Season 5

In this episode, student historians Viktor Lord Harrington, Lauren Flores, and Samuel Saenz tackle a myth propagated by the twentieth-century psychologist Sigmund Freud. Freud argued in an early twentieth-century lecture that the early modern revolution in astronomy which placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the center of the universe, had a profound effect…

In this episode, Whitney Kay, Merit Wagstaff, and Abby Pruns tackle the myth that when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, he and his crew—and everyone else in Europe at the time—believed the earth was flat. Sources Cited in this Episode Cohen, Richard. Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past. Simon &…

In this episode, Cooper Moog, Remington Strickland, and Wyatt Franz tackle the myth that the medieval church prohibited human dissection, supposedly setting back the progress of modern medicine by centuries. Sources Cited in this Episode Croce, Paul Jerome. “Probabilistic Darwinism: Louis Agassiz vs. Asa Gray on Science, Religion, and Certainty.” Journal of Religious History 22,…

In this episode, student historians Nico Mosquera and Ranger Fair tackle a persistent myth about the trial of Galileo Galilei: that he was tortured by authorities within the Catholic Church for challenging prevailing religious beliefs. Studying the transcripts of the trial, as well as Galileo’s own writings, these historians tell the real story of Galileo’s…

In this episode, student historians Aidan Shackelford, Charles Worrell, and Isaac Murat uncover the history of ideas about the relationship between the human mind and the body. Though René Descartes is sometimes credited as the first person to theorize a division between the two, these historians trace a much deeper tradition of attempts to understand…

Perhaps no one encapsulates the incredible advancements of the so-called Scientific Revolution like the English polymath Isaac Newton. Newton is credited with discovering gravity, advancing our understanding of the properties of light, and inventing calculus. In this episode, student historians Marin Newman and Cuatro Welder tackle the myth that when Newton proposed that mathematical laws…

Between around 1450 and 1750, historians agree that something exciting happened in Europe: new discoveries led to new knowledge about the natural world. Scholars used new methods, like experimentation, to study and examine phenomena in nature. Longstanding theories about the order of the universe and the workings of nature were overturned. In popular histories of…