How books about things that changed the world became a publishing trope.

Look within the nonfiction part of any bookstore and also you’ll discover dozens of historical past books making the identical daring declare: that their slender, sudden topic in some way modified the world. Potatoes, kudzu, soccer, espresso, Iceland, bees, oak bushes, sand, chickens—there are books about all of them, and lots of extra apart from, with the phrase “modified the world” or one thing equally grandiose proper there within the title. These books are typically referred to as “microhistories” or “factor biographies” and so they’ve been a trope in publishing for many years. On this episode, we set up the place this development got here from, determine why it’s been so persistent, after which we put a bunch of authors on the spot, asking them to make the case for why their topics modified the world.

The writers you’ll hear from embrace:
• Simon Garfield (Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World)
• Mark Kurlansky (Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World)
• George Gibson, writer of Cod and Dava Sobel’s Longitude
• Historian Bronwen Everill
• Slate author Henry Grabar (Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World)
• Gastropod co-host Nicola Twilley (Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves)
• Tim Queeney (Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization)
• Leila Philip (Beaver Land: How One Weird Rodent Made America).

This episode was written by Willa Paskin and produced by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman additionally produce our present. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

Thanks to Joshua Specht, writer of Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America; Dan Koeppel, writer of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World; Tina Lupton; Dan Kois; and Nancy Miller.

When you have any cultural mysteries you need us to decode, please e mail us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or depart a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.

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