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Culture et société

Culture et société

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Culture et société

Culture et société

26/02/2021
Histoire

Histoire

Chaque semaine
Culture et société

Culture et société

Série
Histoire

Histoire

Série

03/07/2025

Don’t Look to 1903s Germany to Understand American Populism. Look to 1830s New York Revivals Instead.

Something strange happened in Upstate New York during the 1830s. This area was called the "Burned-Over District" because so many fiery religious revivals swept through that it was metaphorically burned over. This region became a key source of the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant revival movement marked by emotional preaching and mass conversions, as preachers like Charles Finney inspired thousands to seek personal salvation and social reform. The revival spirit also birthed new movements: Mormonism emerged with Joseph Smith's founding of the Latter Day Saint movement in 1830, the Jehovah’s Witnesses trace their roots to the Bible Student movement that gained traction later in the century, and Spiritualism took hold in the 1840s with the Fox sisters’ claims of communicating with spirits in Hydesville, New York. This episode, however, isn’t just about the Burned-Over District. It’s about how these revivalists tapped into a distinctly American form of power, one not built on title or lineage, but on pure, raw charisma. From Puritan prophets and prophetesses in the 1600s to big-tent revivalists in the 1800s, and even to modern self-help gurus like Tony Robbins and Oprah Winfrey, charisma has shaped influence across time. It empowers figures like presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama to amass followings, sustain authority, and shape the national narrative through sheer personal appeal. Today’s guest is Molly Worthen, author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump. We explore the roots of charisma and power in American democracy, whether it’s necessarily bad or can be used for good, and how to avoid falling under the spell of a charismatic demagogue. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

03/07/2025

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1 h 4 min
31/07/2025

Depression-Era Governor Huey Long Wanted to Confiscate Individual Fortunes Over $1 Million, Possibly Leading to His 1935 Assassination

The most radical piece of legislation in the 20th century was Louisiana Governor Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth Plan,” a bold proposal to confiscate individual fortunes exceeding $1 million to fund healthcare, free college education, and a guaranteed minimum income for families struggling through the Great Depression—a plan so radical it sparked theories that his 1935 assassination was orchestrated to silence his challenge to the economic elite. From his early days as a plain-speaking lawyer to his transformative tenure as governor and U.S. senator, Long’s media mastery, colorful antics—like coaching LSU football from the sidelines and delivering drunken speeches—and relentless fight against oligarchies cemented his reputation as the greatest politician of the 20th century. His influence on Roosevelt’s New Deal and parallels to modern figures like Donal Trump and Bernike Sanders reveal a recurring pattern of populist fervor in American politics. Join Scott as he discusses these themes with Thomas E. Patterson, author of “American Populist: Huey Long of Louisiana, to uncover how Long’s vision continues to resonate today.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

31/07/2025

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1 h 6 min
15/07/2025

Eugénie de Montijo: The Spanish Empress Who Built Modern Paris and is Blamed For Imperial France’s Downfall

Thirty-three years after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire, his nephew (known as Napoleon III) became the first president of France before becoming emperor himself. Although he was a capable ruler and reformer, Napoleon III’s failed military campaigns, especially France’s loss to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, led to his defeat, capture, and the fall of the Second French Empire and permanent eclipse of Germany in military power. Many historians have blamed Napoleon III’s wife for his failings. Eugénie de Montijo was a Spanish noblewoman who became the last French empress. She was a cultural tastemaker and activist for feminist equality, but many blame her blunders when she held power as regent for France’s worst failures and reckless rush into a ruinous war with Germany. But the story of her life has rarely been told in full. It was a career filled with glamour, achievement, and tragedy, as well as contributions that transformed the nation she ruled unlike any other royal noblewoman in Europe. She spearheaded movements in health and education to help transform France into a modern country. She pushed Parisian architecture toward steel and glass construction of buildings as well as for inclusion of green spaces throughout the city, many of which exist today. Most of all, she crafted much of the idea of what it means to be French in the modern era. Today’s guests are Petie Kladstrup and Evelyne Resnick, authors of “The Last Empress of France: The Rebellious Life of Eugénie de Montijo.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

15/07/2025

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46 min
17/07/2025

How Do We Really Know What Happened in the Past When Many Historians Were Propagandists and AI is Fabricating Everything Else?

“History is written by the winners.” This aphorism is catchy and it makes an important point that a lot of what we know about history was written with an agenda, not for the purposes of informing us. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. There are many times that the so-called “losers” wrote the histories remembered today. After the American Civil War, Southern historians like Edward Pollard crafted "Lost Cause" narratives, romanticizing the Confederacy despite their defeat. Similarly, Chinese and Persian accounts of the Mongol invasions, such as those by Zhao Hong and Ata-Malik Juvayni, detailed Mongol brutality and cultural impacts from the perspective of the subjugated, challenging the victors' dominance. But this statement still gets to a fundament question: What if the history you learned was deliberately shaped by people with their own agendas? This question drives today’s guest, Richard Cohen, in his book “Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped The Past.” We explore how historians and storytellers, from ancient Greece to the modern era, shape our understanding of history through their biases and agendas, featuring figures like Herodotus, who blended fact and fable, Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire reflected his personal perspective, and William Randolph Hearst, whose yellow journalism distorted historical narratives. No history is truly objective, as personal, cultural, and political influences inevitably color the accounts of chroniclers like Thucydides, Tacitus, Voltaire, but we can still construct an understanding of the past that brings us closer to the truth. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

17/07/2025

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49 min
24/06/2025

Rome Definitively Eclipsed Greece in 197 BC By Making the Alexandrian Phalanx/Cavalry Obsolete

The battle of Cynoscephalae represents a key moment in the history of the Greco-Roman world. In this one battle the Macedonian hold over mainland Greece was broken, with the Roman Republic rising in its place as the pre-eminent power in the Greek East. At Cynoscephalae, the proud Macedonian kingdom of Antigonid monarch Philip V was humbled, its army shattered. Yet the battle, and campaign leading up to it, was hard fought and protracted. Philip V had defied Rome and its allies in the First Macedonian War and was poised to do so again, with the pike phalanx continuing to be a daunting opponent for the Roman legionaries. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

24/06/2025

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47 min
08/07/2025

Why Thomas More -- Henry VIII’s Hatchet Man and Heretic Hunter -- Was Himself Executed For Heresy After the English Reformation

Thomas More was one of the most famous—and notorious—figures in English history. Born into the era of the Wars of the Roses, educated during the European Renaissance, rising to become Chancellor of England, and ultimately destroyed by Henry VIII, he hunted Protestants for heresy and had them burnt at the stake in the final years of Catholic England, but after the English Reformation, he was executed himself when he refused to support Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the English Church. He also achieved literary immortality for his book Utopia, which describes an ideal, imaginary island society with communal property, religious tolerance, and social harmony, critiquing the political and social issues of 16th-century Europe. Was he a saintly scholar and an inspiration for statesmen and intellectuals even today? The Catholic Church would say ‘yes’, as they canonized him and made him the patron saint of statesmen. Or was he the cruel zealot who only wanted to burn Protestants alive and hold back England’s progress? Today’s guest is Joanne Paul, author of Thomas More: A Life. We look at a man who, more than four hundred years after his execution, remains one of the most brilliant minds of the Renaissance. He also shows us the limits of passive resistance and how somebody can achieve posthumous fame but also fail to affect the events of his day. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

08/07/2025

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49 min
10/07/2025

John Adams: The Most Influential Yet Overlooked Founding Father?

John Adams is arguably America’s most underrated Founding Father. He has no currency that bears his image. No national holidays celebrate his birth. He’s nearly never named as anyone’s favorite president. And he has no dedicated memorial in Washington, D.C. Despite this, he was perhaps the most influential early American, rivaling Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. Adams was a key advocate for American independence, nominating Washington as commander of the Continental Army and helping draft the Declaration of Independence. As president, he averted war with France through the Convention of 1800, prioritizing peace despite political backlash. He also defended British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial, showcasing his commitment to justice, and laid the foundation for the U.S. Navy by establishing the Department of the Navy in 1798. How can this be remedied? Today’s guest, Jackie Cushman, is the Chair of the Adams Memorial Commission, created by Congress to establish a Washington, DC memorial to John Adams and his family. She seeks to commemorate the lives of him and his descendants, as the original philosopher-statesmen of America. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

10/07/2025

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39 min
01/07/2025

Operation Barbarossa Saw Millions of POW Executions, Civilian Murders, and Starvation Deaths

Operation Barbarossa, launched by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941, aimed to swiftly conquer the Soviet Union, targeting key cities like Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv. Hitler reportedly said a meeting with his generals before the campaign began "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down," With German forces advancing up to 200 miles per week in the first two months, it looked like Germany would accomplish this goal, nearly reaching Moscow by August. The operation’s rapid pace saw the Wehrmacht encircle and capture millions of Soviet troops, bringing Germany close to victory, though fierce resistance and logistical challenges stalled their progress short of total conquest. The campaign devastated civilian populations, with millions killed through bombings, mass executions, and starvation policies, particularly in occupied regions like Ukraine and Belarus. The Nazis’ brutal tactics, including the Einsatzgruppen death squads, systematically murdered Jews, Romani people, and others, contributing to an estimated 10-14 million civilian deaths across the Soviet Union by the war’s end. To look at these months of fighting in Eastern Eruope, some of the most devastating times in that region’s history, is today’s guest, Richard Hargreaves, author of Opening the Gates of Hell. The combination of unprecedented, rapid military victories coupled with state-sponsored and spontaneous atrocities makes the opening fortnight of the invasion of the Soviet Union unique in the annals of modern warfare. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

01/07/2025

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53 min
10/06/2021

What Egyptian Crocodile Mummies Tell us About Life, Death, and Taxes Thousands of Years Ago

Our story begins in 1899, when two archaeologists — Arthur Hunt and Bernard Grenfell — were on an expedition in Northern Egypt in an ancient town once known as Tebtunis on a search for mummies and other ancient artifacts.This was during a growing Western fascination with ancient Egypt that was later dubbed Egyptomania. Researchers hunted all things Egyptian — especially human mummies, partly because they represented the Western obsession with bringing the dead back to life.While the team were excavating the town’s cemeteries, they found something unexpected: crocodile mummies. Instead of being thrilled at the discovery, the archaeologists saw the reptilian mummies as getting in the way of what they really wanted. But a new generation of Egyptologists have a different view. They see these crocodiles as a means of understand Egyptians’ views of fear, strength, pleasing their gods, and even death. But those aren’t the only secrets they contain. To hold the mummies’ shape, priests would stuff the mummies with waste papyri that had writing on it that people didn’t have a use for anymore.This waste papyri, plus other texts that were found in Tebtunis, reveal what daily life was like for the ancient Egyptians. It’s knowledge that’s invaluable to social historians today.Joining the show to discuss these curiosities are Rita Lucarelli, professor of Egyptology and the faculty curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and Andrew Hogan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri at the Bancroft Library. We discuss all the ways that the most unlikely of items can connect us to the ancient past and understand our predecessors.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

10/06/2021

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55 min
19/08/2025

American Anarchists: The Original Domestic Extremists

In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were heroes to many working-class immigrants. But to many others, anarchism was a terrifyingly foreign ideology. Determined to crush it, government officials launched a decades-long “war on anarchy,” a brutal program of spying, censorship, and deportation that set the foundations of the modern surveillance state. The lawyers who came to the anarchists’ defense advanced groundbreaking arguments for free speech and due process, inspiring the emergence of the civil liberties movement. Today’s guest is Michael Willrich, author of “American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.” We look at this tumultuous era and parallels with contemporary society. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

19/08/2025

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40 min

Parthenon Podcast Network is the premier network for shows about history that will make you examine the story of humanity on a much deeper level. Featuring podcasts that focus on everything from America's key wars to a battle royale among all U.S. presidents, our goal is to connect the stories of the past with the most important issues of the present.

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