Biography - Historical Archives - The Library of Podcasts

Book cover of Martin Luther: Renegades and Prophets by Lyndal Roper

Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

On October 31, 1517, so the story goes, a shy monk named Martin Luther nailed a piece of paper to the door of the Castle Church in the university town of Wittenberg. The ideas contained in these Ninety-five Theses, which boldly challenged the Catholic Church, spread like wildfire. Within two months, they were known all over Germany. So powerful were Martin Luther’s broadsides against papal authority that they polarized a continent and tore apart the very foundation of Western Christendom. Luther’s ideas inspired upheavals whose consequences we live with today. […Learn More]

The Scholems: A Story of the German – Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction

The evocative and riveting stories of four brothers—Gershom the Zionist, Werner the Communist, Reinhold the nationalist, and Erich the liberal—weave together in The Scholems, a biography of an eminent middle-class Jewish Berlin family and a social history of the Jews in Germany in the decades leading up to World War II. […Learn More]

The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary—and literary history. […Learn More]

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

Alexis Coe takes a closer look at our first–and finds he is not quite the man we remember

Young George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, caused an international incident, and never backed down–even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle. […Learn More]