Episode #167- Who Was The Fake Asian?

The only literary sources we have about the Viking settlements west of Greenland come from the Icelandic Sagas. The only problem is that the Sagas can be totally off-the-wall. Corpses reanimate and speak prophecies, giant-eyed doppelgängers vanish into thin air, and one-legged cr ...  Show more

Between the 9th and 11th centuries Norse explorers undertook a series of remarkable journeys through the North Atlantic. Iceland and Greenland were settled by medieval farmers eager to find new uninhabited lands. But just how far west did these seafarer's manage to travel? The un ...  Show more

In 1923, an Indian American man named Bhagat Singh Thind argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that he was a white man and was therefore eligible to become a naturalized citizen. He based his claim on the fact that he was a member of India's highest caste and identified as an Arya ...  Show more

When Marco Polo returned from his travels in Asia he brought back with him tales of lands previously unimagined by Europeans. One of his strangest stories was that of the so-called "old man of the mountain" and his band of devoted assassins. The story of a mysterious mystic who u ...  Show more

The history of humanity as told through one hundred objects from the British Museum. This week the Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, is exploring high status objects from across the world around 700 years ago. Today he tells the story of a beautifully carved ritual seat - an obj ...  Show more

In a sense, 1521 is Mexico's 1619. A foundational moment that has for a long time been shaped by just one perspective, a European one. The story of how Hernán Cortés and his small army of conquistadors conquered the mighty Aztec Empire, in the heart of what's now modern Mexico Ci ...  Show more