You Are A Weirdo (with Historian Doug Sofer, Ph.D.)
Welcome to this shiny series about the power of history to help you understand the Strangeness of Now. Sure it may be disconcerting to find that you—and everyone else alive today—are a bunch of weirdos. But it's going to be okay; your host Doug Sofer is a doctor of history and has been trained to help people in situations exactly like yours.
After all, he is a weirdo—just like you.
Episodes
20 episodes
You're A Room Full Of World Historians (Live From SEWHA 2024)
How does history help us come to grips with the strangeness of now? Find out as the scholars of the Southeast World History Association tackle that very question! This special session of SEWHA's annual meetin...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 7
•
40:06
You're A Civil War Historian (with Aaron Astor)
What parts of today’s world would freak out folks who lived during the U.S. Civil War? In this first-ever interview-based episode* of the You Are A Weirdo history podcast, we ask a real-life U.S. Civil War historian t...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 6
•
45:47
Your Planet, Your History and The 'S-Clause' Mystery
There once was a jolly fellow with a red nose who lived in London; historical documents mention something about a certain "S. Clause." Then, in 1833, he and his mates disappeared without a trace. Finding out what happened to him has something t...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 5
•
32:38
History Is in Your Nature—And Nature Is in Your History
Take a walk on the wild side with your historian host as we unearth some of the big-picture insights of environmental history. Forage in the wilderness, stroll around a giant pie, and hear about what ancient folks did for a living. You’ll also ...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 4
•
29:08
You Repeat Yourself You Repeat Yourself
It bears repeating that we live in strange times. Take, for instance, duplication technology. Today, no matter who you are, you can draw an image or scribble out some text, and copy it as many times as you’d like. Yet when we consider that copy...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 3
•
39:08
Your Water's More Valuable Than Diamonds
Which is more valuable: diamonds or water? The seems obvious, but splash some holy water into the mix and you’ll see that this answer is a lot messier than you might at first think. Join your new favorite historian-podcaster guy on a journey th...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 2
•
39:57
Your Democracy Is A Republic—and Vice-Versa
Did the framers of the U.S. Constitution set up the country’s government to be a republic or a democracy? Some folks have surprisingly strong opinions on this question, often with good reason. Yet the words republic and democracy have very simi...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 1
•
42:31
Season Two Trailer
Anticipation. It's so thick you can scoop it out of the air with a soup spoon. Yes my friends, Season Two of the award-imagining You Are A Weirdo podcast is coming soon.If this dramatic trailer is any indication, it's going...
•
Season 2
•
Episode 0
•
4:37
History Makes Your News
In the time it takes you to put on just one elbow pad, you can access hundreds of cutting-edge news articles from all around the globe. Yet making sense of international events can be tricky. To really get it, you need to understand something a...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 12
•
29:48
You're Used To Loudmouths
Understanding the historical rise of mass media is not just about the tech. It’s also about how people used—and abused—those new ways of communicating with the public. That picture becomes clearer when you realize that new innovations in amplif...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 11
•
49:05
You're Amped Up
You’re presumably reading this description because you like to listen to podcasts. And you can listen to podcasts because clever people invented loudspeakers a century-and-change ago. And loudspeakers were not possible without the invention of ...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 10
•
31:00
You're Too Loud!
We take for granted our present-day ability to make ourselves as obnoxiously loud as we want to be. Yet being able to pump up the volume of an individual voice—to make it so deafening that it can easily reach all 140,000 ears of a stadium full ...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 9
•
34:56
You Ask Leading Questions
Studying history can help you become a better, more informed leader. Yet a lot of so-called advice from 'history' out there tends to oversimplify the historical record. History is big and complex; reducing this enormous field to a bunch of dige...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 8
•
36:15
You're Disorderly
Who’s your daddy?In most societies throughout most of recorded human history, your answer to that question would be the primary determinant of who you were allowed to be. A community in which your prestige and your birth-status de...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 7
•
34:53
Yes, You Have New Bananas
Today, bananas are just a delicious, fruity fact of life. But being able to buy these curvy, golden delicacies in places where it’s too cold to grow them is actually a very recent development in the big picture of human history. Understanding t...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 6
•
39:31
Your Network Is Disconnected
When you’re online, you meet all kinds of people. You play games with them, you LOL at their jokes, or care-emoji-hug them when they’re feeling especially sad-emoji. But within the broader context of the human past, these a...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 5
•
39:57
Your Tea Comes with Baggage
How did tea become British when tea plants usually grow in far-away places like India or China? This history of this leafy beverage travels thousands of miles over thousands of years. It’s a story of human brutality and suffering on a global sc...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 4
•
44:55
You Hear Dead People
Shuffle enough random songs and you're certain to hear singers who are no longer among the living. Before 1877, hearing voices of the dead would have been a supremely blood curdling experience. Yet we weirdos of today routinely listen to the so...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 3
•
38:40
You Don't Get The Joke (Probably)
You might think you have a totally normal sense of humor, but then you hear a joke from the past and it sounds like it came from some other dimension. That's when you realize once again that your normal can be another person's weird.Joi...
•
Season 1
•
Episode 2
•
29:29