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Everywhere around us are echoes of the past.

Those echoes define the boundaries of states and countries, how we pray and how we fight.

They determine what money we spent and how we earn it at work, what language we speak,

and how we raise our children.

As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

I'm Patrick Weiman, the host of Tides of History.

It might sound corny to say this, but I believe that history matters.

It's an essential tool for understanding our world and how it got to be the way it is.

But it also tells us that the world doesn't have to be as it is.

That there are other ways of doing things, that things weren't destined to happen the way they did.

In Tides of History, we're looking at two major tides.

First, the fall of the Roman Empire, my specialty and the subject of my last show, the fall of Rome.

Barbarians, political breakdown, economic collapse, mass migration, pillaging and plunder.

We're covering all of it.

Second, we're looking at a time I call the rise of the modern world.

The roots of our own present world can be found in the 300 years between 1350 and 1650-80,

everything from modern states to globalization to capitalism to the printing press to science.

We try to understand these things not just from the top down, but from the ground up,

from the perspective of ordinary people and how they experienced their world.

It's all there, and so are interviews with academic historians,

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