Historically Thinking

“Over the course of the sixteenth century,” writes my guest Catherine Fletcher, “the handgun made a transition from a novel and decisive military technology to become an everyday object, in use across society and carrying a new set of cultural associations that would persist through the coming centuries.”This was the firearm revolution.In this conversation, Fletcher explores how an evolving technology became a transformative one—not simply changing warfare, but altering the structure of society itself. Guns moved from battlefields into cities, homes, and daily life. In doing so, they reshaped how states exercised power, how individuals understood violence, and how social order was enforced.Catherine Fletcher is a historian of the Renaissance and early modern Europe, and is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The history of modern Syria is usually reduced to a story of autocracy, repression, and occasional revolt. And it is a short story, stretching back only to the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, or perhaps to the secret terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that divided the Near East between Britain and France. But my guest Daniel Neep has a different perspective. He believes that such narratives overlook “the pre-​colonial foundations for modern Syria that were undertaken by reformers, infrastructure builders and identity entrepreneurs in the late Ottoman Empire.” They also neglect “the role that Syrians themselves played in determining the precise course of these borders” as well as the ways in which Syrians “ have fiercely clung to their right to live with respect and dignity.” These are some of the arguments which he develops in his new book Syria: A Modern History.Daniel Neep is Senior Editor at Arab Center Washington DC and a non-resident fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He has taught Middle East politics at George Washington University, Georgetown University, and the University of Exeter, and was previously Syria research director with the Council for British Research in the Levant. He has lived in Syria for five years, including for the first year of the uprising, as well as in Amman, and Beirut, and now lives in Washington, DC.

About a century before the birth of Jesus, during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, a remarkable man began a nearly unprecedented intellectual endeavor. Sima Qian, like his father before him, was an official in the imperial court. Working on a plan left behind by his father, Sima Qian began writing a history of China for the two thousand years before his own time. The scope of his labors, and the historiographical discipline and philosophy of history that he brought to them, make him a sort of combination of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Plutarch. Yet in many ways, his personal life was just as extraordinary. With me to discuss this monumental figure in the writing of history, either in China or anywhere else, is Andrew Meyer, Professor of History at Brooklyn College, and an expert in early Chinese intellectual history. He was recently on the podcast discussing his book To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China: From Confucius to the First Emperor.

In this short episode, Al introduces a new feature of the Historically Thinking podcast: the Historically Thinking Field Guides. Drawing on nearly 450 past episodes, these guides gather conversations around major historical themes—beginning with a first guide devoted to the Second World War—so listeners can explore topics through curated sets of episodes, questions, and commentary. Al also explains how the podcast is evolving on Substack, where listeners can receive expanded show notes, weekly “Friday Reflection” discussions with questions and reading lists, and future essays and collections of historical links. It’s a brief update on where the podcast is going in 2026—and an invitation to explore the growing archive of Historically Thinking.For more, go to www.historicallythinking.org

During the American Civil War an estimated 194,000 Union soldiers and 214,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners of war. No prior or subsequent American conflict has seen such numbers. During the Second World War, approximately 124,000 Americans were held captive, but the chance of being captured in that conflict was roughly one in one hundred; during the Civil War it was closer to one in five. Captivity was not a marginal experience. It was central to the war.Indeed, the gigantic scale of prisoner-of-war camps was one of the conflict’s most consequential innovations. Every modern war since has produced successors to Andersonville, Point Lookout, Rock Island, and Florence. Yet prisoner-of-war camps remain oddly peripheral in our narratives of the Civil War, overlooked both as institutional innovations and as formative experiences for soldiers and their families. My guest, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, argues in A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War that captivity reshaped military policy, political rhetoric, racial attitudes, and postwar memory. Prison camps were not aberrations; they were integral to the modernizing logic of total war.For more on the guest, show notes, sources, and related episodes, go to the Historically Thinking Substack at www.historicallythinking.orgChaptersIntroduction - 0:00Historical Treatment of POWs - 2:35Parole System and Napoleonic Wars - 4:47Scale and Logistics of Civil War Prisons - 7:42Lincoln's Dilemma: Sovereignty vs Prisoner Exchange - 10:56Andersonville: Conditions and the Deadline - 31:48Point Lookout and Union Prisons - 47:25Prison Society and Community - 57:45Black Prisoners of War - 65:33Elmira Prison and John W. Jones - 82:11

Lutherans are a strange denomination in American religious history and culture. For Catholics they are certainly Protestants. For Protestants they are crypto-Catholics. While they have been around since the Swedes established their short-lived colony on the Delaware River, they have typically received as much attention in the American imagination as the short-lived Swedish colony on the Delaware River. But my guest Timothy D. Grundmeier has a different point of view. He argues in his new book Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith that Lutheranism was a central component of nineteenth-century American religion and of the era of the Civil War. This is because Lutherans were numerous, the nation’s fourth largest denomination by 1900; they were uniquely positioned in the American religious landscape; and they almost invariably expressed the opinion of the “moderate majority” in Union states outside the Northeast. And, as with every other aspect of American society, Lutheranism was reshaped by the struggle of the Civil War, and Reconstruction.Timothy D. Grundmeier is professor of history at Martin Luther College in New Ulm, Minnesota. Lutheranism and American Culture is his first book.Chapters00:00:00 - Introduction 00:02:60 - What is Lutheranism? 00:06:21 - The Civil War Era Defined 00:09:01 - Three Varieties of American Lutheranism 00:19:44 - The Old Lutherans and Missouri Synod 00:27:38 - How the Civil War Fractured Lutheranism 00:39:36 - The Slavery Debate: Walter and the Norwegians 00:47:20 - Lutheran Quietism After the Civil War 00:52:38 - The Great Lutheran Realignment 01:02:35 - Ideas, Institutions, and Cultural Context

The two hundred and eighty years between the death of the philosopher Confucius and the reign of the first Emperor of China saw one of the most profound revolutions in human history. Not only did it end with the creation of an imperial rule that persisted through successive dynasties for 2,132 years, but it also saw the creation of “new traditions of thought and practice…great monuments of art, literature, and philosophy…that still inform social life in our own lifetime.” The era of the “warring states”, as scholars call it, was critical not just for China or East Asia, “but to that of humanity writ large.”Yet this era remains almost unknown in the English-speaking world. “If one enters any bookstore…in search of a book about classical Athens, the conquestions of Alexander, or the early Roman Republic,” writes my guest Andrew Meyer, “one will have many options. But if one looks for such a book about the corresponding period in early Chinese history, there are none. I wrote this book to fill that gap.”Andrew Seth Meyer is Professor of History at Brooklyn College. A specialist in the intellectual history of early China, he is the author of The Dao of the Military: Liu An's Art of War and co-author of The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China. His latest book is To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor, which is the subject of our conversation today.Chapters0:35 - Book Overview & Historical Context 4:47 - Dating the Warring States Period 8:42 - What Are the Warring States? 11:08 - Social Structure & Aristocracy 18:39 - Rivers & Regional Differences 24:45 - Military Power & Wealth 31:37 - Four Great Questions: State Models 40:51 - Centralization vs Regional Autonomy 51:26 - Education & Intellectuals

This is the first ever Historically Thinking Roundtable. Given that it's 2026, it’s appropriate that this roundtable focus on the 250th anniversary of the United States, and how historians can be involved in its commemoration. Difficulties in doing this can arise from at least two reasons. One is that historians, like most academics, represent a relatively small slice of the political pie. And indeed, in these very partisan times, academics are some of the least trusted people in society–right around members of congress, according to a recent poll. Naturally academics and professionals in cultural institutions tend to get defensive about that, and beginning in a posture of attack and defense usually means that whatever happens afterward will not be good. But there’s another problem, one related to historical thinking. Historians are taught to tell the whole story, however complicated and messy. They often find anything less than that to be distortion. And while arguably civic thought requires an element of gratitude, that’s not how historians think of their own craft. These difficulties can be acutely felt by professionals in With me to discuss these difficulties, and how to resolve them are:Bill Peterson, Director of the State Historical Society of North DakotaTrait Thompson, Executive Director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, host of the podcast, co-host of A Very OK PodcastBen Jones, South Dakota State Historian, and Director of the South Dakota Historical Society, Ryan Cole, historian, Speechwriter at U.S. Senate, author most recently of The Last Adieu: Lafayette's Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the RepublicAnd Jill Weiss Simins, historian and Director of Special Projects, Indiana State ArchivesChapters0:00 - Introduction 3:20 - Community Conversations in Red States 13:04 - Telling Complex History 20:28 - When Is Complexity Bad? 25:12 - Bridging Alienation and Division 31:10 - Primary Sources and Making Arguments 37:35 - Historical Distortion and Noble Lies 47:15 - America 250 Local Projects

He was at various times in his life known as Gaius Octavius Thurinus; Gaius Julius Caesar; and Caesar Augustus. He called himself Princeps, the first man in Rome; the Roman Senate would eventually call him pater patriae, the father of his country. Heir to his great-uncle Julius Caesar, this 19 year old was dropped into the tumult of Roman political violence, and emerged from it the sole and undisputed victor after decades of civil war. He murdered hundreds, and then became the founder of a new Roman system that brought peace and prosperity to Rome’s citizens and inhabitants. He was tyrannical and giving, cruel and clever, manipulative and noble. And he has claim to be one of the most successful politicians to ever lead a nation or a kingdom, who created a system which lasted for hundreds of years after his death.With me to discuss Caesar Augustus is Adrian Goldsworthy, author of Augustus: First Emperor of Rome, now being reissued in its second edition. The annoyingly prolific author of a shelf of books, both of ancient history and historical fiction, Adrian Goldsworthy has been described as the OG scholar of the Roman Army and the Mr Darcy of Ancient History. Since his next book comes out in May, this promises to be the first of at least two conversations with him in 2026–and this is his sixth appearance on the podcast.ChaptersIntroduction: Caesar Augustus (0:00)The Standard Received View: Syme's Roman Revolution (1:33)The Importance of Names: Octavian vs Caesar (13:27)Why Not Call Him Emperor? (22:56)Why Did Julius Caesar Pick This Kid? (27:06)Augustus's Talented Circle: Agrippa, Maecenas, and Livia (36:20)Augustus's Travels and Provincial Administration (47:59)Marriage Laws and Religious Reform (57:34)The Aeneid: Propaganda or Great Literature? (64:08)The Last 16 Years and Augustus's Legacy (71:52)

For a very long time humans have been getting sick. Sometimes we have gotten sick more easily than at other times. From time to time we get sick from things a human body has never before encountered. Sickness is always present with us. And while injury we can understand–like breaking a leg, or having a rock hit your head–sickness can be as mysterious to people in 2026 who trust the science as it was to our ancestors 4,000 years ago. “Why did one patient heal,” my guest Susan Wise Bauer writes, “while another rotted? And what about the shivering, miserable sufferer who simply awoke with a sore throat and cough, after going to bed healthy and filled with plans the night before? It is the constant presence of sickness, not injury, that has shaped the way we think about ourselves and our world.”Susan Wise Bauer’s books include The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (fourth ed., 2024) and The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory. Her most recent book is The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy. 0:00 Introduction 1:45 What This Book Is and Isn't 4:35 Did Hunter-Gatherers Get Sick? 9:50 Guilt and Sickness 14:00 Doctors as Priests 21:30 The Four Humors 25:15 Humoral Theory and Colonialism 29:45 Occasionalism: God's Will and Disease 35:55 The Black Death 40:45 The History of Drugs 45:50 Vaccines: Jenner and Cowpox 50:30 The Early 20th Century: Disease Returns 54:25 The Pax Antibiotica 58:30 Wellness Culture 61:45 COVID and What Hasn't Changed 67:15 Closing

On November 1, 1755, the city of Lisbon was devastated by a terrible earthquake, and a new era of urban planning began. The reconstruction of Lisbon was, more or less, the first time that modern planners had the opportunity to transform an urban landscape and bring it into line with their vision of what the future should look like. What shifting tectonic plates did to Lisbon would, in the future, be the job of bulldozers and wrecking balls. We take that for granted now, but we shouldn’t. In his new book The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, my guest Bruno Carvalho tells two histories that our intertwined. One is the story of how histories were planned, built, or rebuilt. But the other is an intellectual history of how cities of the future were imagined. It turns out that those two stories don’t intersect as often as you might assume. Bruno Carvalho is a professor at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on cities. He is also the author of Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro.

In this episode of Historically Thinking, we begin not with a historian’s voice, but with the voice of a seventeenth-century woman.Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley—born in England, twice widowed, and married in 1670 to Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia—speaks from the midst of crisis. Jamestown has burned. Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion has fractured the colony’s political order. Her husband has been recalled to England to answer charges before the Crown. Lady Berkeley, left behind, attempts to make sense of loyalty, loss, honor, and exile.That voice is brought to life by my second guest, Amy Stallings, a historian and historical interpreter who believes the past is best understood not only through documents, but through embodied experience. Together, we explore Bacon’s Rebellion from an unfamiliar vantage point, the interior world of Lady Frances Berkeley, and the intellectual stakes of historical reenactment itself: what it reveals, what it risks, and what it makes newly visible.00:00 - Introduction00:28 - Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley Introduces Herself00:58 - Writing to Her Husband in England02:55 - Sir William Berkeley's Accomplishments in Virginia04:23 - The Royal Commissioners and Personal Betrayal05:47 - Berkeley's Loyalty During the English Civil War07:17 - Berkeley's Resistance to Parliament08:15 - Berkeley's Return to Power and Jamestown's Glory09:39 - Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion Begins11:08 - Bacon Surrounds the State House12:57 - Introducing Amy Stallings13:41 - Theater and History Intertwined14:27 - The Dissertation on Ballroom Politics21:40 - Dance as Political Resistance24:25 - English Country Dancing Before the Waltz28:53 - First Character: Susan Binks, Tobacco Bride28:53 - Learning History Through First-Person Interpretation39:14 - Developing Lady Berkeley's Character46:52 - Lady Berkeley's Isolation and Loss46:52 - Lady Berkeley's Inheritance and Legal Battles55:00 - The Challenges of Colonial Communication57:00 - Sewing Period Costumes61:51 - Conclusion

According to Chinese Communist official Xi Zhongxun, his first revolutionary act was an attempt to poison one of his school’s administrators when he was 14. He was faithful to the revolution, and the Chinese Communist Party, until his death at age 88 in 2002. In between those ages was a remarkable life. He fought Nationalists and Japanese. He was a right-hand man to both Zhou Enlai in the 1950s, and Hu Yaobang in the 1980s. As the Party administrator responsible for dealing with religious groups, he negotiated with the Dalai Lama–and would show off the wristwatch that the Dalai Lama gave him. But Xi also spent sixteen years in house arrest, internal exile, under suspicion, or at least out of power, from 1962 to 1978. “In the early 1990s, Xi even boasted to a Western historian that although Deng Xiaoping had suffered at the hands of the party on three occasions, he had been persecuted five times.” All this would make Xi Zhongxun fascinating simply as a psychological study of a Communist functionary who, despite everything, remained devoted to the system that oppressed him. But Xi Zhongxun was also the father of Xi Jinping, now effectively the dictator of China. If we are to understand the younger Xi, argues my guest Joseph Torigian, then we must understand his father.Joseph Torigian is an associate professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He was previously on the podcast to discuss his book Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, a conversation that was published on May 23, 2022. His latest book is The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping was released with Stanford University Press in June 2025. It was a Financial Times Book of the Summer and an Economist Best Book of the Year So Far.00:00 — Introduction02:19 — Overview of Xi Zhongxun's Life07:15 — Early Life and Revolutionary Beginnings11:44 — Growing Up as a Peasant in Shaanxi15:02 — Path to the Communist Base Areas19:21 — The United Front Work24:10 — Work with Ethnic Minorities26:00 — The 1935 Arrest by Fellow Communists27:56 — Patronage and Party Relationships30:51 — The Northwest Bureau and China's Territorial Expansion33:43 — Personal Life and Family36:37 — The 1962 Purge41:50 — Sixteen Years of Persecution44:37 — Why Bring Him Back?46:53 — Deng Xiaoping's Distrust50:55 — Grudges and Party History52:33 — Xi Jinping and His Father's Legacy59:17 — Conclusion

The red flowered plant that shows up everywhere at this time of year–I saw a forest of them in Wegman’s this morning– is called in Mexico the cuetlaxochitl, or the noche buena; but Americans know it by as the namesake of man who introduced it to the United States: poinsettia. Yet Joel Roberts Poinsett was a more interesting organism than that plant given his name. He was a South Carolinian who spent years away from the state, and was a committed nationalist and anti-nullifier; a world traveller when few Americans were; a slaveowner who other slaveowners regarded as potentially anti-slavery; an international investor who also labored for South Carolina local improvements; a diplomat who spent years if not decades trying to find a way to be a soldier. And that’s leaving a few facets of his identity out. As my guest Lindsay Schackenbach Regele sums him up, “He was not the same, anywhere.”Lindsay Schakenbach Regele is with me to discuss Joel Poinsett, his era, and what he reveals about it. She was previously on the podcast in a conversation that dropped on April 3, 2019, which focused on her book Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 (Hopkins, 2019). Her latest book is Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism, and it is the focus of our conversation today.For more information and links, to to our Substack at www.historicallythinking.org00:00 – Introduction 00:22 – Joel Roberts Poinsett: A Complex Figure 02:47 – Early Life: A Loyalist Family's Journey05:19 – Education in New England and England 06:50 – European Travels and Grand Tour 08:56 – Mission to Latin America 11:11 – Journey Down the Volga River 13:38 – Botanical Interests and Scientific Pursuits 18:34 – Secret Agent in South America 21:41 – Supporting Independence Movements 23:38 – Return to South Carolina 25:24 – South Carolina Politics and Public Works 26:32 – First Mission to Mexico 30:02 – Masonic Lodges and Political Influence 32:43 – Mining Investments and Financial Dealings 35:57 – The Nullification Crisis 42:35 – Understanding Nullifiers vs. Anti-Nullifiers 46:15 – Secretary of War 47:44 – The Trail of Tears and Indian Removal 50:38 – The Seminole War and Bloodhounds 51:44 – Later Life: Cuba and Final Years 54:06 – Evaluating Poinsett's Legacy 57:36 – Meeting Tocqueville59:48 – Next Project: Francisco Miranda 1:02:28 – Closing

The Greek philosopher Plato is famous for writing his teachings in the form of dialogues. But there are additionally a series of seven letters attributed to Plato. Over the centuries much ink has been spilt in arguments over their authenticity. My guest today argues that these letters are actually epistolary philosophical novel which are if nothing else a “ripping great yarn”.“In the pages of Plato’s letters,” writes Ariel Helfer, “we find Plato the teacher, the counselor, the ally, the statesman; intrigue and faction in the court of a tyrant; grand political hopes dashed as famous utopian dreams become living nightmares—it is a stunningly dramatic and dynamic portrait of Plato and his philosophy.” An alll this is set in the exotic setting of Hellenized Sicily during the 5th century BC, which has a cultural and political complexity that makes the head spin uncontrollably. Ariel Helfer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wayne State University, and the most recently editor and translator of Plato’s letters in an edition titled Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic LIfe . He was last on Historically Thinking to discuss Plato’s dialogue Alcibiades, and the broader subject of political ambition, in a conversation that was published on September 30, 2020.For show notes, resources, and our archive, go the Historically Thinking Substack ChaptersIntroduction and Background — 00:22The Authenticity Debate of Plato's Letters — 03:25Arguments for Authenticity and Unity — 11:27Textual History and Preservation — 18:36Historical Context: Plato in Syracuse — 26:19Themes in the Letters — 33:55Letter One: A Dramatic Opening — 40:51Letter Six: Philosophy, Law, and Playfulness — 47:35Philosophy vs. History: Different Perspectives — 56:24The Herculaneum Scrolls and Future Discoveries — 1:03:20