History Shorts

Long before stadiums, scoreboards, or professional leagues, Mesoamerican civilizations played a game where sport, ritual, and the cosmos collided.
In this episode of History Shorts, we explore Ullamaliztli, the ancient Mesoamerican ball game played for more than 3,000 years by the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec worlds. Using a solid rubber ball, sometimes weighing as much as a bowling ball, players struck it with hips, thighs, and forearms, battling gravity, physics, and pain itself to keep the ball in motion.
 
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For centuries, their voices were said to sound unearthly, pure, soaring, and unlike anything heard before or since.
In this episode of History Shorts, we explore the haunting and controversial history of the Angel Singers of Rome: the castrati whose voices filled Europe's greatest churches and concert halls. Created through a brutal practice carried out on young boys, castrati became musical superstars in early modern Europe, prized especially by the Catholic Church, which barred women from singing in sacred spaces.
 
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In this episode of History Shorts, we tell the dramatic, transatlantic story of the Polish nobleman who helped shape the American Revolution from the saddle. Branded a traitor in his homeland after fighting Russian domination, Pulaski carried his hard-earned battlefield experience across the Atlantic and offered it to a desperate Continental Army. What followed was nothing short of transformative.
 
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At two pivotal moments in American history, waves of religious revival swept across the colonies and the young United States, reshaping faith, politics, reform movements, and the very idea of what it meant to be American. Known as the First and Second Great Awakenings, these movements transformed religion from an elite, church-centered experience into a mass, emotional, and deeply personal force.
 
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Nicknamed "The Little Magician," Martin Van Buren was one of the most skilled political operators in American history, and one of its most misunderstood presidents. He didn't win power through battlefield glory or soaring rhetoric, but through organization, loyalty, and an almost modern understanding of party politics.
 
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