Napoleon Bonaparte’s favorite sister was shocking, beautiful and worthy of an empire all her own. We talk with biographer Flora Fraser.

Over three thousand years ago, a female pharaoh ruled Egypt with a strong hand and a fake beard. We’ll look at the life, reign, and mummy of Egypt’s she-king.

Iconic feminist Germaine Greer joins us with her re-imagined life of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway.

Jamaica, 1800. White masters, black slaves, and revolt. Novelist Marlon James talks about his new work, “The Book of Night Women.”

The Japanese masterpiece known as the world’s first novel, is a thousand years old. We’ll journey back to courtyard and kimono.

Spies, lies and nukes. We’ll look at a new history of nuclear proliferation – and how the bomb really spread.

Biographer Jeffrey Meyers on how one of history’s great idlers became one of literature’s greatest wits.

On January 1st, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Historian Edna Greene Medford explains what it meant for African Americans, and how it resonates in the era of Obama.

A new look at frontier medicine, and the wildest tonics of the old Wild West.

From the “Huck Finn” to “The Feminine Mystique,” author and critic Jay Parini talks about the books that really changed America.

A new biography says he was much more than the world’s greatest lover.

Newsweek’s Jon Meacham talks about his new biography of President “Number 7,” Andrew Jackson, who broke down the doors of Washington for the common man.

Historian Niall Ferguson discusses the economic crisis of our time, right now.

American historians David Kennedy and Nell Irvin Painter discuss the weight of the 2008 election.

A scary Halloween story. We’ll talk with Yale historian John Demos about the 2,000-year history of witch-hunting in the Western world.

Two and a half thousand years ago, he wandered the ancient world, trying to make sense of the great war that had shaped his times.

A new film shows off the soft side of Genghis Khan. We talk with the director of “Mongol.”

It’s just a matter of days now, and Indiana Jones is back in a theater near you.
Harrison Ford, the leather jacket, the bullwhip, the fedora — 27 years after “Raiders of the Lost Ark” they’re practically archeological artifacts themselves. But who cares? Everybody wants to get back to snakes and jungle and desert and adventure.
At [...]

Science writer George Johnson is in love with the science of the old days — before super-colliders and supercomputers and terabytes of data to be churned.
When he thinks of the beauty of science, he thinks of the simple, shattering experiments of Galileo and Newton, Pavlov and Faraday.
Until very recently, he says, the most earthshaking science [...]

The world is too much with us, goes the sonnet. And in fourteen lines we’re off, into the “jewel box” of poetic form. How do I love thee? Death, be not proud. My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun.
For five hundred years and more, from Petrarch and Shakespeare to Ginsburg and Seamus Heaney, the [...]