the life and work of Aristotle. He is considered a brilliant thinker, but we do not have any of his original writings. Over two hundred works are attributed to him, and the range of his works is extra-ordinary and super-human – he’s written about metaphys...

We celebrate Alexander the Great as one of the greatest conquerors of history. What motivated him? Was he truly a strategic genius? What is his ultimate legacy? In this talk to his Chinese high school students Jiang Xueqin presents a revisionist understanding of Alexander the Great. He argues that Alexander was first and foremost motivated to prove he was better than his father. With his boundless...

In this talk Jiang Xueqin examines how Philip II of Macedon turned his kingdom from a poor and weak nation into the military hegemony that would conquer Persia. In his youth, Philip was a hostage at Thebes, where he studied the military innovations that made Thebes into the dominant military power in Greece at that time. He learned that with enough training and discipline, an army could achieve th...

In 399 BCE the Athenian people condemned Socrates to drink hemlock. In this lecture to Chinese high school students, Jiang Xueqin examines the significance and legacy of the trial of Socrates. During his lifetime, Socrates enjoyed exposing Athens' leading intellectuals. He became so notorious that the satirist Aristophanes ridiculed him in a play. Socrates had many admirers though. A group of...

What made Athenian democracy so strong and vibrant? Jiang Xueqin explains that theater taught Athenians how to be democratic citizens. The three major dramatists were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aeschylus' Oresteia offered a mythology of democracy, showing that democracy was a gift from Athena herself, and that by practicing it well Athenians could make the whole world more just, fair...

In his book The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides explains that the war started because Sparta saw Athens as a threat to its hegemony. In this talk Jiang Xueqin argues that the American scientist James Calhoun’s “rat utopia” experiments offer a better explanation. In the 1950s and 1960s James Calhoun conducted experiments in which colonies of rats were put into worlds of plenty and abundance. All thes...

The Greeks were humanity's most creative civilization. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are timeless classics, Plato's The Republic continues to inspire, and Thucydides are still read by military officers in search of strategic insights. Why were the Greeks so creative? Jiang Xueqin explains to his Chinese high school students there are three main factors:1.) the polis2.) the alphabet3.) Home...

In this lecture Jiang Xueqin explores with his Chinese students why the Bronze Age collapsed. In the year 1200 BCE the world was globalized and prosperous. Nations shared people, ideas, and goods. A few decades later, the Bronze Age collapsed. Mycenaean Greece and Hittite Anatolia were destroyed, and the Sea Peoples ravaged Egypt. Scholars disagree on what caused this collapse. Some argued it was...

Homo sapiens originated in Africa 300,000 years ago, and for the vast majority of our history we were egalitarian, peaceful, and artistic. So where did concepts of patriarchy, war, and private property come from? The Yamnaya people are nomadic pastoralists who originated in the Eurasian Steppes. They worshipped the Sky Father, and excelled at waging war. Slowly, their culture spread throughout the...

For centuries, linguists have believed that most European languages have so many similarities that they must have originated from a mother language, which is referred to as "Proto-Indo-European." Decades of work in linguistics have confirmed the existence of this language. But how did this language spread? The Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas proposed her Kurgan Hypothesis, and...

Jiang Xueqin examines two case studies that highlight the power of religion. In his book "The Wayfinders," the Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis looks at the animistic cosmology and the shamanistic rituals of the Barasana people of the Amazon. In his book "The Forest People," the British anthropologist Colin Turnbull observes the religion permeates every aspect of the life of...

The great French sociologist Emile Durkheim once wrote: “Religion is above all a system of ideas by which men imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it.” In this talk, Jiang Xueqin explores the origin and purpose of Paleolithic cave paintings. He argues that these paintings expressed pre-historic religious beliefs and practices, and they...

In this first lecture, Jiang Xueqin explains to his Chinese high school students why humans adopted agriculture. We now know that there were many consequences due to the transition to agriculture. Hunter-gatherers had an easier, more healthier, and less disease-prone life. So why did humans make this sacrifice? Though there are many explanations, most scholars believe that it was the religious imp...