Famine

It is soft, common, and something most people wear almost every day. Yet behind this humble fabric lies one of the most dramatic stories in human history. Cotton connected ancient civilizations, built global trade networks, fueled the Industrial Revolution, enriched empires, and ...  Show more

Most riots are born from serious grievances: politics, poverty, religion, or oppression. Yet history is also filled with eruptions of violence that began for reasons so strange, so unexpected, and so absurd that they almost defy belief. Some changed cities, some embarrassed gover ...  Show more

How did the memory of the Great Famine shape Irish identity? Could it have been prevented? From 1845 to 1852, a disease decimated potato crops across Ireland. Farmers of small plots who relied entirely on this monoculture were launched into complete destitution. Desperate famili ...  Show more

Around 3,200 years ago, a vast, interconnected civilisation suddenly collapsed. A 'perfect storm' of climate catastrophe, famine, drought and invasion tore apart the eastern Mediterranean, plunging the survivors into decades of turmoil.

Eric Cline is the author of '1 ...

There seems to be headlines about floods, wildfires, or hurricanes every week. Scientists say this might be the new normal — that climate change is making natural disasters more and more common.Tatyana Deryugina is a leading expert on the economics of natural disasters — how we r ...  Show more

As we learned last week, starvation extends far beyond hunger and what a lack of food does to the human body. Similarly, famine is much more than a food shortage and starvation on a population-level scale. This week, we’re picking up where we left off last episode to explore the ...  Show more