“In November 1944,” Edward D. Melillo writes in his book The Butterfly Effect​, “Decca Records released a single featuring Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots. ‘Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall’ skyrocketed to number one on the top of the Billboard charts in the United States and inaugurated a long-term collaboration between the ‘First Lady of Song’ and the fabled record producer Milt Gabler. A century before this musical milestone, the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid I founded the Hereke Imperial Carpet Manufacture to supply elaborate silk rugs for his Dolmabahçe Palace on the Bosphorus. These extravagant carpets, among the finest ever woven, featured between three and four thousand knots per square inch. Six decades earlier, on October 19, 1781, Brigadier General Charles O’Hara of His Britannic Majesty’s Coldstream Guards donned his distinctive scarlet officer’s coat, strode onto the battlefield at Yorktown, Virginia, and surrendered the sword of Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis to Major General Benjamin Lincoln of the American Continental Army. A trio of more incongruous events, spanning three centuries, is difficult to imagine, yet these episodes share an astonishing feature. They depended on the tremendous productive capacity of domesticated insects.” This week on the podcast, Melillo and Lewis H. Lapham discuss events like these across human history, which show how, despite any annoyance we might feel at the prospect, the world as we know it would cease to function without insects. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Edward D. Melillo, author of The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of 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.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Derek W. Black, author of “Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy.” 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.

“Disunion—the possibility that it all might go to pieces—is a hidden thread through our entire history,” the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner writes in Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. “Our refusal to recognize this, like patients who insist, against all evidence, that they are not ill, has been a major cause of our political dysfunction and social strife. Secession is the only kind of revolution we Americans have ever known and the only kind we’re ever likely to see.” On this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Kreitner start at the beginning of the United States of America and trace this history of disunion up to the present. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Richard Kreitner, author of “Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union.” 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 Thomas Frank, author of “The People, No.” 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 Tracy Campbell, author of “The Year of Peril: America in 1942.” 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 Edward Achorn, author of “Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.” 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 Peter Fritzsche, author of Hitler’s First Hundred Days When Germans Embraced the Third Reich.” 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 Richard J. King, author of Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of “Moby Dick.” 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 Gaia Vince, author of “Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time.” 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 history of capitalism in America has been a tale of predation,” historian Eugene McCarraher writes at the beginning of The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, “an ambitious but inexorably grotesque and destructive endeavor in the manufacture of beatitude, and that story is arguably winding down to its conclusion. What better time to trace the outlines of that history and inquire into the possibilities that lie dormant in the present?” In the latest episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and McCarraher discuss and unpack the author’s argument that “we should welcome the demise of our misenchanted way of life as an opportunity for repentance and renewal. But redemption can only come if we tell a different story about our country and its unexceptional sins.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Eugene McCarraher, author of The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. 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.