The Old World with Will Tanner

his is the tale of how tobacco created the plantations in Virginia for which the Old Dominion is known, and how those plantations entrenched and solidified the power of the famous "Topping People" of Virginia, those First Families of Virginia and Virginia Gentry who ruled the state for decades. It is a tale of indentured servants in colonial Virginia and slave labor workforces on vast Virginia plantations. It is a tale of the Navigation Acts, of soil exhaustion, of Starving Times in Jamestown and dying gentlemen in their starched, ruffled shirts. This is the story of Virginia's shift, brought about thanks to John Rolfe of Pocahontas fame, from the blighted land Captain John Smith and Gov. George Percy knew, to that flourishing and flowering Old Virginia of Robert "King" Carter, Thomas Lee, and the others of Virginia's Golden Age. But most of all, this is the tale of tobacco and plantations in Virginia, and why they developed as they did.

In this episode, Will and Richard Easton, a historian of GPS and son of one of the inventors of GPS, discuss the history of the Space Race and Apollo missions. They go over the impetus for Eisenhower committing America to launching a satellite, the reasons for the Gemini and Mercury missions, why Kennedy settled on the moon mission, and how the Apollo program progressed. They discuss the technical advancements required to make Apollo happen, the characters and competence of the men involved, the scientific legacy of Apollo, and why the missions were ended. They discuss also why space exploration slowed to a crawl after Apollo 17, the challenges NASA faces, and the incredible technical competence shown by SpaceX, along with GPS and Richard's book about its history. Note: the Apollo 16 CapCom whose name Richard could not remember is Charlie Duke Get Richard's Book here: GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones Get Michael Collins's Book here: Carrying the Fire Get Charles Murray's book about Apollo here: Apollo: The Race to the Moon

In this concluding video on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Will discusses what the legacy of these two great explorers is. He comments on their discovery that the Northwest Passage was a figment of the imagination, but how they nevertheless sparked a massive fur trade rush. He tells how Clark mapped the West with incredible accuracy and created a resource used for decades, how their careful cataloguing and preservation of natural specimens was an immense scientific accomplishment, and how they discovered and documented much of the West's incredible species and beauty. He also discusses the death of Meriwether Lewis, and how Lewis's incomprehensible failure to publish the Lewis and Clark Journals led to many of their greatest scientific accomplishments going unrecorded for almost a century.