Historian and veteran Middle East journalist Michael Rank looks into the most exciting events and personalities of history in this podcast and explains them in five-minute episodes so that you can absorb the facts in the fastest way possible. Learn about the lives of Genghis Khan, Vlad Dracul, and Richard the Lionheart, and such events as the Crusades and the Black Death in these highly entertaining and informative episodes. Michael has sold thousands of books with his unique take on the past with such best-selling titles as "History's Most Insane Rulers: Lunatics, Eccentrics, and Megalomaniacs From Emperor Caligula to Kim Jon Il," and he brings the same energy to this podcast. He focuses on world history, Roman history, military history, the history of the United States, the most famous rulers in history, biographies, biography of famous people, the most famous people in history, the most powerful rulers, medieval history, violent history, world history, United States history, and how to put all these pieces together. This is a great podcast if you know nothing about a topic and need a good launching point into a deeper study.
http://www.michaelrank.net
HFM 122 | The Most Productive People in History, Part 5: Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas is arguably the greatest theologian in Catholic Church. During his lifetime he wrote over 60 tomes of philosophy and theology, most the size of a scholar’s magnum opus. The total word count of his extant writings exceeds 6 million words, perhaps the largest set of complete works created by one man before the invention of the word processor. The pages of these books contain dense concepts – much more so than Isaac Asimov’s thoughtful-but-workmanlike prose – packing in enough ideas per paragraph to warrant a three-hour graduate student session. They include exegeses of scripture, theological syntheses (Summas), commentaries on church fathers or Aristotelian philosophy, and polemical works. Philosophy professor Peter Kreeft believes that were it not for the scarcity of parchment and ink, Thomas could have written more than 500 books in his lifetime.
How did he do it? By delegation, extraordinary focus, and always keeping his eyes on larger goals.
Learn more about his life by getting my new book The Most Productive People in History: 18 Extraordinarily Prolific Inventors, Artists, and Entrepreneurs, From Archimedes to Elon Musk by clicking here.
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