War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding right down to the present.

Wars made the United States independent, kept it together, increased its size, and established it as a global superpower.

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In each episode, I discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's Wars.

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The history of North America podcast is a sweeping historical saga of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, from their deep origins to our present epoch.

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Hi, everyone. Welcome back to our series on counterintuitive facts about the Middle Ages.

We're going to be looking at two things that probably everyone associates with the Middle Ages in this episode.

That is, which burnings, and the plague.

And before I get started, I'd like to give a thank you to Timothy O'Neal.

Tim was someone that I first touched base with about five years ago. He's a writer on Quora, and he was a guest on one of my old podcasts.

Tim is an amateur medievalist and probably one of the most entertaining writers that I know about the Middle Ages.

He blogs at the site, Armaria Magnum, and he's currently writing for a site called History for Atheists.

And Tim is very interesting because he is not a religious believer, but he is a fierce defender of the Middle Ages, and believes that that age is maligned, often by religious skeptics, who might have an ideological bone to pick.

He's a guy that transcends a lot of ideological categories.

Anyway, he writes a lot of great stuff about counterintuitive facts about the Middle Ages.

He glued me into a lot of this information and helped me get into the medieval world.

So I recommend checking his stuff out if you want to follow up on some of the stuff I'm going to talk about here.

Let's just get right into it. Let's first talk about which burnings.

And that's because whenever someone uses the phrase which burning or which hunt, they usually can't help a tag on the words of the Middle Ages.

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