Curated history collection
Art, ritual, story, and faith reveal how people understood their place in the world. This collection explores cultural life as something practiced and contested, not merely displayed in museums.
Listen to histories of religion, philosophy, music, literature, architecture, myth, and everyday custom, told through the people and communities who gave them meaning.
7 documentaries
15 min documentary
She conquered Hollywood on her own terms, demanding unprecedented contractual control and walking away with an Oscar for a film she despised. From runaway heiress to the highest-paid woman in America, this is the story of how an immigrant girl outsmarted the studio system.
15 min documentary
For fourteen years Nokia owned the mobile phone, then vanished from it in barely six. What kills a giant that had touchscreens before the iPhone and still froze?
10 min documentary
A railway cutting through the South Gippsland scrub split open a seam of black coal, and a forest clearing became one of Victoria's busiest mining towns almost overnight. So why did the boom collapse - and why does a make-believe pioneer village now stand where the miners once dug?
15 min documentary
A tiny Czech studio thought its glowing block-slashing game might be just another small side project. Instead it became the first virtual reality game to sell a million copies - and the app that finally made VR worth owning.
10 min documentary
Why does Japanese still use Chinese characters alongside two homegrown syllabaries? The answer begins with Buddhist texts and court politics, then winds through women’s literature, schoolroom reform, and the surprising survival of an apparently impossible system.
10 min documentary
What happens when courts, police, money, and even citizenship become things people can buy? Anarcho-capitalist thought produced stranger consequences than a stateless society: private-law experiments, encrypted communication, cryptocurrency, and a recurring problem its champions never quite solved.
10 min documentary
A peasant in fourteenth-century England could lose grain, labor, rent, and church dues before ever seeing a coin-yet the modern American tax bill may still be larger. The answer depends on whether “tax” means money paid to government, or everything extracted from a household’s survival.
