Show Notes
Every generation thinks it’s living through unprecedented change. A Short History of Saving the World is a new history podcast with Angus Hervey and historian Ada Palmer that explores the turning points, crises, and ideas that shaped world history - and the hidden patterns that connect them. From ancient civilisations to modern global events, this series zooms out to ask a bigger question: what actually happens when the world feels like it’s falling apart?
Part conversation, part historical deep dive, this series reveals history not as a timeline of collapse, but as a story of human ingenuity, adaptation, and resilience.Because if you read history closely enough, you start to see it differently. The world doesn’t just break. It changes. It adapts. It gets saved - again and again.
More from A Short History of Saving The World
We expect science to give us answers. But what if its greatest breakthrough was learning to be wrong?
We figured out that women and men were equal thousands of years ago. So why did it take so long for the world to catch up?
What if artificial intelligence isn't just about machines? What if it's part of a much longer story about how we understand ourselves?
Every generation thinks it’s living through an unprecedented information crisis. But according to historian Ada Palmer, we’ve been here before. In this episode, Angus and Ada explore the first great information revolution - from Machiavelli hiding The Prince and Leonardo da Vinci’s coded notebooks to the printing press, censorship, and Shakespeare’s anxieties about misinformation.