Ministry of Ideas

Ministry of Ideas

Release Date

‏الحلقات

Genealogies of Modernity Episode 8: The Enemy of Morality Is Not Modernity, It’s Me

The great English essayist and linguist Samuel Johnson was writing during the Enlightenment – the period some historians identify as the beginning of the modern age. American author and philosopher David Foster Wallace worked more than two centuries later, in the “post-modern” st ...  عرض المزيد

Genealogies of Modernity Episode 7: A Genealogy of Gun Violence

The problem of gun violence is as old as guns themselves. According to historian Priya Satia, America’s present epidemic of gun violence has its roots in the industrial revolution. Satia tells the story of British gun-maker Samuel Galton, Jr., who was called to task by his Quaker ...  عرض المزيد

Genealogies of Modernity Episode 6: A Medieval Anti-Racist

What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adornol, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of ho ...  عرض المزيد

Genealogies of Modernity Episode 5: Picturing Race in Colonial Mexico

Race is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread – and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blo ...  عرض المزيد

Genealogies of Modernity Episode 4: Jamestown and the Myth of the Sovereign Family

What is the “traditional American family?” Popular images from the colonial and pioneer past suggest an isolated and self-sufficient nuclear family as the center of American identity and the source of American strength. But the idea of early American self-sufficiency is a myth. C ...  عرض المزيد