The Ottomans, the Safavids, and the War for the Muslim World, 1501-1514

The Ottomans, the Safavids, and the War for t...

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Popular History and Academic History

Academic history and popular history are very different things, but what is their purpose? And how should we, as people who like and consume history, understand and use them?Patrick launched a brand-new history show! It’s called Past Lives, and every episode explores the life of ...  Show more

Migration in Human History

If we want to understand how and why the human story has unfolded in the way it has, then we have to understand migration: large numbers of people moving long distances. It's a surprisingly difficult topic to understand, but in the past couple of decades, we've developed better i ...  Show more

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115. The Great Conversion: How Iran became Shia
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How did the great divide within Islam, the split between Sunni and Shia, develop? We trace how the great 16th century confrontation between the Ottomans of Turkey and the Safavids of Iran cemented what had previously been a much more porous division. Iran has been a Shia country ...  Show more

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1979 was the year that set the Islamic world on the path to today. In Iran, the revolution established the nation as a theocracy that sought to defend Shi'ism across the world. In Saudi Arabia, the siege of the Holy Mosque led to the nation embracing a more radical Sunni Islam th ...  Show more