Look in the nonfiction section of any bookstore and you’ll find dozens of history books making the same bold claim: that their narrow, unexpected subject somehow changed the world. Potatoes, kudzu, soccer, coffee, Iceland, bees, oak trees, sand, chickens—there are books about all of them, and many more besides, with the phrase “changed the world” or something similarly grandiose right there in the title. These books are sometimes called “microhistories” or “thing biographies” and they’ve been a trope in publishing for decades. In this episode, we establish where this trend came from, figure out why it’s been so persistent, and then we put a bunch of authors on the spot, asking them to make the case for why their subjects changed the world.

The writers you’ll hear from include:

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, publisher of Cod and Dava Sobel’s Longitude
Historian Bronwen Everill
Slate writer 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 also produce our show. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

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

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.

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How Books About Things That Changed the World… Changed the World