In this 2000 program, Nathanial Philbrick, author of “In the Heart of the Sea,” recounts the true-life story that probably inspired Melville’s Moby Dick. The Essex, a whaleship out of Nantucket, was completely destroyed by the great sperm whale that it was pursuing  in the South Pacific about a thousand miles east of the Marquesas Islands.

Despite his trial in Jerusalem and his subsequent execution, Eichmann, who was in charge of the Holocaust of European Jewry, remains an enigmatic figure. Was he merely a bureaucrat “following orders” or was he an enthusiastic mass-murderer? One of the best book-length studies of Eichmann was by Neal Bascom. Here he is in a full discussion from 2009.

Is Homo Sapiens directly descended from some prior species? If so, it would probably be “Homo Neanderthalis.” That is the question with which this fine discussion from 2004 begins. One of the participants is a biological scientist and the other is engaged in archeological anthropology. Both have spent their careers trying to track the long geneology of our species.

“Strange” because of its fictional beginning, but full of revelations from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Edmund Morris. He is joined in this conversation from 1999 by Joe Morris. The two Morrises are not related except in their shared and striking competence as political historians.

As you have probably heard, Peter Schweitzer, author of the recent book “Clinton Cash,” asserts that they are. Here, he lays out his case.

Bellow died in 2005 and about a week later we commemorated his passing with an extended discussion of his art and his life. One of our guests, Richard Stern, was Bellow’s close friend and played a major role in bringing him to the University of Chicago. Both Stern and our other guest, Alexander Hemon, were important working novelists at the time of this deeply probing discussion.

Graham Allison, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and one of the founders of the Kennedy School at Harvard, wrote a book 11 years ago saying that such an attack was ultimately inevitable. In this riveting conversation from 2004 he lays out the facts and the reasoning behind his warning. The likely source of such an attack is no longer Osama Bin Laden. But as you listen ask yourself whether this analysis does not apply as well – or even more closely – to ISIS.

What if the Confederacy had won at Gettysburg? That and similiar questions always arise as one ponders the mysteries of history. The Gettysburg counterfactual and others are examined here in a discussion in 2001 featuring three military historians.

No, it’s not the group you think it is. It’s “Beyond the Fringe” an early post-war group introduced here, in a program about British and American comedy, by Abe Peck who was one of our regulars in the 1980s. Peter Moore is in the group as are various others who went on to prominence after they escaped from Oxford University.