Sam Peltzman speaks of Friedman as his professor and colleague. Another such colleague was Leo Melamed. Here in a 2007 program they recall Friedman as friend, as innovative contributor to the transformation of American economics and, basically, as the “guy who got it right.”

But economics is probably the most important, or most influential, of the academic social disciplines One practitioner, who is widely expected to become a Nobel Laureate, is Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago. He joins us to explain the “Peltzman Effect” and, among many other things, how and where the present administration went wrong.

A team of academically based historical specialists examines “the anatomy of revolution” and inquires what was shared by – and distinctive about – the French, English, American and Russian revolutions. A guiding question is whether modern convulsions in the alteration of power are truly “revolutionary.”

It has been about 65 years since their discovery. Our guests are two famous specialists who have long researched the Scrolls as they bear upon the composition and special strands of meaning in both the Old and the New Testaments.

This 2006 conversation with the main man at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) aroused and infuriated – and all the more so today because the problems it highlighted then persist.

That’s the title John Drummond held in Chicago and among knowing journalists everywhere. For detailed knowledge of organized and street-crime, for perfect memory and compelling narrative style he has and had no match. Here he is in a conversation five years ago.

Elizabeth the First had a much more demanding assignment than the current Queen of England. The arts of ambiguity – combined, where necessary, with ruthlessness – seem to have been the basis of her effective and creative rule. All of this is under delightfully detailed examination in this 2003 conversation with two specialists in “Elizabethan” history.

Eleven years ago biblical archeologists were enthused over the discovery of the container that had held the bones of the brother of Jesus. Two of the leading scholars of New Testament research reported the find and the way that it deepened our “knowledge” of the historical Jesus. Here in 2003 they discuss what 200 years of that search have yielded.

John James Audubon was rumored to be the Dauphin of France who would have succeeded to the French throne but for the revolution. Wrong. But of course he invented and perfected the new art of bird portraiture and lived a life full of adventure and invention. Rhodes, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, did a great biography of Audubon and gave us this great discussion in 2005 before we went on to discuss his totally different preceding book about the Nazi killing squads.

Is gravitation a key to history so that everything that goes up must come down? Daniel Garrison, professor of the History of Classical Antiquity at Northwestern University, examines the fall of Rome, asking whether the West is now going through the same stages of decline.