15 Minute History 15 Minute History

Political partisanship is not only a hallmark of US democracy today. There is also a long history of dysfunction and division as old as America. H.W. Brands’s new book, Founding Partisans is a revelatory history of the Revolutionary era’s stormy politics, which includes a look at the nation’s earliest political parties — those of Hamilton and […]

Climate change and population growth is creating a new appreciation — and anxiety — around water infrastructure, both in the western United States and around the world. We’re joined today by Professor Erika Bsumek, whose new book, The Foundations of Glen Canyon, focuses on America’s  second highest concrete-arch dam. Not simply a massive piece of physical infrastructure it is also […]

The Hapsburg Empire was founded in 1282 (or 1526, depending on who you ask) and lasted until 1918. Despite its increasingly antiquated and illiberal tendencies, it survived the reformation, the thirty years war, the enlightenment, the age of Revolution, the revolutions of 1848,  and the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 — but not World War I. […]

In the wake of the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era emerged as a time of radical change in the 19th century United States. Dr. Peniel Joseph brings this conversation into the 20th and 21st centuries as we discuss his most recent book, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.

Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon, is a monumental historical epic that has endured mixed reviews since its release last month, due to historical inaccuracies and narrative jumps. But do such criticisms miss the point? Today 15 Minute History is joined by Professor Judith Coffin, who studies and teaches French history at UT Austin, including the […]

“How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” asks Professor Ned Blackhawk (Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone), author of The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Today, Dr. Blackhawk discusses what it would look like to build a new theory […]