History podcast on the rise of the modern world, 1206-1914. It's not a march of progress or a list of all that’s gone wrong. It’s the story of the people, large and small, that drove, participated in, and experienced the creation of this New World in which we live today.

This is an incredibly long and dramatic period of history and I’m not going to attempt to cover everything. My focus will be on telling stories less often explored or looking at them from a different perspective. The show will be broken into distinct seasons, each of which will focus on a particular story or topic.

The first season is covering Taiping Civil War, a war against the ruling Qing dynasty, led by a man who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. It’s probably history’s bloodiest civil war, with more dead than World War I, and nearly brought an end to the ruling Qing dynasty.