Part I: Beginnings
Animated gif made by not-a-robot-not-an-artist Doug Sofer, ©2026. Made with Procreate for iPad.
Scholars, politicians and meme-slingers alike talk about Western Civilization as if it were something concrete. Since it’s named after a compass direction, you might even assume it refers to some actual place. But even old-school, traditional Western Civ textbooks show that The West is a much, much messier concept than it first appears.
Find out why the West isn’t just about Western Europe. Sometimes it’s in the East, or the Middle East, or in Western Asia, or in North Africa.
And sometimes it’s only in your head.
Join historian Doug Sofer for the first part of this exciting three-part mini-series that was a whole big fat year in the making! Part I (this one!) is about the ancient origins of what’s called the West. It’s also somehow about robots, a rabbit’s nose, and way too much about kicking footballs around.
Episode Notes & References
Western Civ Resources
Much of the info in this episode can be found in literally any Western Civilization textbook written by actual, professional historians. For a few sections, I used Joshua Cole and Carol Symes, Western Civilizations, Brief combined volume (New York: W.W. Norton, 2023), 125.
If you want a free one, here’s a link to the first volume of Christopher Brooks, Western Civilization: A Concise History, V. I, (Open Educational Resource released under the Creative Commons License—Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, 2024), at https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/698 , accessed 9 Jan., 2026.
History of Mathematics
George Gheverghese Joseph, “The History of Mathematics: Alternative Perspectives,” In The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics, Third Edition—STU-Student edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1–29. at https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7sdsb.5.
For a somewhat outdated and effusive look at Thales of Miletus, see Colin R. Fletcher, “Thales: Our Founder?” in The Mathematical Gazette 66, no. 438 (1982): 266–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/3615512.