How our hunger for land shaped history

Prosthetic legs, wheelbarrow wheelchairs and guide… children? Those were just some of the assistive technologies and body augmentations available to our medieval and early modern ancestors. In this episode, Rae Gillibrand highlights how bodily difference was understood in this pr ...  Show more

It's now often used as an adjective for anything standard, plain, and borderline boring – but the history of vanilla is anything but. Eric T Jennings – whose book Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean is among the titles shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize – te ...  Show more

When Simon Winchester takes on a big subject, he takes on a big subject. His new book, “Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World,” travels through ...

Featuring Jo Guldi on the global history of the long land war—a war over everything from agrarian reform to tenant rights, from India and China to England and Ireland, from the late 19th century through the present—and into the future.

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A look back at our changing diet and the ways and means in which we had to evolve ourselves and our technologies to succeed in the ever changing and differing environments of the world. 

We try to unravel the mystery of the human transition from the success of nomadic hunter-gathering, to the laborious risks of sedentary agriculture and farming.