Calling for democratic reforms, some of the one million demonstrators in East Berlin on November 4, 1989, hold a sign reading "Who lies once cannot be trusted" at the Palace of the Republic. The building housing the Communist Parliament is decorated with the national emblem, the hammer and pair of compasses. (AP)

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Twenty years ago this fall there was an earthquake brewing in Eastern Europe.

On November 9, 1989, the almost unthinkable happened. The Berlin Wall came down. The front line of the Soviet empire fell. It was astounding.

Americans have come to think it fell because Ronald Reagan said, “Tear down this wall!” My guest today gives Reagan his due, but says that is a simplification tied directly to a myth that drove the Iraq War. The facts of 1989, he says, are far richer.

This hour, On Point: The real story of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from New York City is Michael Meyer. He was Newsweek bureau chief for Germany, Central Europe, and the Balkans from 1988 to 1992. His new book is “The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall.” He is now director of communications and chief speechwriter for Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon.

Pauline Bonaparte at Galleria Borghese, by Dhfeinsmith/Flickr

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Pauline Bonaparte, favorite sister of the French emperor, was a terrible role model.

Faithful to her famous brother — but not to her husbands. A legendary beauty who liked bathing in milk — and being carried in a chaise longue. She collected jewels. And fashion. And men.

But La Paolina, as the Italians called her when she married Prince Borghese, was more than a sum of her frivolous parts. Courageous, canny and cunning, she might have had an empire of her own had she been born a century or two later.

This hour, On Point: Pauline Bonaparte, “Venus of Empire.”

You can join the conversation. Did you know that Napoleon Bonaparte had a formidable little sister? What are your questions for biographer Flora Fraser about the Bonaparte clan, the Napoleonic wars, and the art of piecing together a life for the page?

You can join the conversation. What’s your story of friendship through the years? Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guest:

Joining us from London is Flora Fraser, author of “Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire.” An acclaimed biographer, she is the author of three other books about scandalous women, including “Beloved Emma: the Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton.” She is also the co-founder of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, named for her grandmother, who wrote about the Duke of Wellington and Queen Victoria.

Read an excerpt from “Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire.”

More links:

Here are reviews by The New York Times (title: “Twisted Sister”) and The Washington Times.

The King Herself (Photo: Kenneth Garrett/National Geographic. Click for full image on nationalgeographic.com).

3,500 years ago in the heart of ancient Egypt, in the heyday of the pharaohs, a woman took the throne.

A great king had died. A step-son and heir was too young to rule. The pharaoh, queen, Hatshepsut, stepped into power – and stayed there.

She built. She commanded armies. She wore the ceremonial fake beard of a pharaoh’s regalia. And when she had died, her stepson chiseled her name off every monument he could reach. Her mummy vanished to history. Now it’s back, and a new story is emerging.

This hour, On Point: Hatshepsut, the great “she-king” of Egypt.

You can join the conversation. How far do you think we can really understand what went on in one grand life in ancient Egypt, 3,500 years ago?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Chip Brown, author of “The She-King of Egypt,” the cover story in the current issue of National Geographic. 

See the stunning gallery of photos by Kenneth Garrett, accompanying Chip Brown’s article, at nationalgeographic.com.

And joining us from Cairo, Egypt, is Zahi Hawass, world-renowned archaeologist and Egyptologist who led the effort that positively identified the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut in 2007. (Click here for an image of the Hatshepsut CT scan.)  He is Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and leader of the Egyptian Mummy Project, which uses modern science — including CT scanning and DNA analysis — to learn more about ancient Egyptian mummies. Among other projects, Dr. Hawass is currently leading the search for the tomb of Cleopatra and Marc Antony.

Germaine Greer in 2007. Photo: Jonathan Ring.

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Germaine Greer was a hot, giant icon of the 1970s feminist uprising. She wrote “The Female Eunuch.” Rallied for gender revolution. Hit every hot button in the era of bra-burning and “hear me roar.”

Four decades later she’s still on fire. Still ready for revolution. Still standing up for women, even a woman who lived 400 years ago.

Anne Hathaway — not the movie star, but William Shakespeare’s wife — has had a bad rap, says Greer. She’s set out to set it right.

This hour, On Point: Feminist rebel and Renaissance scholar Germaine Greer, on Anne Hathaway — and women and the world now.

You can join the conversation. What’s your question for Germaine Greer? On feminism? Our times? Anne Hathaway?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Germaine Greer joins us from New York. Her book “The Female Eunuch” was a seminal text for the feminist movement in the 1970s. She is a scholar of Elizabethan drama, a professor emeritus at the University of Warwick, with a slew of titles to her name. Her book “Shakespeare’s Wife” came out in the U.S. last year. It’s now out in paperback.

Back in the day: Here’s Greer at New York’s Chelsea Hotel, July 1972…

(AP Photo)

The Book of Night Women

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Slavery in the United States was bad, and bad enough. Slavery in Jamaica was something else again.

A tiny portion of whites. An overwhelming black majority in bondage. Escaped blacks preying on runaway blacks. An island engulfed in brutality.

In a powerful new novel, young Jamaican writer Marlon James takes us back to 1800, and into a circle of slave women plotting revolt. Into a secret sisterhood, and the life of one young slave seeking to be human in an inhuman world.

This hour, On Point: Jamaican novelist Marlon James and “The Book of Night Women.”

You can join the conversation. What do you know about life in Jamaica in the heart of its slavery years? About the role of women?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Marlon James joins us in our studio. Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970, he won critical praise for his first novel, “John Crow’s Devil.” He is now a professor of literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.  His new novel is “The Book of Night Women.” The New York Times calls it “beautifully written and devastating.” The Chicago Tribune calls it “a bright dream of hell … painted with a brush dipped in blood.”

Read an excerpt from “The Book of Night Women.”

Ukiyo-e triptych print, a joint work of Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865) and Utagawa Hiroshige, identified as a modern version of the Tale of Genji in snow scenes. (Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)

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The Greeks have Homer and the “Iliad.” The English — “Beowulf,” Chaucer, Shakespeare. The Japanese — “The Tale of Genji.”

The story goes that a thousand years ago, Japanese imperial lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, sat down in the moonlight of a temple outside Kyoto and began to write. Her great tale — of love and longing and court intrigue — is often called the world’s first novel. In Japan, they’ve been celebrating its thousandth anniversary.

The story’s complex hero: the “Shining Genji,” the impossibly beautiful, highly amorous son of the emperor of Japan and a lowly concubine. In Japan, he’s still a heartthrob. The book, a classic. Its insights, as fresh as a thousand-year birthday.

This hour, On Point: Inside “The Tale of Genji.”

You can join the conversation. Do you know this Japanese classic tale of an imperial Don Juan? Are you ready to recognize familiar human psychology in a tale from far away and a thousand years ago? Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Pasadena, Calif., is Lynne Miyake. She is a professor of Japanese, Asian and Women’s studies at Pomona College, and a scholar of the “Tale of Genji” and the life of its author.

And from Berkeley, Calif., is Liza Dalby, a novelist and cultural anthropologist. She’s the author of “The Tale of Murasaki,” a historical novel about the life of Murasaki Shikibu, the woman who wrote “The Tale of Genji.”

More links:

The text of Royall Tyler’s English translation of “The Tale of Genji,” the version read by our guests on this show, is available online at Google Books, along with his introduction.  Another well-known English translation, by Edward G. Seidensticker, is available online here.

A Pakistani worker buffs a logo of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission fixed on a model of Chagai Mountain, the site of Pakistan's nuclear tests, on May 24, 2005 in preparation to mark the seventh anniversary of Pakistan's first nuclear test. (AP)

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Once upon a time, the atomic bomb — with all its terrible destructive power — was in one place, in one set of hands. American hands.

And then it spread: to the USSR, Britain, France, China, Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan. And that nuclear daisy chain, of course, is not a closed book.

The story of the spies and lies and politics that spread the bomb is little told, and utterly fascinating. Now, an American bomb maker and a nuclear spook are telling it — and warning of where the chain could still go.

This hour, On Point: The secret history of nuclear proliferation, and the threat today.

You can join the conversation. Do you know how the nuclear powers actually got their bombs? China? France? Israel? And where does this go next?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

We’re joined from Santa Monica, Calif., by Thomas Reed, and from Los Alamos, New Mexico, by Danny Stillman, co-authors of “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation.” Stillman was former director of intelligence at Los Alamos. Reed was a young nuclear weapons designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the late 1950s. Recruited there at age 26 by Edward Teller, he designed two thermonuclear bombs. He went on to serve as Secretary of the Air Force under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan for National Security Policy. His previous book is “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War.”

More links:

“World at Risk,” the report of the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism, chaired by former senators Bob Graham and Jim Talent, was released in December. It found that “it is likely that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.”

Global Zero, an international initiative launched in December “by 100 political, military, business, faith and civic leaders from across political lines,” is developing a plan for “the phased elimination of nuclear weapons.”

Three hundred years ago this year, 1709, saw the birth of Samuel Johnson — essayist, poet, critic, epic talker, dictionary writer, high moralist, and brutal wit.

He grew up huge and plagued with afflictions: blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, horribly scarred from infancy, a twitching, muttering, explosive sufferer of Tourettes.

He knew poverty and despair, and lived through both to become the most quoted English speaker after Shakespeare. If you know the quip that second marriage is “the triumph of hope over experience,” you know Samuel Johnson. Or that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” Or that “a decent pension for the poor is the true test of civilization.” Or that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” All Johnson.

Boswell left him famous like no other with his Life of Johnson. A new biography goes for the whole man. This hour, On Point: Samuel Johnson, at 300.

You can join the conversation. Three hundred years on, are you still switched on by Samuel Johnson? By his mind, his suffering, his wit, his compassion? His stands on slavery? Capital punishment? Life? Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Berkeley, California, is Jeffrey Meyers. He’s the author of many biographies, most recently “Samuel Johnson: The Struggle.”  You can browse inside the book here.

And with us from Hanover, New Hampshire, is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Kaamilah Furqah, 13, views the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 2007 at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark. (AP)

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On January 1st, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — the historic document that freed America’s slaves, sort of.

In the midst of civil war and politics and military challenge, Lincoln’s act was narrowly aimed at slaves under Confederate control. Their bondage remained unbroken — and once broken, gave way to many decades of Jim Crow oppression.

But the Emancipation Proclamation stands as a national watershed. Now, with Barack Obama headed for the White House, its history speaks again. On January 20, Obama will lay his hand on Lincoln’s Bible to take his oath as President of the United States. It’s a good moment to look back on history.

This hour, On Point: The Emancipation Proclamation and its resonance today.

You can join the conversation. Barack Obama reveres “the Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln. Do you? And how do Lincoln’s acts echo this year in Washington? Tell us what you think.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Edna Greene Medford, associate professor of history at Howard University. She specializes in 19th-century African-American history and is co-author of “The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views,” with Harold Holzer and Frank Williams.

And from Hanover, N.H., is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic. He’s written about 19th-century American history himself, most recently in his book “Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900.”

More links:

The National Archives website features a digital reproduction of the original Emancipation Proclamation, as well as the text version; the “preliminary” proclamation of September 22, 1862; and a background essay by historian John Hope Franklin.

In the November 1862 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Ralph Waldo Emerson reacted to Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in an essay, and the national mythology was born before the proclamation had even been signed:

It is not a measure that admits of being taken back. Done, it cannot be undone by a new Administration…. This act makes that the lives of our heroes have not been sacrificed in vain….

With this blot removed from our national honor, this heavy load lifted off the national heart, we shall not fear henceforward to show our faces among mankind. We shall cease to be hypocrites and pretenders, but what we have styled our free institutions will be such.

In December 1866, also in The Atlantic, Frederick Douglass appealed to the United States Congress to live up to the promise of Lincoln’s proclamation:

Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results, — a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure … or whether, on the other hand, we shall, as the rightful reward of victory over treason have a solid nation, entirely delivered from all contradictions and social antagonisms, based upon loyalty, liberty, and equality, must be determined one way or the other by the present session of Congress.

As we know, it would be a century, and more, before liberty and equality began to be realized for African Americans.

From East to West, and further south than usual, the country has been blanketed in snow in recent days. Imagine if you were crossing it on foot, by canoe, on horseback, in a wagon; a settler, a pioneer, a frontiersman — and you got hurt, became ill.

The medicine of the American frontier was rough and ready — and often required for snake bite, bear slash, bullet wound, broken bone, fever. In deep woods and mountain pass. When doctors were rare – and sometimes more dangerous than the snake.

This hour, On Point: Wild stories of American medicine — native and otherwise — on the American frontier.

You can join the conversation. Does your family lore include tales of wagon-bed surgery? Medicine on the hoof? Fever and ax-wound and frontier survival? Would you have the grit to go mano-a-mano with a bear … tend your wounds … and press on?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

David Dary, professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, where he ran what is now the Gaylord College of Journalism for eleven years. He is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books on the American West. His new book is “Frontier Medicine: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941.”

Read an excerpt from “Frontier Medicine.”

In the age of video games, cell phone texting, and the instant message, the idea that books shape a nation may seem like a stretch.

But look back across American history, and at nearly every key moment of definition, of transition, there stands a book that nails the change.

Novelist, critic, and poet Jay Parini has sifted out of his list a baker’s dozen of books that shaped the nation’s very understanding of itself. “Huck Finn” is in there. So is “Walden.” Lewis and Clark’s journals. “The Souls of Black Folk.” “The Feminine Mystique.” “On the Road.”

This hour, On Point: Thirteen books that changed America.

You can join the conversation. Can the idea of this country, as it’s evolved, be found in thirteen books? What would be on your list?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Jay Parini, poet, novelist, critic, and biographer. He’s a professor of English and creative writing at Middlebury College in Vermont and has written biographies of Frost, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. His new book is “Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America.”

Read excerpts from “Promised Land,” including the chapter on William Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation,” at RandomHouse.com.

Here are the thirteen books that made Parini’s list:

- Of Plymouth Plantation (1620-47), by William Bradford
- The Federalist Papers (1787-88)
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793)
- The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1803-06)
- Walden (1854), by Henry David Thoreau
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), by Mark Twain
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), by W.E.B. DuBois
- The Promised Land (1912), by Mary Antin
- How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), by Dale Carnegie
- The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), by Benjamin Spock
- On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
- The Feminine Mystique (1963), by Betty Friedan

Say the name Casanova, and everybody thinks of love, lust, seduction, thrills.

And well they should. In the 18th century, the great Italian ladies’ man Giacomo Casanova cut a swath through hearts and petticoats from Venice to St. Petersburg. He was irrepressible, irresistible, unashamed — and a very busy man.

And in more than just the boudoir. Casanova left a detailed record of his life and conquests that captures Europe’s life before revolution, and one man’s life with many women, like nothing before.

This hour, On Point: A new biography of the great lover — and chronicler — Casanova.

You can join the conversation. What do you picture when you think: Casanova?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from London is Ian Kelly, actor, writer and now biographer of Casanova. His new biography is “Casanova: Actor Lover Priest Spy.” London’s Sunday Telegraph calls it “A great blast of a book… rippling with enthusiasm right down to the final footnote.” He’s also the author of “Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, The First Celebrity Chef” and “Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style.”

Excerpt:

What was he like? Casanova, Kelly writes, was “an attractive man,” yet “he did not conform to ideals of sexual allure.” He paints a vivid portrait of his subject in this paragraph from “Casanova”:

He paid for sex from time to time throughout his life but did so considerably less than seems to have been the norm at this period for many urban men. Nor did he put himself in the first rank of sexual athletes, some of whom he encountered and witnessed, any more than he accounted himself handsome, well endowed or of abnormal libido. He was aware that his singular interest in humankind, and womankind in particular, was considered unusual and attractive, and until his late thirties he proceeded in life and love in the unquestioning faith that for him, anything and anyone was possible; a credo that transubstantiates its own reality. That he was an attractive man has the witness of figures from the Prussian king Frederick the Great to Madame de Pompadour, connoisseurs of masculine beauty both. Yet he did not conform to ideals of sexual allure of that or any age. He had a large, beaked nose and bulbous, heavily lidded eyes, thick dark eyebrows and a swarthy complexion, minuses all in the lexicon of eighteenth-century ideals of beauty. He looked almost a caricature of an Italian, was uncommonly tall and unusually muscular for a man who never laboured at anything; there are also references to the thickness of his neck and the prominence of his Adam’s apple, which suggest a solid man; a manly man for all he swathed himself in lace. Despite his bulk he moved, it was said, like a dancer; unsurprising, when his family were all in the theatre. At his prime, his only boast was that he was convinced he – or any man – could conquer any woman, if she was the sole object of his undivided attention. He focused completely on those he was with, a sort of charm in itself, and perhaps an unusual experience for women in the eighteenth century.

(Quoted with permission from “Casanova: Actor Lover Priest Spy,” copyright 2008 by Ian Kelly, published by Tarcher/Penguin.)

Andrew Jackson has some big hair and hints of big attitude on the twenty dollar bill.

In life — in the Tennessee woods, in war, in the White House — he was bigger than that. A brawler, a dueler, an infamous lover. The first populist president, who brought the common man, literally, into the White House and made the American presidency imperial.

Andrew Jackson had a temper. He was the first president targeted for assassination, and the only one who fought back and attacked his assailant!

He drew lines Barack Obama will still live with. He took on special interests and big money. He flexed America’s military muscle at home and abroad. He drove slaves and exiled Indians.

Newsweek’s Jon Meacham unpacks Old Hickory’s colorful legacy in a big new biography. This hour, On Point: The age of Jackson.

You can join the conversation. What do you know about the man behind the face of the $20 bill? Can you imagine a commander-in-chief who grew up ready to duel? What can we learn here as a new president takes the stage?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from New York is Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek. He’s author of the New York Times bestsellers “Franklin and Winston: An intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship” and “American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation.” His new biography is “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.”

Read an excerpt from “American Lion.”

Financial historian Niall Ferguson knows humanity’s long trail of boom and bust cycles. But he is hardly buried in the past.

In the long run-up to today’s crisis, Ferguson was warning loud and clear that we were headed for trouble. He called it early, and he called it right.

Now, Ferguson is sizing up the mess we’re in. Bottom line guess, he says: we’re headed for ten percent unemployment and five-plus years of hard times.

On the other side, the world could look quite different. But the U.S., he says, still has some good cards to play. Saving graces.

This hour, On Point: Niall Ferguson, and the big view of the mess we’re in.

You can join the conversation. Big picture, what do you see going on in this economic crisis? Big hiccup? End of an era? Passing of the crown of superpower?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us in our studio is Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard University, professor at Harvard Business School, senior research fellow at Oxford University, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. A contributing editor of The Financial Times, his books include, “Empire,” “Colossus” and “The War of the World.” His latest is “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.” His article titled, “Wall Street Lays Another Egg,” appears in the current issue of Vanity Fair.

The crowd at Grant Park in Chicago waves flags as it is announced that Barack Obama has been elected the President of the United States, Tuesday night, Nov. 4, 2008. (AP)

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History was all over the vote count last night, as Barack Obama — Democrat, first-term senator, African-American son of a Kenyan father and Kansan mother — was elected 44th president of the United States.

In any country on Earth, such a rise would be stunning. In America, with its deep history of slavery, racial strife and race-tarred politics, it is for many astounding. And it has happened.

It was just 40 years ago that Martin Luther King Jr. gave his last speech in Memphis. On April 3, 1968, King said he’d seen the potential for equal rights in the United States: “I may not get there with you,” he said. But the Promised Land would come.

Yesterday’s election of Barack Obama may not be the Promised Land. But it is a giant moment in America’s singular national story.

This hour, On Point: Obama’s victory, in the context of history.

You can join the conversation. How would you describe, for the history books, what happened yesterday at the polls? What does it mean for America’s national story?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Stanford, California, is David M. Kennedy, professor of history at Stanford University. His many books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945″ and the bestselling textbook “The American Pageant: A History of the Republic.”

And from Rutgers University in New Jersey, we welcome Nell Irvin Painter, professor emerita of history at Princeton University. She is a leading scholar of the experiences of African-Americans, women and the working class. Her many books include “Southern History Across the Color Line,” “Creating Black Americans,” and “Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol.”

We have fun with witches. Tonight, for Halloween, hordes of little trick-or-treat witches will be ringing doorbells for candy. Harry Potter made Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry a bestselling playground of childhood imagination.

But human history is also a history of no-joke witch-hunting. Of outcasts and eccentrics and unlucky neighbors hounded down and dunked and burned and boiled.

From ancient Rome, to feudal Europe, to the Salem witch trials — and much more recently.

This hour, On Point: America’s top witchcraft historian on the dark history of witch-hunting.

You can join the conversation. Do you know how deep this story goes? Are we done obsessing with black magic and sorcery? Or still ready — one way or another — to hunt witches?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

John Demos, professor of history at Yale University. His new book is “The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World.” He is also the author of “Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England.”

Read an excerpt from “The Enemy Within.”

Flickr photo

Two and a half thousand years ago, a man named Herodotus wandered the ancient world, trying to make sense of the great war between the Greeks and Persians that had shaped his times.

He gathered wild tales of fabulous creatures and arrogant kings and queens. He also heard of the very real clash of the armies of Xerxes and the Greeks, of the Spartans of “300″ fame, of two great cultures colliding in battle.

In the process, he did something that had never quite been done before. He wrote history. A new translation shows we’re still learning from it.

This hour, On Point: re-reading Herodotus, “Father of History.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Robert Strassler, editor of “The Landmark Thucydides” and the new book “The Landmark Herodotus.” He is president of Riverside Capital Management Corp.

Tadanobu Asano as Genghis Khan in Picturehouse's movie "Mongol"

Genghis Khan rose from nomadic obscurity in outback Mongolia to build, with his descendants, the biggest contiguous empire the world has ever seen.

He did it on horseback, with swords and arrows. In conquered lands from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to Beijing, his name became synonymous with hordes and plunder.

A new film, “Mongol,” in Mongolian and out of Russia, paints the youth of Genghis Khan, his softer side and the trials that made the conqueror. It’s stunning.

This hour, On Point: Mongol Genghis Khan, the first great globalizer, and the story of his rise.

- Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guests:

Morris Rossabi, professor of Mongolian and inner Asian history at Columbia University

John Man, historian and author of “Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection”

Sergei Bodrov, award-winning director of “Mongol”

Learn more about the new movie “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 Yale, where the new film, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” opens in ivy splendor, that story — a true story — has never gone away. In fact, it’s hot.

This hour, On Point: Bull whips everyone. We’ve got real-life derring-do, and the return of Indiana Jones.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Ty Burr, film critic for The Boston Globe.

Roger Atwood, a contributing editor at Archaeology magazine and author of “Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World.”

Andrew Mangino, editor in chief of The Yale Daily News, he will be a senior next fall majoring in political science and history.

Christopher Heaney, a 2003 Yale graduate, he lived and studied on a Fulbright scholarship in Cusco, Peru, from 2005-2006, and is writing a book on Hiram Bingham III and Machu Picchu to be published in 2010 by Palgrave Macmillan.

Barbara Shailor, deputy provost for the arts at Yale University.

Eliane Karp-Toledo, first lady of Peru from 2001-2006, she is an anthropologist and currently a visiting lecturer at Stanford University.

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 came from a single pair of hands, a single mind confronting the unknown. Astoundingly. Beautifully.

This hour, On Point: George Johnson and the ten most beautiful experiments in the history of science.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

George Johnson, science writer for The New York Times, Scientific American, Slate, Wired, Time, and The Atlantic Monthly, and author of “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments.”

Tim Hallman, experimental physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.