 | IDEAS airs Monday to Friday on CBC Radio One
at 8 p.m. (8:30 p.m. NT) and 4 a.m. (4:30 a.m. NT) | |  | Monday, May 12, 2025 | | | |  | Archaeologist Kisha Supernant uses ground-penetrating radar in her work. She has been consulting with Indigenous communities on how the technology can best be applied to search for unmarked graves. (Submitted by Kisha Supernant) | | | * Please note this schedule is subject to change. | | | MONDAY, MAY 12 | | | Heart and Head: The Archeology of Kisha Supernant | | When she began her line of work, Métis archeologist Kisha Supernant was sometimes called a grave robber. The reason: she was trying to help Indigenous communities locate the graves of children who died at residential schools. Professor Supernant teaches archeology at the University of Alberta, and in a talk she gave in Calgary, she outlines how she uses both traditional knowledge systems, as well as cutting-edge ground radar techniques, to find children’s graves so their families and communities can begin to heal. As she maintains, it’s an archeology of heart and head. | | | TUESDAY, MAY 13 | | | To Run the World: Lionel Gelber Prize | | Nahlah Ayed hears from Sergei Radchenko, a historian born on Sakhalin Island, off Russia’s south-east coast. He attended school in the U.S., Hong Kong, and the U.K., and now teaches and writes in Italy and Wales. Radchenko’s globe-spanning life trajectory has informed his thinking, naturally, and may help to explain how this scholar succeeds so well at re-telling the world’s story from the Cold War to today, focusing especially on what the idea of global power meant to the Soviet Kremlin. His call for a rethink of Moscow’s motivations has made Radchenko one of the most-read scholars on Soviet history today. His latest book, To Run the World, earned him Canada’s Lionel Gelber Prize for 2025, recognizing the year’s best English-language book on international affairs. | | | WEDNESDAY, MAY 14 | | | The Chatham Coloured All-Stars | | Ninety years ago, the Chatham Coloured All-Stars became the first all-Black team to win the Ontario baseball championship. In another time and place, players like Wilfred “Boomer” Harding and Earl “Flat” Chase might have been larger-than-life figures, hailed for their superior skill and athleticism. But they remained both legends and part of the neighbourhood in Chatham’s East End. Now the story of their historic 1934 season, including the racist treatment they endured and their exploits on the field has resurfaced, and they’re getting their due as trailblazing Black Canadian athletes. *This episode originally aired on Nov. 25, 2025. | | | THURSDAY, MAY 15 | | | The Pig War and the Meaning of History | | In 1859, on a small island in the Pacific Northwest, an American shot a pig. But that pig belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company. British warships were dispatched, American troops landed, and suddenly the United States and British Empire were on the brink of war once again. The incident became known as The Pig War, and it claimed one casualty: the pig. Over the years, tales about the conflict have been embellished and exaggerated, conspiracy theories invented, and lessons derived. But underneath all the folklore and tall tales is a story of peace, diplomacy, and how we make meaning out of history. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 15, 2024. | | | FRIDAY, MAY 16 | | | Liberal Democracy in the Rearview: Peter Biro | Democracy scholar Peter Biro says there are just three ingredients in the recipe that could end liberal democracy as we know it: fear, habituation and what he calls stupidification. Biro recently delivered a keynote address at the ominously titled conference Liberal Democracy in the Rearview Mirror? at Massey College in Toronto. He says unless we ‘arm our civic immune system’ to defend against the forces of backsliding, we might well find ourselves looking back in regret. The senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights speaks to Nahlah Ayed about what he’s doing to counteract that trifecta, and why he thinks the power to save liberal democracy lies in the hands of average citizens. | | |  | | American historian Timothy Snyder took leave from Yale University in the summer of 2024, and moved to Toronto, as have two other prominent Yale scholars. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, and Chair in Modern European History at the University of Toronto. (Ole Berg-Rusten/NTB/AFP via Getty Images) | | | IDEAS IN THE AFTERNOON | MONDAY, MAY 12 at 2 p.m. | | | | | In a political era where the word "freedom" is defined and redefined by whichever faction needs to evoke it, American historian Timothy Snyder argues that — for the sake of our common future — more than the freedom from various things, we actually need the freedom to thrive. | | |  | Listen whenever you want.
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