Elle Trump’s TakeSource video:
A battle in France supposedly stopped Islam's advance into Europe. The fall of Baghdad supposedly ended centuries of Islamic intellectual achievement. A succession of caliphs appears to pass authority neatly from one dyn…
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Matt Baker has a simple warning for anyone quoting the Talmud: context matters. A sentence may be genuine, he explains, yet become profoundly misleading when separated from the legal discussion surrounding it. He is righ…
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Matt Baker's UsefulCharts history of the Roman emperors promises a complete account of nearly 1,500 years of imperial succession. But its confident storytelling conceals factual mistakes, questionable genealogical claims…
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Matt Baker promises to connect every living thing on Earth. His evolutionary history contains demonstrable errors, mistaken explanations of scientific experiments, and a fundamental contradiction about how life evolves. …
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A nephew becomes a son. A usurper becomes a straightforward dynastic heir. A disputed Viking invasion becomes established history. And the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople is offered as an explanation for European over…
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A murdered prince. A surviving princess. A secret royal child. Joseph Raymond's theory has everything a historical thriller needs—except the evidence necessary to make it history. There is one particularly inconvenient p…
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The strongest evidence for evolution is not a fossil buried in a museum, a drawing of an ape turning into a human, or an argument about whether God exists. It is something considerably harder to dismiss: the history of o…
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Matt Baker's Timeline of US History tells the story of a country assembled through wars, purchases, treaties, and the steady admission of new states. France sells Louisiana. Britain relinquishes Oregon. Mexico surrenders…
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In 1850, an American religious leader crowned himself king on an island in Lake Michigan. Six years later, two men shot him beside a government vessel, his followers were driven from their homes, and the authorities neve…
Read Elle’s TakeElle Trump’s TakeSource video:
Matt Baker has an impressive talent for making complicated history look simple. His YouTube channel, UsefulCharts, turns sprawling subjects into orderly diagrams, giving viewers the satisfaction of seeing an entire field…
Read Elle’s TakeElle Trump’s TakeSource video:
On November 3, 2024, Matt Baker, the creator of the history and education channel UsefulCharts, published a video from his hospital bed. He had spent approximately 10 days unable to eat or drink, with a tube running thro…
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Matt Baker's evolutionary chart promises to explain how mammals, including humans, came to exist. But several basic claims are demonstrably false, and some of its most important evolutionary relationships are presented w…
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Five days before leaving the presidency, Jimmy Carter told Americans that defending human rights required the United States to uphold its principles at home. On January 19, 1981, he granted a full pardon to Peter Yarrow,…
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Five thousand years of conquest, migration and intermarriage do not prove that nobody belongs. Yet that is the extraordinary conclusion Matt Baker draws from his history of Gaza. In his June 28, 2024, UsefulCharts video,…
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Matt Baker sets out to explain the history of organized atheism. Instead, he exposes a problem with the way intellectual movements are packaged for popular consumption: complicated beliefs become neat categories, organiz…
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The Bible tells us that Israel began with one man, Jacob, whose twelve sons became the ancestors of twelve tribes. It is an extraordinarily successful origin story. For thousands of years, it has shaped how Jews, Christi…
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A man was supposed to inherit a fortune. His trustees questioned whether he could manage it. His relatives fought over who should protect him. One court found him capable of managing his affairs. Another judge suggested …
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A family tree is supposed to make complicated history easier to understand. But when its branches are wrong, the simplicity becomes a liability. In Islamic Denominations Explained, the popular educational channel UsefulC…
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The British Museum has an unusual product on sale for £25: a history of the world whose foundations were laid more than 150 years ago, whose original author has largely disappeared from the credits, and whose latest edit…
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An ancient monument credits a Syrian king with killing two biblical monarchs. The Bible credits somebody else. Matt Baker calls this a confirmation. That is the most revealing problem in UsefulCharts' 37 Bible Characters…
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A church without a name sounds almost charming. No cathedral, no headquarters, no salaried clergy. Just traveling preachers carrying the Gospel into ordinary homes. That is how the Two by Twos appear in Matt Baker's Usef…
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Germany abolished its monarchy in 1918. More than a century later, the descendants of its last emperor were still fighting over royal property, defending their family history, and facing questions about their ancestors' …
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History becomes dangerously convenient when complicated events are reduced to one powerful man making all the decisions. In The Borgia Family Tree, UsefulCharts presents the extraordinary rise of a Spanish family that ca…
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In December 1999, a Memphis jury concluded that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered in a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and unnamed government agencies. It was an extraordinary verdict, delivered more than three d…
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Matt Baker promises to explain how Christianity divided into its modern denominations. But when his family tree reaches the Eastern Catholic churches, several branches lead to the wrong ancestors. A family tree makes an …
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A president is assassinated. His blood stains a chair. More than a century later, scientists extract his DNA, identify a rare genetic signature, and solve a mystery about his mother. It is a compelling story. It is also …
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Matt Baker has a problem with his Christian family tree. One of its most important branches broke away before the council he identifies as the cause. Another division is explained using a description of Jesus Christ that…
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Matt Baker has an appealing explanation for why Christians become atheists: their personalities make them unusually willing to question what they were taught. In his UsefulCharts episode, Are Atheists Immoral, Arrogant, …
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For millions of African Americans, slavery did more than sever family relationships. It destroyed records, erased names and separated descendants from knowledge of their ancestral communities. African Ancestry offers som…
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A genealogy website promised users control over police access to their DNA. A court order overrode that choice. A security breach exposed protected profiles. And investigators later bypassed consent settings deliberately…
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Jerusalem has survived conquerors, massacres, empires, and religious upheavals. Its history is complicated enough without turning it into a competition whose rules change halfway through. In Who Controlled Jerusalem the …
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Matt Baker tested 10 DNA services, compared their prices, examined their ancestry predictions, and gave viewers a practical guide to choosing between them. His UsefulCharts video was careful about the limits of genetic s…
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A Hindu temple is demolished. A religious tax is imposed. A Sikh spiritual leader is executed. And somehow, the explanation is always politics. That is the troubling pattern in UsefulCharts’ Mughal Emperors Family Tree, …
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Charles Darwin's family produced remarkable scientists, writers, inventors and reformers. It also helped produce one of the most destructive intellectual movements of the modern age: eugenics. In its video Charles Darwin…
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UsefulCharts presents a compelling story of industrial power, but its most dramatic financial example turns a complicated corporate promotion into a one-man magic trick. The video says William Rockefeller Jr. transformed…
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UsefulCharts offers a sweeping account of Genghis Khan’s descendants, their conquests and the fragmentation of their empire. But two of its most definitive claims fail under scrutiny: that Ain Jalut in 1260 was the first…
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Matt Baker’s UsefulCharts episode on the authorship of the New Testament epistles makes a consequential mistake while discussing one of Christianity’s most contested historical questions. It introduces the argument that …
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Matt Baker’s Biblical Chronology makes a consequential leap at the end: it turns a striking numerical coincidence into a claim about when Jewish scripture was edited. His evidence is intriguing, but it does not establish…
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Matt Baker’s Who Wrote the Apocrypha? explains how Jewish and Christian communities came to recognize different collections of sacred books. But when the episode reaches some of its most consequential historical claims, …
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Matt Baker’s 2021 UsefulCharts video delivers a satisfying revelation: Milo, a large, talkative cat assumed to be part Siamese, apparently has a Maine Coon grandparent. Two younger cats receive different breed percentage…
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UsefulCharts offers a clear introduction to Mesopotamian mythology, but its discussion of Gilgamesh makes a damaging historical mistake: it treats the absence of modern-style historical writing as though it were the abse…
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Matt Baker compared five DNA testing companies and told millions of viewers which ones were worth their money. He explained the prices, the health reports, and even how to collect saliva. But he left out something more i…
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Charles Curtis helped write laws that dismantled Native American institutions. His own family received approximately 1,625 acres when the Kaw Nation's communal land was divided. Yet a UsefulCharts documentary about his a…
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A crown can survive for a thousand years without proving whose head it once adorned. That distinction is essential to understanding European royal history. It is also where UsefulCharts’ Famous European Crowns makes its …
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A man conquers half of Asia. Eight centuries later, millions of people supposedly carry his DNA. It is an irresistible story about power, reproduction, and the biological consequences of empire. There is just one problem…
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A king cannot convert a country to a church it already belongs to. Yet that is effectively the story UsefulCharts tells about medieval Croatia. In Serbian & Croatian Monarchs Family Tree, presenter Jack Rackham offer…
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UsefulCharts sets out to answer a fascinating question: Which characters in the Bible actually existed? The answer, presented through a biblical family tree, appears reassuringly orderly. Adam and Noah belong to mytholog…
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A family tree can make an extraordinary claim look like an ordinary fact. Connect enough names with enough lines, and a medieval Irish dynasty can suddenly produce an American president and the woman in the world's most …
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A little girl was supposed to inherit one of Africa’s most unusual monarchies. Instead, her older brother was declared king, the uncle who had served as her regent challenged her claim, and the South African president fo…
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A Byzantine prince left his imperial claim to the Spanish monarchy in 1502. UsefulCharts argues that this makes King Felipe VI the rightful heir to Rome. The historical documents establish the inheritance attempt. They d…
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