Over 800 people died in the middle of the Chicago River on an early morning at dockside one sunny day in July of 1915. Matching the tragedy of the Titanic, it is now lost in memory except for the tales still told in Chicago. Here is a striking account by Jay Bonansinga. He did the definitive history and discussed it with us one night in 2004. Of equal interest are the phone calls from descendants of some of the survivors.

The Old Testament – the Hebrew Bible or Tanach – combines myth, allegory and particularly in the later books, historical events. Modern biblical scholarship has worked for over a hundred years to decode the text so as to reveal the “true story” of the group that became the Jews. James Kugel is one of the leading contributors to that effort. Now at Bar Ilan University in Israel, he taught before that at Harvard where his undergraduate course in the Hebrew Bible usually drew 800 or 900 registered students. He joined us in this memorable 2007 program about the hidden meanings of the biblical text.

So said Wellington about the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo – and the same can be said and is said by our guest, John Ferling – about the outcome of our Revolutionary War. In this 2006 conversation the masterly historian reviews how lucky we were and how much our victory was a gift from the French, who finally provided the naval blockade which blocked the escape of the British from Yorktown. The broader lesson is how utterly contingent can be the turns of history. Ferling provides a wonderfully rich narrative backing for this view.

A striking side-note from a discussion in 1981 with Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and historian of the Holocaust. He reveals that he himself was, inadvertently, the source of that designation – meaning, in the original Hebrew, “burnt offering” – for the term that has come to stand for the mass murder of European Jewry.

The trio of Hitler, Stalin and Mao were responsible for some 100 million political murders of civilians. Of these some 48 million could be traced to Mao Tse Tung and his two mad campaigns known as “The Great Leap Forward” and  “The Cultural Revolution.” The terrifying and inevitably riveting story was told by Oxford University historian Roderick Macfarquhar in his book “Mao’s Last Revolution.” He joined us in this exceptional program early in 2006.