Susan Burch teaches at Gallaudet University and is the author of “Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 - 1942.” She talks about the “oralist” movement which required the deaf to learn sign language and lip reading.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Simon Winchester talks about the enormous volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883. The tidal waves killed almost forty thousand people, and the resulting social chaos gave rise to the first incidents of Muslim clerics fomenting violent uprisings against Westerners.
Stephen Prothero tells Steve Paulson about the first American cremation, which didn’t really go very well, and the current craze for going out in a blaze of glory.
There’s a Modern Caveman Movement afoot. And their inspirational leader is 76 year-old Arthur De Vany. A man who says we all should be mimicking our caveman ancestors.
Reinhold Messner is arguably the world’s greatest living mountaineer. He’s climbed 14 of the world’s tallest peaks, and if that isn’t impressive enough, he was the first to climb Mt. Everest alone and without supplemental oxygen. He recounts some of these adventures in a new book called “Reinhold Messner: My Life at the Limit.” Steve Paulson caught up with him and asked how he got hooked on climbing.
Tariq Ramadan tells Steve Paulson that Islam should be viewed as a religion in its own right and not compared to the history of Christianity.
Russ Parsons tells Jim Fleming that french fries should be crisp on the outside and fluffy on the inside, and shares the secrets of fried spinach and Tuscan potato chips.
We know a lot about how slaves looked at books because of the hundreds of slave narratives they wrote. Scholar Cherene Sherrard-Johnson says a fundamental trope in those narratives is what’s called “the Talking Book.”
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