26 Citric Acid, History, and Other Things That Exist: A Conversation with Arkoudos

In this episode, Dr. Liam begins a sporadic series of conversational stories about Professor Athanasios Arkoudos, a prairie-bred historian with a fondness for strong coffee, precise questions, and ideas that refuse to disappear just because they appear on ingredient labels. Through informal dialogues, small domestic scenes, and the gentle sparring of a seasoned mentor and an attentive student, the series explores what it means to think historically: how imagination reconstructs rather than reinvents the past, why evidence must govern interpretation, and where curiosity ends, and intrusion begins. Along the way, Arkoudos reflects on historical writing, moral seriousness, forgotten voices, and the quiet discipline required to let the past speak in its own voice—without dressing it up.