T.O.P. Podcast with Michael DiMatteo

A Rhodian silver drachm, 4th-2nd century BC, bearing the face of Helios and the rose of Rhodes — this is the coin Michael DiMatteo wears every day, a gift from mentor and fellow history teacher Ron Hurst. In this episode of the T.O.P. Podcast, DiMatteo traces the coin from the mint of ancient Rhodes through the hands that may have held it: sailors, merchants, market women, the enslaved. He explore...

Charles Bukowski and Christopher Hitchens — two of the most controversial, brilliant, and unapologetic writers of the 20th century. In Season 2, Episode 20 of The T.O.P. Podcast with Michael DiMatteo, we go deep into the lives and work of the poet of the American gutter and the intellectual who picked public fights with God, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa — and won most of them. From Bukowski’...

Cicero, Jonathan Swift, Frederick Douglass, George Orwell, and Émile Zola — five writers who used the page as a weapon. In Season 2, Episode 19 of The T.O.P. Podcast with Michael DiMatteo, we trace 2,000 years of purposeful writing: from Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations in 63 BC, which brought down a conspiracy against the Roman Republic, to Zola’s J’Accuse in 1898, which cracked open one of history...

Bread built civilization. Egypt paid pyramid workers in loaves. Rome bought loyalty with grain. And someone had to control the story. SEE MORE Bread is not food. It's history, power, and the oldest mirror civilization has ever held up to itself. In this episode of The T.O.P. Podcast, host Michael DiMatteo traces bread from the Epic of Gilgamesh — where eating bread makes a wild man human — thr...

Gustave Flaubert, Zora Neale Hurston, and D.H. Lawrence — three writers who published work their societies called dangerous, obscene, or simply wrong. This is Episode 17 of The TOP Podcast with Michael DiMatteo. Flaubert stood trial in a Paris courtroom in 1857, charged with offenses against public morality for refusing to condemn the inner life of a woman his society had decided was expendable. H...

Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison — Episode 15 of The TOP Podcast with Michael DiMatteo.  "The Words That Made a Nation: Literature of the American Revolution." From  Common Sense  and  The American Crisis  to the Declaration of Independence and Federalist No. 51, this episode follows the writings that built the American republic — their plain language, radical...

Walt Whitman dreamed the American West into existence. John Muir walked into it and came back changed — and then changed policy. Willa Cather wrote with clear eyes about what the pioneer dream actually cost. In Episode 15, The TOP Podcast examines how three of America's greatest writers shaped the myth of the frontier — and what that myth got right, and got wrong, about the real human lives li...

What did the great explorers actually  write  — and what does that writing reveal about the human need for wonder? In this episode of The T.O.P. Podcast, Michael DiMatteo traces five centuries of discovery literature: Columbus's journals, Pigafetta's account of Magellan's Pacific crossing, Darwin's encounter with the forests of Brazil, and Thoreau's radical argument that wonder...

What does it feel like when a season of your life ends — not with drama, but with quiet certainty? In this episode of The TOP Podcast, author and storyteller Michael DiMatteo explores one of the oldest questions in the literary canon: how do we live in full awareness that everything ends? Drawing on his short story collection  Falling Leaves , DiMatteo weaves literary history and biographical stor...

The T.O.P. Podcast is a history and literature podcast exploring historical events, the literary canon, and the craft of storytelling. Each episode examines storytelling, historical figures, and the craft of writing. This podcast is for readers, writers, and anyone interested in history, literature, and storytelling In 1968, the world cracked open — and writers cracked their forms to match it. Did...

The T.O.P. Podcast is a history and literature podcast exploring historical events, the literary canon, and the craft of storytelling. In 410 AD, the Visigoths sacked Rome — and the loudest critics of the empire were among those most devastated by its fall. In this episode, we look at three remarkable voices from the wreckage: Jerome, Augustine, and the little-known poet Rutilius Namatianus. What...

The T.O.P. Podcast is a history and literature podcast exploring the intersection of historical events and great writing. Each episode examines the literary canon, storytelling, historical figures, and the craft of writing. This podcast is for readers, writers, and anyone interested in history, literature, and storytelling. Season 2, Episode 10: History Through Literature – What Writers Reveal Tha...

Hemingway & Nabokov: What Prose Reveals About the Soul What does the way a writer uses language reveal about what they believe? In this episode of the T.O.P. Podcast, we explore two towering figures of twentieth-century literature— Ernest Hemingway  and  Vladimir Nabokov —and the radically different answers they gave to a century that shattered the old certainties of Western civilization. Both...

Everyone knows the story. There was a great library. Someone burned it. The ancient world's knowledge was lost forever. Here's the problem: it's wrong. In this episode of the T.O.P. Podcast, we go to Alexandria — to the city Ptolemy turned into the intellectual capital of the ancient world, and to the Library he built by boarding ships and confiscating their books. The Mouseion, histor...

The Printing Revolution: How Gutenberg's Press Changed Everything Imagine a world where every book is copied by hand, letter by letter. A single Bible takes a scribe a year to complete. One mistake corrupts the text forever. This was Europe in 1450—a world where knowledge was imprisoned in Latin, accessible only to a tiny clerical elite, chained in monastery libraries and university halls. The...

This episode of  the T.O.P. Podcast , sponsored by  mrdwrites.com , explores how societies remember — and misremember — plagues, arguing that disease is never just biological; it is also a battle over narrative, memory, and meaning. Beginning with the Black Death, the episode examines how medieval theologians framed catastrophe as divine judgment, offering moral clarity in the face of chaos. Yet w...

Who Gets to Tell the Past? Modern societies are drowning in history—and starving for truth. This episode of the T.O.P. Podcast asks a deceptively simple question: who gets to tell the past, and by what authority? Not as an academic exercise, but as a moral and cultural problem—one that becomes unavoidable when inherited stories collapse. Historiography emerges not as neutral scholarship, but as do...

PART TWO SUMMARY: “THE VOID” Part Two examines what followed the collapse of meaning after World War One. If the artists and writers of the 1920s documented the destruction of God, progress, reason, and authority, the 1930s revealed what happens when nothing replaces them. Modernist literature did not simply experiment with form. Writers like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner abandoned omniscient narrati...

PART ONE: The Fracture — Art and Meaning Between the Wars A T.O.P. Podcast Episode World War One did not simply devastate Europe physically — it  shattered meaning itself . In this episode of  the T.O.P. Podcast , Michael DiMatteo explores how writers and artists between the World Wars responded to the same historical catastrophe in radically different ways, and why geography — especially the Atla...

Between Two Worlds: How Medieval Writers Saved the Pagan Past While Preaching Christianity In early medieval England and Ireland, Christian writers faced a dilemma that feels uncomfortably familiar today. They were charged with spreading the Christian faith, yet they inherited a world saturated with pagan stories—gods, heroes, monster-slaying warriors, and funeral pyres. Church doctrine labeled th...

Episode 2: Writing Under the Emperors Augustus commissioned Virgil's  Aeneid  to legitimize empire through mythology. Aeneas's divinely-destined founding of Rome made Augustus's rule seem inevitable and holy. Yet Virgil embedded darkness—Dido's suicide-curse, Turnus's brutal killing—showing empire's cost even while celebrating it. The bargain: write what the emperor wants,...

The Roman Republic didn’t fall to an army. It fell to a story. And Julius Caesar wrote it. This is the first episode exploring how Roman writers wielded language as a weapon during the Republic’s collapse. Next week: poets and philosophers navigating imperial Rome. Today: four voices that shaped power itself. CAESAR: THE GENERAL WHO WROTE HIS OWN MYTH Picture Rome, 52 BCE. Rumors swirl about Caesa...

What happens when history's greatest minds fall completely, irrevocably in love? When passion meets genius, when devotion transcends death itself? In this episode, we explore four extraordinary love stories that span more than a century of history—from revolutionary Paris to Victorian London, from Regency England to Belle Époque France. These aren't fairy tales. These are real people who l...

The Price of the Rebel: What Happens When Everyone's a Revolutionary Che Guevara's face on t-shirts at Urban Outfitters. Apple selling computers with images of Gandhi and MLK. Every other Instagram bio: "Rebel." "Disruptor." "Resistance." We worship the rebel. It's become our highest virtue, our most aspirational identity. To be called a conformist is an insult. To be called a rebel is a badge of...

The Tyranny of Memory There's a photograph from 1937 that captures something unsettling: Joseph Stalin walking beside Nikolai Yezhov along the Moscow-Volga Canal. Three years later, Yezhov was executed—and in the photograph, he simply vanished. Airbrushed out. Replaced by water. As if he had never existed at all. This episode explores one of humanity's most profound paradoxes: memory is bo...