Very Human History

In 1949, one Dominican family refused to hang a portrait of dictator Rafael Trujillo in their home. When 23-year-old Minerva Mirabal told him "No" to his face on a dance floor, it set off a chain of events that would...

What happens when you let your worst instincts get amplified by the wrong circle of friends? In 1914, a frail, rejected teenager named Gavrilo Princip fired two shots in Sarajevo—lighting the fuse for World War I and...

Anne Frank spent two years in hiding above a warehouse; writing about crushes, fights with her mom, and being bored out of her mind, right alongside her fear. This is the story everyone knows the ending of, told through...

How do you move forward when everything you know is destroyed? In 1945, Japan faced the unthinkable. One generation later, they were one of the world's most resilient nations and a close American ally. The secret wasn't...

China reported a record harvest while 36 million people starved. This is the true story of the lie behind it — and the son who spent 30 years believing it. In 1959, 18-year-old Yang Jisheng watched the man who raised...

He got the headaches the week he made the call. He never mentioned them again; not once, for the rest of his life. In July 1945, President Truman had one decision that belonged to no one but him: whether to use the...

She had one way out of a prison cell: sign a confession. She refused for 2,372 days. Then came out to a lie about her daughter. In 1966, Mao's Cultural Revolution turned Nien Cheng's education, her wealth, and her years...

A baby survives a plane crash that kills 138 people. 50 years later, she still doesn't know her real birthday. In 1975, one man broke the rules to fly orphans out of a falling Saigon, and by accident, started a...

There's exactly one person in history known to have volunteered to get sent to Auschwitz. Not captured. Not sentenced. He asked to go in. Witold Pilecki walked into a Nazi roundup on purpose, using a fake name, to find...

She ran in front of the world. Finished last. And the entire stadium stood up. Samia Yusuf Omar grew up in Mogadishu during one of the most violent periods of the Somali Civil War. She lost her father to a mortar...

Their parents were behind barbed wire. Their government called them the enemy. And when America finally let them fight — 10,000 men volunteered for a unit that needed 1,500. Some of them enlisted straight out of the...

The room was full of the smartest people in the world. Every single one of them said the same thing. And every single one of them was wrong. In October 1962, Kennedy sat in a room where every general, every advisor...

For 28 years, a concrete wall split a city in half and trapped millions inside a country they never chose. Then one night in 1989, ordinary people showed up at the checkpoints and the wall came down. The history is...

This episode explores the transformative power of failure, using the story of the Wright Brothers and the history of flight to illustrate how learning from crashes and setbacks can lead to success. It emphasizes the...

This episode explores the extraordinary story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as surviving two atomic bombings in Japan. Through his journey, we learn about resilience, the impact of trauma...