Lessons From History

Cover Image for the collection 'Lessons From History'

What the past can teach us about the future

By The Blinkist Curators

What's it about?

What can we learn from history? With the right mindset, just about anything! This collection shows us how we can apply lessons from history to understand our society today and where we're heading for the future. From family units to mass movements, each title spotlights a different period in history that could hopefully guide us towards a kinder, fairer, and more stable future.

Lessons From History

What the past can teach us about the future

Psychology: Blame Game

Psychology: Blame Game

Take a look under the hood of one of the strangest public hysterias in recent memory, the Toyota Recall Crisis of 2009. Cars were said to be mysteriously accelerating with fatal consequences, but as Malcolm Gladwell dug deeper he finds the crisis speaks as much to what goes wrong with us in challenging situations and large-scale public incidents as it does the cars.

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels

How Human Values Evolve

How to Avoid The Dunning Kruger Effect

How to Avoid The Dunning Kruger Effect

When the people who are the worst at something think they’re the best at it—that’s the Dunning Kruger effect in action. It speaks to a kind of mindset that's convinced "it can't be that hard," despite experts and specialists proving otherwise. In this episode, you'll hear about how it can affect us in big ways and small, and you'll learn how to prevent it before it happens to you.

The True Believer

The True Believer

Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

The Great Leveler

The Great Leveler

Walter Scheidel

Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

Humankind

A Hopeful History

Problem Solving: General Chapman's Last Stand

Problem Solving: General Chapman's Last Stand

How does a carefully laid strategy go so very wrong that it ends up achieving exactly the opposite of what it set out to do? You can find a perfect example of this in the US's fraught border-control history and the idealistic military man behind it all: General Leonard F. Chapman's. This is a story about nuances, realism, and why trusting our instincts in complex problem solving isn't always the best solution.

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

A Brief History of Humankind

Caligula and Nero: The Men Behind the Madness

Caligula and Nero: The Men Behind the Madness

It’s common practice to place labels on others. We hear one or two memorable anecdotes, and that’s all we remember about someone. But how much does this cause us to miss? In this episode, Dan hears about two notoriously "mad" Roman Emperors, Caligula and Nero, and how their stories might be a little more complex than their reputations lead us to believe.

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