“If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers,” David Wengrow, an archaeologist, and the late David Graeber, an anthropologist, write at the beginning of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, “what were they doing all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what did they imply? What was really happening in those periods we usually see as marking the emergence of ‘the state’? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with David Wengrow, coauthor of The Dawn of Everything, about these answers and what they mean for the future of a humanity facing ecological catastrophe. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“About twenty years ago,” the historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft says on the latest episode of The World in Time, “Umberto Eco said he was amused by a survey in which a quarter of British schoolchildren thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. But in fact in a way that is what he has become. He has become something outside conventional history. This is demonstrated by his portrayal in popular culture. It dawned on me in recent years: if you go to a movie called Lincoln, it will be hero-worshipping, and respectful in the Spielberg manner, but it will stick quite close to historical fact. But if you go to a movie called Churchill…or Darkest Hour…they are complete travesties that bear no resemblance whatsoever to historical fact. And nobody minds.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Geoffrey Wheatcroft, author of Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

The journey at the heart of this week’s episode of The World in Time is “the most important story of our age” for writer and explorer Nicholas Crane. “We’re in the grips now of both a Covid-19 pandemic and rapid climate change, which are putting greater demands on international science than anything that’s gone before us. And if you track back through time and ask yourself, When did international collaboration on a scientific challenge begin?, you end up in 1735 in a port in western France on a ship called Portefaix bound for the Caribbean and South America.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Nicholas Crane, author of “Latitude: The True Story of the World’s First Scientific Expedition,” about the legacy of that voyage. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

For 150,000 years “humans didn’t behave much like us,” the veterinarian, philosopher, and legal scholar Charles Foster writes in Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness. “They weren’t, to use the phrase beloved and hated by archaeologists, ‘behaviorally modern.’ Probably they didn’t adorn their bodies, bury their dead with grave goods, make bladed or bone tools, fish, move resources significant distances, cooperate with anyone to whom they weren’t closely related, and probably they weren’t organized enough to kill large animals. Then something big happened. The speed with which it happened, and the amount that happened in Africa, are contested. That it did happen is not.” In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Foster discuss what exactly happened, and the history of humans having a more romantic relationship with science. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Charles Foster, author of Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis Lapham interviews Michael Knox Beran, author of 'WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.' They discuss the history, influence, and predicted obsolescence of the WASPs. The chapter also explores the portrayal of high wasps in literature and the role of T.S. Eliot in cultural reform.

In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Philip Hoare discuss Albrecht Dürer’s brilliance, what his art meant to people throughout history, and the centuries-long ubiquity of his woodcut of a rhinoceros—an animal the artist had never seen. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Philip Hoare, author of “Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“The compulsion to silence others is as old as the urge to speak,” historian Eric Berkowitz writes in Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, “because speech—words, images, expression itself—exerts power…Even in countries where free expression is cherished, we often forget that forgoing censorship requires the embrace of discord as a fair price for the general good. Tolerance is risky. Suppression, on the other hand, is logical—and across history, it has been the norm.” In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Berkowitz discuss this history and consider the future of censorship and free speech. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Eric Berkowitz, author of “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Simon Winchester, author of “Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“I think we do ourselves a disservice,” Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Alan Taylor says on the latest episode of The World in Time, speaking about his book American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850, “if we romanticize the origins of United States and cast it as some sort of political utopia from which we have fallen. I think we’d do a lot better if we’d see that division and disagreement have been in place in the United States from the start.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Alan Taylor, author of American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“Life is on the move, today as in the past,” journalist Sonia Shah writes in her book The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. “For centuries, we’ve suppressed the fact of the migration instinct, demonizing it as a harbinger of terror. We’ve constructed a story about our past, our bodies, and the natural world in which migration is the anomaly. It’s an illusion. And once it falls, the entire world shifts.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham and Shah discuss the many movements that define life on Earth, the naming trends that created the idea of invasive species, and the hope that the next great migration might be one we finally embrace as a fact of humanity and the natural world. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Sonia Shah, author of The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.