Historically Thinking

It is without question the most lethal predator in the history of the planet. It has killed more humans than any other single cause of death—something around 52 billion over the course of 200,000 years of human history. In 2022 alone, it probably killed 680,000 people—a number much reduced from the carnage it has caused in past centuries. This super-predator is the mosquito, which has since the time of the dinosaurs carried diseases in its tiny body that have destroyed nations and cultures, and altered the destinies of those who survived. With me to describe the immense historical impact of the mosquito is Timothy C. Winegard. He is Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, and author of the 2019 bestselling book The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. For Further Investigation A review of The Mosquito in Emerging Infectious Diseases The CDC Guide to Mosquitoes One of the earliest works of animation: How a Mosquito Operates, from 1912 Two videos related to William Crawford Gorgas: one, from the Gorgas House Museum in Alabama, highlights his contribution to the building of the Panama Canal; the other is a one minute clip of a silent movie of Gorgas traveling on a train through the Canal Zone.

Just before 10 AM on Tuesday, June 9th, 1964, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, hundreds of people were gathered in First African Baptist, prepared to march to the new Tuscaloosa County Courthouse where they planned to drink from water fountains and use restroom facilities that were supposed to be only used by whites. Around the church were gathered hundreds of police, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and other deputized whites. At 10:15 AM, after the arrest of Reverend T.Y. Rogers, the pastor of First African Baptist, the police attacked the church. They beat those who attempted to leave with clubs and cattle prods. Then, the door being closed and locked, they brought up a fire truck, and blasted away the stained glass windows, filling the sanctuary in some places ankle-deep with water. Then they fired tear gas canisters through the windows, driving those within outside, where they were beaten, and over a hundred were hauled off to jail. This was Bloody Tuesday, now a nearly forgotten inflection point in the Civil Rights struggle, overshadowed by the concurrent campaign then ongoing in St. Augustine, by national events in the weeks to come, and by the violence of Selma in 1965. John M. Giggie had preserved the memories of Bloody Tuesday, and complex struggle of justice in Tuscaloosa in his new book Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa. John M. Giggie is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. He is creator of "History of Us," the first Black history class taught daily in a public school in Alabama. Giggie is also director of the Alabama Memory Project, which seeks to recapture and memorialize the over 650 lives lost to lynching in Alabama, and a founding member of the Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History and Reconciliation Foundation. For Further Investigation Three short essays on Bloody Tuesday by John Giggie: “How Tuscaloosa’s Bloody Tuesday Changed the Course of History,” Time.com, June 7, 2024 Remembering Bloody Tuesday, Alabama Heritage, June 2024 The Tuscaloosa Campaign and Bloody Tuesday, Encyclopedia of Alabama Books on the Civil Rights movement on Tuscaloosa, related to subjects in the podcast, or mentioned in the podcast: Clark, E. Culpepper. The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at The University of Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Hollars, B.J. Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013. Wendt, Simon. The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2007. Cobb, Charles E. Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Marsh, Charles. God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Chappell, David L. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Does knowing a lot of facts about the historical past – say, of early America – make us feel closer to it? Or is something else required? How can we–as my guest puts it, “appreciate a bit better what it felt like to be alive then. Naturally,” he continues “we can’t teach emotions to any who weren’t alive to experience them how Pearl Harbor felt in real time – let alone Fort Sumter or Lincoln‘s assassination – is not transmissible. The historian can only do so much.“ But how to convey not merely the intellectual weight but the emotional burdens that humans once carried–and that we might no longer understand? My guest Andrew Burstein has done what he can to credibly bring early America closer to us in his new book Longing for Connection: Entangled Memories, and Emotional Loss in Early America. It is a work of history that is intricately plotted, connecting personalities and themes in a sort of great circular panopticon of early America, in which the reader sits at the orbital center of continual swirl and movement. Andrew Burstein is the Charles Phelps Manship Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at Louisiana State University. Longing for Connection is the latest member of a large-and hopefully happy- family of books. For Further Investigation You really should read some Alexander Pope. Find more about him, and some of his poems here. Poor Edward Everett. No one ever reads his Gettysburg address. Some of the more closely related members of the Burstein family of books, many of them mentioned in the conversation, listed in order of publication: The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist; Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image; The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving; and Lincoln Dreamt He Died: The Midnight Visions of Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud For an intro to cultural history, you should listen to Episode 32 Past episodes with a connection to this one are Episode 163: The First Martyr of the American Revolution; and Episode 344: Founding Scoundrels

In 1978, along the shoreline of the Potomac River in Westmoreland County, Virginia, people began to see…something…out in the water. Whatever it was, it seemed snakelike. But then all such sightings ended–until, over a period of years in the early 1980s, sightings proliferated around Kent Island, situated in the very middle of the Chesapeake, the eastern end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The “monster” was soon named “Chessie”, and perhaps because of the cute name was characterized as being a friendly monster; and while no biological traces of it were ever discovered, “Chessie” became an icon of the environmental movement to save the bay. But what was the context for Chessie’s sightings? What might suburbanization and taking recreation as seriously as labor have to do with seeing monsters in the water? And why did so many (including, as best as I can remember, myself) need to believe that Chessie was real? With me to discuss Chessie, and her life and times is Eric Cheezum, an independent historian, a resident of Maryland’s eastern shore, and the author of Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster, which is–not surprisingly–the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation David Halperin, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West WBAL-TV: "The legend of 'Chessie' is alive and well 35 years later" The Chesapeake Conservation Partnership on the sightings and importance of "Chessie: The Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster"

On June 24th, 1947, a private pilot and fire suppression equipment manufacturer named Kenneth Arnold was flying south of Mount Rainier, bound for Yakima, Washington. At about 3 PM he saw a flash of light in the air to the north of the mountain, and subsequently he saw a long chain of flying objects passing in front of the mountain. He described them as having convex shapes, and this was soon changed to the term “flying saucer". Arnold’s was in fact not the first UFO sighting following the Second World War; nor was it even part of the first wave of sightings of strange things in the sky. Yet something unprecedented did happen after 1947, not only in the United States, but around the world–not necessarily involving aliens, but very much involving humans. As Greg Egighian observes in his new book After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon, UFO sightings “have made people wonder, fret, question, probe, and argue. In that regard, they have revealed more about human beings than about alien worlds. And that is a story worth investigating.” Greg Eghigian is a Professor of History and Bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth Century Germany and the editor of The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, among other works. For Further Investigation Greg Egighian suggests the following books for your UFO history reading list: Matthew Bowman, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill David Clarke, How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth D.W. Pasulka, American Cosmic Sarah Scoles, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here – and Out There Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs From the HT archives, if you haven't heard them, then give a listen to somewhat related episodes: Iwan Rhys Morus on "How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon," and Tom Misa on the "History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet" D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? Peter Berger on Secularism and Relativism; and a full-length video of the same lecture

Sometime around two and half millennia ago, a cluster of cities and states around the northeastern Mediterranean began to do amazing things. For some reason they began to spread out, establishing towns and outposts around the fringe of both the Mediterranean and the Black Seas. And as they sailed and traded in the outer world, they also began to explore with ever-increasing rigor their inner world, with a series of big questions which remain important to us even to this day. All the while, they competed feverishly with one another: in athletics, in war, in trade, in sex, in the arts, and in all the varieties of social life. These were the people we call the Greeks. But how did such a diversity of people gain a common title, or come to represent a common culture? Amongst their commonalities, what were their differences? And despite their often uncanny ability to think and act in ways that still make us feel a deep connection to them, how were they very different from us, and very similar to others of their own world? With me to survey the unities and diversities of the ancient Greeks is Jennifer Roberts, Professor of classics and history at the City College of New York and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her many books include The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece and Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction, both of which were the subject of previous conversations on this podcast. Her most recent book is Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Jennifer Roberts previous episodes were on the Peloponnesian War, and on the historian Herodotus. We've done a lot of episodes on Ancient Greece, enough for a mini-curriculum. Here is Paul Cartledge on Thebes; Andrew Bayliss on Sparta; and Bruce Clark on Athens (though admittedly little of that conversation was about ancient Athens). Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color I referred to my two conversations with Tom Holland, the first one concerning his book Dominion, and the second and most recent conversation about his book PAX. Hunter Rawlings, classicist and expert on Thucydides

Books have been made for over 530 years. That is, they have been created from raw materials– sometimes lovingly, sometimes not–printed, bound, and sold, only then to be read. When we think only of what is written in books, we ignore much of the history of the book. So ubiquitous is the book, so commonplace is the book, that we often neglect it both as a brilliant technology; the product of multiple technologies; and as an art. My guest has written the story of how books have been made over that long half millennium by focusing on the individuals who have created the different aspects of the book that we now take for granted. It is a history of the physical printed book for a world that is increasing online–but a word which, curiously enough, the sale of ebooks is down, and that of printed books is up. Adam Smyth is Professor of English literature and the history of the book at Balliol College in the University of Oxford. He is also one of the members of 39 Steps Press, “a small and unusual printing collective” that is housed in an old stables in Elsfield, Oxfordshire. His most recent book is The Book Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Lives, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Previous conversations that relates to this one are: Episode 251, with Tom Misa, in which he discussed printing as beginning as a "courtly technology"; Episode 271, with Martin Clagget, in which among other things we discussed the marvelous place that Birmingham was in the eighteenth century An introduction to Baskerville's typographical art, with fine examples of the uppercase Q and the lower-case g, presented by A Type Supreme, a website that proclaims itself to be "a love letter to typography". Of course you can get a poster of the Baskerville Q, and I must say that I'm tempted. And Zuzana Licko's beautiful creation, Mrs Eaves Here is Sonnet 126, as printed by 39 Steps Press. Another guest, Kelsey Jackson-Williams who featured in Episode 162, has also experimented with printing. He's a member of the Pathfoot Press at the University of Stirling.

This is another of our series of conversations on intellectual humility and historical thinking. With me today is Joseph Manning. He is the William K. and Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of Classics and History, Professor in the Yale School of the Environment, and Senior Research Scholar in Law. Manning has a specialized historical focus on Hellenistic history, with particular focus on the legal and economic history of Ptolemaic Egypt. His research focus over the last ten years has concentrated on historical climate change and its impact on premodern societies more widely. He is the principal investigator of the US National Science foundation project: “Volcanism, Hydrology and Social Conflict: Lessons from Hellenistic and Roman-Era Egypt and Mesopotamia.” He is also on the editorial boards of Studia Hellenistica (Leuven) and the Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies. He has coedited several volumes, and is the author of numerous monographs, the most recent of which is The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome (Princeton University Press, 2018), which was the subject of a conversation in Episode 164 of Historically Thinking. He is now at work on a major new work on historic climate change and its impact since the last Ice Age.

The Paris of the Belle Époque was a city divided by new and old conflicts–the tensions of modernity, and the schisms which had divided France since 1789. Modernity, which the city both exemplified and advanced, could be both celebrated and the source of anxiety–sometimes by the same person at more or less the same time, certainly by the same person at different times. “The glories of the Belle Epoque were real enough,” writes my guest, “like many myths and cliches, they contain an element of truth–but they tell only one side of the story. The era was also riven by political conflict, crackling with social tension, and fraught with cultural friction. And, of course, it ended with the industrialised carnage of the First World War in 1914.” Michael Rapport is Reader in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow. He has previously written about topics related to the age of the French Revolution, and the revolution of 1848. His most recent book is City of Light, City of Shadows: Paris in the Belle Époque, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Michael Rapport has also written 1848: Year of Revolution; The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction; and The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of Revolution, which is a fine companion read to Episode 350, Episode 281, and Episode 176 Urban Insider's guide to the Paris Metro A guide to Montmartre And a walk through Montmartre A guide to Art Nouveau in Paris A collection of Zola reading lists: his novels in their written order; his suggested way to read through his novels; a five-novel list; a ten-novel list; and a twenty-novel list

At 2 PM on July 9, 1860, a mob attacked the Christian quarter of Damascus. For over a week, shops, churches, houses, and monasteries were attacked, looted, and burned. Men were killed, women raped and abducted, children taken from their families. Some 5000 Christians were ultimately killed, about half of them refugees who had fled to the city from Mount Lebanon during an earlier outbreak of violence there, the others all native Damascenes—about 15% of the Christian population of Damascus. These eight days of terror became known as “the Damascus events.” In his new book my guest Eugene Rogan describes the external and internal pressures which led to the Damascus events; the immediate precipitation of the events; the eight days of violence; how the violence was ended; and finally how the Christian population was reintegrated into the Damascus community. Eugene Rogan is professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford, where he is also the Director of the Middle East Center at Saint Anthony College, Oxford. Author of numerous books, his most recent is The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East. For Further Investigation We haven't had that many podcasts on the Ottoman Empire: in fact, hitherto we have had precisely one, a conversation with Kaya Şahín in Episode 314 about Suleyman, one of the greatest Ottoman monarchs. We haven't had that many podcasts on the modern Middle East, either. The closest would be one of the most popular podcasts we've done, this conversation with the late Neil Faulkner in Episode 240, which dealt with the British Empire's attempts to cope with revolutionary Islamic movements in late nineteenth century Africa and Arabia.

As you might have noticed, the world is awash in narratives. You hear people talk about “establishing the narrative”, or noting that “in the last 24 hours the narrative has changed.” We don’t talk about facts any more, we talk about narratives. And more than that. Narratives are, many have decided, cause conflict. They enable genocide, and wars. They are also embedded into our biology–”hardwired”, to use a word popular with neurobiological enthusiasts– due to evolutionary developments, and so by narrative we shall always be afflicted. With me today to discuss narrative is Adrian Goldsworthy, who has committed numerous acts of narrative in both history and fiction. He was last on the podcast in Episode 332 to discuss the tangled history of Rome and Persia, which he wrote about in his most recent book Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry. This is his fifth appearance on the podcast. I should add that this episode was first dropped to our subscribers on Patreon, the members of Historically Thinking’s Common Room; and that if you were a member of the Common Room, you would have already heard it. For Further Investigation Adrian Goldsworthy has previously been on the podcast in the following episodes, and discussing these topics: Episode 63, on Julius Caesar as a historian; Episode 75, on Hadrian's wall; Episode 182, on Philip Macedonia and his spoiled-brat son; and finally the aforementioned Episode 332 on Rome v. Persia. We've discussed the problematic nature of narrative in Episode 243 with Jonathan Gottschall, the author of The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down. WARNING: he is not as keen on narrative as Adrian.

"..Since ancient times, the idea that the climate exerts a determining influence on minds and bodies, health and well-being, customs and character, war and wealth has attracted a long line of committed followers.” Alarm over climate change brought about by anthropogenic global warming has renewed—or perhaps simply enhanced—an idea with a very long history. It was after all in 1748 when Montesquieu wrote that the “empire of climate is the first, the most powerful of all empires.” But intellectual attentiveness to climate predates that remark by at least two millennia. In my guest David Livingstone’s new book The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea, his object is to “take a measure of this impulse over the longue durée.” To do that he travels from the Hippocratic treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places, to seemingly the very latest report of the International Panel on Climate Change, scaling a mountain of literature between those two points. David N. Livingstone is Emeritus Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author and joint editor of numerous books which congregate around the histories of geographical knowledge, the spatiality of scientific culture, and the historical geographies of science and religion. For Further Investigation For some past HT episodes related to climate see Episode 156: Stories Told by Trees; Episode 209: Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith, and Episode 340: Price of Collapse Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (University of California Press, 1967) Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (University of California Press, 1996) Mike Hulme, “Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism.” Osiris 26 Klima (2011): 245–266 Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (MIT Press, 2016) Dagomar Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

In 1177 BC a series of very unfortunate events culminated in the collapse of numerous kingdoms centered upon the western Mediterranean. The nature of those events, and how one played upon the other, was the topic of our conversation with Eric Cline way back in Episode 62, when we talked about his book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Now Eric Cline is back on the podcast to answer one of the great questions, “and then what happened?” That is also the task of his most recent book After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations. We shall talk about those who survived, those who didn’t, and why–and, for those of you who like rating Presidents and baseball players, we'll discuss the winners, the losers, and those who came out sort of even. Finally we'll even talk about whether there is ever such a thing as a "dark age". Eric H. Cline is professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University. His most recent book is 1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed. For Further Investigation The website of Erich H. Cline We have talked about calamity, disaster, and disruption several times in past episodes. See conversations with Ed Watts, first on the fall of the Roman Republic in Episode 93; and then again on the "eternal fall" of Rome, in Episode 219. In Episode 224 I talked with David Potter about historical disruption, that moment when it feels as if a civilization is going over a waterfall.

At a pivotal moment in Chapter 17 of Nathanael Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, two of his protagonists escape from haunted Salem, Massachusetts, and are whirled away from its power by the even greater power of steam: “…Looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own.” As in Hawthorne, American literature of all kinds abounded with railroad and steam power metaphors. In an incredibly short time, a new technology became a point of reference for a nation. In 1858, when Sallie McNeill of Brazoria County in Texas first saw a train, she noted in her diary that “I could hardly realize that this was my first sight of the ‘iron horse’, because I have read and heard of the cars so often, that everything seemed natural.” With me to discuss steamboats, railroads, and steam engines, and their cultural power in the antebellum United States, is Andrew W. Marrs, author of The American Transportation Revolution: A Social and Cultural History. Andrew Marrs is a historian at the Department of State; and I should announce here that his views on steamboats, railroads, and steam engines, and related topics, are his own, and not those of the State Department or the federal government. For Further Investigation In Episode 134, Cynthia Kierner and I touched on steamboat disasters–among many other disasters; and if you're interested in an overview of the history of technology since approximately 1450, listen to Episode 251. Andrew W. Marrs, Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society–"Far from seeing the Old South as backward and premodern, Marrs finds evidence of urban life, industry, and entrepreneurship throughout the region. But these signs of progress existed alongside efforts to preserve traditional ways of life. Railroads exemplified Southerners' pursuit of progress on their own terms: developing modern transportation while retaining a conservative social order." February 27, 1859: The Steamboat Princess Disaster Mark Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828-1965 Michael J. Connolly, Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Jacksonian New England

In late July 2013, Vladimir Putin visited Kiev. There he celebrated the 1,025th anniversary of Christianity coming to the Kievan Rus. There he and Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych stood shoulder to shoulder and celebrated the unity of Russia and Ukraine. At that moment–my guest Michael Kimmage writes– Putin and Yanukovych, Russia and Ukraine, seemed to be “twin protagonists of the same story.” Seven months later things were very different indeed. This was because of what my guest Michael Kimmage describes as a series of collisions which resulted in the war that began in 2014, and which accelerated in 2022. The first collision was between Russia and Ukraine; the second between Russia and Europe; and the third between Russia and the United States. Michael Kimmage is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America where is chair of the department. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the US Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He was last on Historically Thinking in Episode 165 to discuss his book The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy. His most recent book is Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability, and it is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation The list of Historically Thinking conversations either directly connection or tangentially related to this conversation with Michael Kimmage is vast. Here are just a few... Episode 211: The (Quiet) Russian Revolution Episode 212: The Perennial Russian Pivot to Asia Episode 284: The Greatest Russian General, in War and Peace Episode 345: The Ecology of Nations

On June 24, 1894, President of France Sadi Carnot was stabbed by an anarchist; on September 10, 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was stabbed by an anarchist; on July 29, 1900, King Umberto I of Italy was shot by an anarchist; on September 6, 1901, President of the United States William McKinley was shot by an anarchist. If you have ever wondered why people in the 1900s right up to the Great War, and beyond, all seem to have had anarchists on the brain, those are four of the reasons. But these attention-grabbing acts were far from the first anarchist attacks to capture the public imagination, and nowhere near the most violent or destructive, as my guest today makes clear. From the mid 19th century, the combination of technological and cultural developments in mass media and in weaponry made acts of violence resonate around the globe. “What follows,” writes James Crossland in the preface to his new book, “is the story of how…revolutionaries, thinkers, killers and spies learned a lesson as heinous as it has proved enduring, resonating with menace into our own troubled age – the means by which to bring terror to the world.” James Crossland is Professor of International History at Liverpool John Moores University, where he is co-director of the Centre for Modern and Contemporary History. His interests are in—among other things—terrorism, propaganda, the International Red Cross and the history of international humanitarian law. His third and most recent book is The Rise of the Devils: Fear and the Origins of Modern Terrorism, and it is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation The Orsini Bomb The Paris Commune William McKinley: Death of the President Anarchist Incidents

Today’s guest is Mark Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College. His academic speciality is modern American history and pedagogy. Among his many books are an edited volume, Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (Yale University Press, 1989). An interest in how history appears in things other than histories led him to edit Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, and Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other)—both of which have a dazzlingly impressive array of contributors. In 1995 Mark Carnes pioneered a new pedagogy, a role-playing pedagogy—now known as Reacting to the Past— which placed students and their efforts to understand the past in the center of the classroom experience. He has written several games in the Reacting to the Past series, as well as Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College, which he and I discussed way back in Episode 16. (I also discussed RTP in Episode 77 with historian Nick Proctor; and the philosophy of educational games with Kellian Adams in Episode 18.) As is always the case with these conversations, and unlike more typical conversations on the podcast, we will be following a set format of questions…though we reserve the right to wander off the set path.

By the reign of Marcus Arelius, Rome seems to be unquestioned in its reach of its power, its wealth, and its cultural and intellectual sophistication. The Pax Romana stretched from Britain and Portugal to Syria and Egypt. Yet at the moment of its seemingly greatest achievements, Rome was struck by a disease that annihilated its legions and ravaged its cities. This was the Antonine plague, perhaps history's first pandemic. Its origins and its diagnosis remain a mystery. But my guest Colin Elliott argues that it was both the cause and effect of the empire's decline, a disease which both exposed the crumbling foundations of the empire and then accelerated that crumbling. Colin Elliott is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. His most recent book is Pox Romana: The Plague that Shook the Roman World, and it is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Colin Elliot's podcast is The Pax Romana Podcast If you've missed it, go back and listen to Tom Holland explain how The Romans Were Not Like Us in Episode 335 This podcast loves a good pandemic, so long as it is at a great historical distance. We've talked about the immediate consequences of the Black Death with Professor Mark Bailey in Episode 207, and the long term consequences of the Black Death with Jamie Belich in Episode 275 For more on historical disaster, see the conversation with David Potter on disruption in Episode 224

From the 1760s into the 1830s, waves of revolutions rolled up upon the shores of the Atlantic World, confusing or destroying entrenched political and social hierarchies, and ushering in a new era of democratic rule. These of course were headlined by the American and French Revolutions, but there were no less important ones that quickly followed: not only the Haitian revolution, but in the Andes, in Italy, and eventually throughout the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas. It was a period of unprecedented and–perhaps–unmatched political, economic, social, and artistic upheaval. This is the canvas for Nathan Perl-Rosenthal in his new book The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It. It spans multiple continents, touching on both familiar and very unfamiliar people and places. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. His previous book was Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution. For Further Investigation As I said at the beginning of the conversation, this is one of a series on the revolutionary connections of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For an intro, see my conversation with David Bell in Episode 176. Micah Alpaugh described how certain means were adopted and adapted by revolutionary movements in that era. And Episode 288 with Jonathan Singerton was about the influence of the American Revolution on the Hapsburg Empire.

Today’s guest in our series of conversations on intellectual humility and historical thinking is Leah Shopkow, Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is a historian of the Middle Ages, specifically of medieval France, and she began her career by studying the history written by medieval chroniclers, which led to her book History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Since then she has also edited one of those historical texts, William of Andres' The Chronicle of Andres. Interest in medieval historiography morphed, naturally or unnaturally depending on your point of view, into an interest in the pedagogy of history. She has written numerous articles on the topic, and was the founding co-director and the principal investigator of the History Learning Project at Indiana University. Most recently she has combined both of these interests in her book The Saint and the Count: A Case Study for Reading Like a Historian, which she and I discussed in Episode 203 of this podcast. For Further Investigation For more on the moves–or dispositions–of historical thinking, go to our series on historical thinking.

Fallingwater, perched above Bear Run in southwestern Pennsylvania is Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, a house perhaps as recognizable as any other in the United States–and it's not even on the nickel. Less known is that it was designed and built at the end of decades of despair and seeming futility in the architect's life, a series of circumstances that would have broken nearly anyone else. Fallingwater is not only an instantiation of Wright’s developing philosophy of architecture, but of his near fanatical determination to prevail against all enemies — often, most notably, himself. But Fallingwater is also a monument to the Depression era, even though it seems very far removed from our mental images of what "the Depression" was like. With me today is Catherine W. Zipf, an award-winning architectural historian. She is executive Director of the Bristol, historical and preservation Society in Bristol, Rhode Island, and author of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater: American Architecture in the Depression Era, which is the subject of our conversation today For Further Investigation Fallingwater Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin: the one in Wisconsin Midway Gardens Wingspread The classic book to read about Chicago and its hinterland is William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West William R. Drennan, Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders Wright in Los Angeles, and his "California Romanza": The Hollyhock House, and the Ennis House This 1996 Library of Congress exhibit, "Frank Lloyd Wright: Designs for an American Landscape, 1922-1932", covers one of the decades that Catherine Zipf and I talked about. It is full of beautiful designs, none of which were ever built. Some of the most impressive things in the exhibit are the meticulous models of the landscape in which Wright proposes to build. Catherine briefly mentioned that many houses of the 1920s, most of which are in revival style. For proof of this, see the architectural plans sold by Dover Publications Frank Lloyd Wright explains why he wrote his Autobiography Lincoln Logs and the Hollywood Bowl Listeners to recent podcasts will note some resonance with aspects of my recent conversation about Henry Wallace; but attentive long-time listeners will also note some curious resonance over the question of what is natural with Episode 222, about the career and views of Harvey Wiley.

In the summer of 1918, hoping to somehow re engage the Russians in the First World War as the Allied offensive on the western front began, thousands of Allied troops began to land in ports in Russia’s far north, far east, and far south. It was the beginning of one of the most ambitious military ventures of the twentieth century. Following the armistice with Germany, Allied forces in Russian not only remained, but expanded. Eventually 180,000 troops from fifteen different countries would participate. As either a means of bringing Russian into the war, or strangling the Bolshevik regime in its crib, the intervention was a failure, and quickly forgotten in those nations who had participated in it. But it was a long-cherished memory in the Soviet Union, it arguably stoked global turmoil for decades to come, and it remains firmly a part of the “pick-n’-mix, might-is-right narrative” of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Anna Reid was the Kyiv correspondent for The Economist and The Daily Telegraph, from 1993 to 1995. She has written about Ukraine for Foreign Affairs, the Observer, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her books include The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia; Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II; and Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine. Her most recent book is A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation There are numerous podcasts in the Historically Thinking archive that relate to this one. You might begin with Episode 65: The First Year of the Russian Revolution, before moving on to Episode 193: The Plot to Bring Down the Soviet Revolution, which covers some of the same territory as this conversation. We talk a little about Siberia; you might also be interested in listening to Episode 212: The Perennial Russian Pivot to Asia

In our latest in the series of conversations on intellectual humility and historical thinking, my interlocutor is Suzanne Marchand. She is Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. Her interests are within the realm of European intellectual history, but she has ranged more widely than that. Her books include Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton, UP, 1996); German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship (Cambridge UP, 2009); and Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton UP, 2020), which was the subject of a conversation on this podcast in Episode 190. She has recently been writing a lot about the reception and interpretation of Herodotus from the Renaissance to the present, work which soon promises to become a book. As is always the case with these conversations, and unlike more typical conversations on the podcast, we will be following a set format of questions…though these might be shaken off, from time to time, by either myself or the guest.

Following the outbreak of the American Civil War, the abolitionist movement underwent an “astonishing transformation”, which would in time alter the direction of the war, the shape of the postwar settlement, and destroy the abolitionist movement itself. As the movement’s moral outsiders found themselves becoming interest group insiders, not only their approach but also their message and ultimately their goals changed. Ideological differences became ideological conflicts, and personal animosities were soon blended into the mix. This is the argument of Frank J. Cirillo in his new book The Abolitionist Civil War: The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union. Frank J. Cirillo is a historian of slavery and antislavery in the nineteenth-century United States. He has held positions at the University of Bonn, The New School, and the University of Virginia. This is his first book. For Further Investigation The photograph is of, from left to right: Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and George Thompson (an English advocate against slavery). The standard biography of Wendell Phillips is James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); Henry Mayer wrote a popular biography of William Lloyd Garrison titled All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery; for a wider focus, see the second edition of the classic study by Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 Numerous conversations on Historically Thinking have dealt with related issues. For an overview of abolitionism, see Episode 82: Abolitionism, A Long Conversation. The overlooked importance of Unionism was at issued in Episode 132: Armies of Deliverance and again in Episode 291: True Blue. The drive for black voting rights by American Blacks was the focus of Episode 294: Black Suffrage. And Abraham Lincoln's racial attitudes were the subject of a conversation with Michael Burlingame in Episode 242: Was Abraham Lincoln a Racist?

Henry Wallace was an Iowan, an accomplished geneticist who hybridized corn; an entrepreneur who co-founded Pioneer Hi-Bred to produce seed, still an agricultural behemoth; the third-generation of editors of an influential American newspaper; a mystic who had a mysterious guru; and a “liberal philosopher”, according to no less an authority than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was also at various times Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, Vice President of the United States, and a third-party candidate for President of the United States in the 1948 election. Like America, Henry Wallace contained multitudes. With me today is Benn Steil, author of The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century. Benn Steil is a Senior Fellow and Director of International Economics at the Council of Foreign Relations. His previous books have been on the Marshall Plan, and on the financial arguments focused upon the Bretton Woods conference. In this book we have yet another study examining the central moment of the twentieth century–both chronologically as well as in many other ways–but from the extraordinary and idiosyncratic point of view of Henry Wallace. For Further Investigation For more on Wallace's Midwestern ethos, see my conversations with Jon Lauck about the Midwest: here, way back in Episode 13 (!!!), and again in Episode 299: The Good Country Benn Steill's previous books are The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, and The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order Henry Cantwell Wallace (1866-1924): Secretary of Agriculture, father of Henry Cantwell Wallace "A Magazine Called Wallace's Farmer" The connection between George Washington Carver, Henry Wallace, and Norman Borlaug

Some animals—like beavers, nesting ants, bees, and humans—actively reshape their environments to make them more favorable for their own species. My guest today believes that the same is also true of nations. This, he argues, is the true meaning of Woodrow Wilson’s phrase “to make the world safe for democracy.” But animals also change as they are adapting their own environment. John Owen argues that liberalism has evolved in ways that are no longer conducive to its own survival; and meanwhile autocratic governments in Russia and China are actively reshaping the international environment to favor autocracy. He believes that the way to ensure democracy’s survival in the United States is to reimagine liberalism—to view it as less about disruption and perpetual openness, and more about commitment, community, and country. John M. Owen IV is the Amb. Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and the Miller Center for Public Affairs, all the the University of Virginia. His latest book is The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order, and it is the subject of our conversation today. I should add that John is a friend, now of many years standing; and while he might be a thorough-going political scientist, and this is not a work of history, there is a lot of historical thinking in it—but, more importantly, I wanted to have a chance to talk to him for one uninterrupted hour about the book. We recorded the conversation in his study.

This is the first of my interviews with historians touching on questions of intellectual humility and historical thinking. Today conversation is with Jonathan Zimmerman. He is the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education and Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in 1993 from the Johns Hopkins University. His books have dealt with a variety of topics related to the history of education, including sex and alcohol education, history and religion in the curriculum, Americans who taught overseas, and historical memory in public schooling. Jonathan Zimmerman is also I think notable for the vareity of opinion pieces he has published across a range of American publications. Jonathan Zimmerman has been on Historically Thinking twice, in Episode 188, on the history of the apparently eternal inability of American college professors to teach, and in Episode 205, where we wondered (along with Eliot Cohen, another frequent guest) if there could ever be a civic history, a history for the common good. For Further Investigation Jonathan Zimmerman, The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America The Greater Good Science Center

We’re going to do something a little differently in today’s episode of Historically Thinking, in that it's not an episode of Historically Thinking. Instead I wanted to share with you a teaser of a podcast that I think you’ll like. It’s hosted by Jason Pack, our guest on episode 337, and it’s called Disorder. It’s produced by GoalHanger podcasts, the UK's number 1 podcasting company, makers of The Rest is History, hosted by friends of this podcast Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Disorder is hosted by Jason and former British diplomat Alexandra Hall Hall. The pod tackles small and easy questions like: how did the world get so disordered? What are the fundamental principles behind our current era of geopolitics? And how do seemingly disparate challenges from AI, to Climate Change, to Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, to Tax Havens, to Unregulated Cyberspace all interact with each other and feed into our era of Global Enduring Disorder? The first full season of episodes are out now – you can find them by searching Disorder or by following the links in the show notes. For me, the Disorder pod hits on many of the same themes as Historically Thinking (that is how a range of of seemingly disparate historical phenomenon are actually interlinked), but tackles this phenomenon through conceptual investigation with the doers of geopolitics rather than via an interview based podcast with historians. So since I think you’ll enjoy it, I wanted to give our listeners a little taste of what Disorder sounds like. We are going to tune in to episode 11, where Jason and Alex spoke with Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's former Chief of Staff. They present an overview of some humorous anecdotes from the Northern Ireland peace process and what they can tell us about what factors lead to successful negotiations and how we might be able to draw upon these lessons in the Middle East and Ukraine. You can find that episode in full as well as Jason's proposed plans for the post-war Govenance of Gaza by following the links in the show notes. Now over to Jason and Alex for that teaser… For Further Investigation Listen to the Disorder podcast here: Read Jason's ‘The Road to Middle East Peace Runs Through Doha’

“Founders” is a term that we typically use to refer to just a few men–usually the first four Presidents of the United States, plus Ben Franklin and–nowadays–Alexander Hamilton. We think of them as typical representatives of their age, which produced civic saints of wisdom and service to the new nation. We don’t usually think about the other Founders, all those men and women who created the institutions, the politics, and the culture of the new republic–from Richard Allen to Judith Sargent Murray to John Jay. And we certainly don’t consider that an age which considered people like Washington to be heroic had points of contrast–the “many unscrupulous figures who violated the era’s expectation of public virtue and advanced their own interests at the expense of others.” Think of them as America’s Founding Scoundrels, whose plots and cons ended up shaping the nation sometimes as much as did the plans and hard work of the institution-builders. David Head and Timothy J. Hemmis are the co-editors of a new book A Republic of Scoundrels: The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New Nation. Timothy Hemmis is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University Central Texas, where his teaching focuses on Early American History and American Military History. David Head is history professor at the University of Central Florida, and the author of A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution, which he and I discussed in Episode 145 of the podcast. For Further Investigation I've previously on the podcast talked with Lorri Glover about "Founders as Fathers"; and we've also discussed the legal history of treason in the American Revolution with Carlton Larson. The following resources have all been suggested by David and Tim. The best place to read founders' mail is Founders Online William C. Davis, The Rogue Republic: How Would-Be Patriots Waged the Shortest Revolution in American History, (Boston, 2011). Edward Everett Hale, “The Man without a Country,” The Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1863, 665–679. Andro Linklater, An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (New York, 2009). Shira Lurie, The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the Early Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 2023). J. K. Martin, Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Hero Reconsidered (New York, 1997). David Narrett, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana–Florida Borderlands, 1762–1803 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015)

In his Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755, Samuel Johnson did not define the words Saxon, Angle, or Anglo-Saxon. But Noah Webster in his 1828 American Dictionary defines Anglo-Saxon as "adjective. Pertaining to the Saxons, who settled in England, or English Saxons." Something had happened in between the two, and not just the American Revolution, and Johnson's and Webster's different views of that event–but that probably did contribute to the difference. And when Webster published his definition, the term was already taking on new connotations. Indeed, the term Anglo-Saxon has a rich and complicated history, right to the present moment. And so does perception of the peoples to which it refers…or does it actually refer to them? With me to discuss the history of the definition and the ideology of the term is Rory Naismith, Professor of Early Medieval English History at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Author of numerous books, including Citadel of the Saxons: The Rise of Early London, he was last on the podcast talking about medieval money in Episode 328. For Further Investigation Content, S., and Williams, H., ‘Creating the Pagan English, from the Tudors to the Present Day’, in Signals of Belief in Early England: Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited, ed. M. Carver, A. Sanmark and S. Semple (Oxford, 2010), pp. 181–200 Foot, S., ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 6 (1996), 25–50 [on use of Anglo-Saxon and English terminology in the pre-Norman period itself] Frantzen, A. J., and Niles, J. D. (eds.), Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, FL, 1997) [a collection of essays - the introduction is probably the most helpful single thing] Horsman, R., Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981) [this is really good on the early modern and American side of the story] Kidd, C., British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), esp. ch. 4–5 and 9 [again, excellent on early modern Anglo-Saxonism] Mandler, P., The English National Character: the History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, 2006), esp. ch. 3 Niles, J., The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901 (Oxford, 2015) Rory Naismith observes, "There is also a welter of very polemical stuff on the web; for a selection, see below" Rubinstein, S., ‘Anglo-Saxon Extremists: the Strange Logic of the Activists who Insist the Term “Anglo-Saxon” is Racist’, The Critic, June 2023 Rambaran-Olm, M., ‘History Bites: Resources on the Problematic Term “Anglo-Saxon”’, a three-part series on Medium: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, 7 September 2020 Rambaran-Olm, M., ‘Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting “Anglo-Saxon” Studies’, History Workshop, 4 November 2019 Rambaran-Olm, M., and Wade, E., ‘The Many Myths of the Term “Anglo-Saxon”’, Smithsonian Magazine, 14 July 2021 Sewer, A., ‘“Anglo-Saxon” is What You Say when “Whites Only” is Too Inclusive’, The Atlantic, 20 April 2021 Williams, H., ‘The Fight for “Anglo-Saxon”’, Aeon, 29 May 2020 Wood, M., ‘“As a Racism Row Rumbles on, is it Time to Retire the Term ‘Anglo-Saxon’?” Michael Wood Explores the Controversy’, History Extra, 4 November 2019

From its opening in 1822, the Fulton Market was an essential part of life in old New York, selling vegetables grown on Long Island, fruit harvested in Cuba, lobsters taken from the waters of Maine, chickens raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and oysters–and fish–hauled forth from New York harbor itself. Over the decades Fulton Market became known as Fulton Fish Market, dominated by wholesale dealers in fish that came not only from New York Harbor, but from all over the world. What Chicago became for beef, New York became for fish. “A business that specializes in fish,” writes my guest Jonathan Rees, “has to regularize an inevitably uneven supply through a mixture of knowledge and technology.” Rees’s book The Fulton Fish Market: A History is therefore not simply the story of the creation, life, and decline of a New York place, but a description of that place where community, politics, economy, nature, and culture all came together on the New York waterfront. Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. This is his third appearance on the podcast; he was last on in episode 222 to describe the strange career of Harvey Wiley. For Further Information Previous conversations with Jonathan were about refrigeration, and the purity and nutritional value of mass-produced food. It doesn't take too much of a guess to figure out why he's now writing about fish markets. Jonathan Rees and I talked briefly about Joseph Mitchell, a legendary New Yorker columnist not least because he eventually had a case of writer's block so massive that it transcended the metaphor "block". Here is Mitchell's book Up in the Old Hotel, in which the Fulton Fish Market is essentially a supporting character, if not primary character, and more on those thirty years without writing.

Beginning in 1940 a group of Polish diplomats based in Bern, Switzerland, orchestrated a program of forging passports and identity documents from Latin American countries. These were then smuggled into Nazi-occupied countries, where they were used to save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. When the Ładoś Group–named after its leader, Aleksander Ładoś, the Polish ambassador to Switzerland–ended its activities in 1943 it had saved possibly as many as 10,000 people from extermination, making it one of the largest conspiracies on behalf of the survival of the European Jews. Roger Moorhouse describes the Lados Group and its activities in his new book The Forgers: The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation. His most recent book was Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (which won the Polish Foreign Ministry History Prize). He is also the author of Berlin at War (shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman Prize), and The Devils’ Alliance. He is a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Warsaw. For Further Information As mentioned in the podcast, Episode 273 was an exhaustive examination of the life of Josef Pilsudski: father of modern Poland, socialist, Siberian exile, civilian, military thinker, bank robber, master diplomat, and dictator. Also a friend of the podcast, or so we hope. Some common terrain was also discussed in Episode 317, about the village of Oberstdorf in the Allgauer Alps. More on the Ładoś Group The featured image was generated with AI ∙ November 4, 2023 at 12:26 PM

“We live in a world that feels as though it is in the grip of rapid and capricious change. To rescue ourselves from the distress and dismay that change can induce, we tell ourselves that flux is the signature of contemporary life and sets us apart from the simpler worlds in which those before us lived... Yet we really have little ground to be so confident that present flux is outdoing past, for there have been times when the very conditions of survival were stripped from our predecessors, denying them the dignity of living well. This book is about one of those times, China in the early 1640s, when massive climate cooling, pandemic, and military invasion sent millions to their deaths.” Those are the words of my guest Timothy Brook, which begin his new book The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China. Founded in 1368, the Ming overthrew Mongol rule, eventually moved the capital of China to Beijing, and ushered in centuries of economic growth, dazzling cultural achievements, and a doubling of the population. This book is an inquiry into how that achievement collapsed–and why. Timothy Brook is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of British Columbia. His work focuses on the Ming Dynasty, but has extended to both earlier and much later eras. This is his second appearance on the podcast; he was last on in Episode 180 to discuss his book Great State: China and the World. For Further Investigation Porcelain was mentioned in the course of the conversation; for the European industrial aesthetic drive to match China's capacity to make beautiful porcelain, see my conversation with Suzanne Marchand in Episode 110 Tim Brook believe that prices are tools by which to diagnose climate change on par with taking sample cores from glaciers, or examining tree rings. While I've never had a conversation about glacier cores with anyone (but I'm open to it), I have had one about tree rings in Episode 156: The Stories Told By Trees. An even bigger perspective on climate–but one without the granularity and fine detail provided by price history–was provided by Philip Jenkins in Episode 209: Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith Transcript [00:03:08] Al: Tim Brooke, welcome back to the podcast. [00:03:10] Tim: Thank you, Al. It's a pleasure to be here. [00:03:13] Al: Before we get to anything else, we should probably do a definition. What is price history? Since we're going to be discussing price history a lot. Before we get to China, let's get to the even stranger terrain of price history. [00:03:31] Tim: The project began not as a project to understand climate change. The project began because I wanted to understand the most basic, simple fact that Anyone in a somewhat commercialized society has to deal with, and that is, how much do things cost? It was, so it was a very kind of simple minded question that I had. [00:03:58] Tim: I just wanted to know, [00:04:00] what did you, what did it cost to live during the Ming Dynasty? And I've worked on the Ming Dynasty for long enough that I had a good sense of what society and economy and politics were like during the period. So what I wanted to do is go down to the level of daily life and figure out, what did things cost? [00:04:18] Tim: Did people have enough? income to be able to buy the things they needed. How was that income distributed? How were costs managed? So I started out with this very simple idea. And in fact, the idea was niggling in the back of my mind for about two decades. And so over the last two decades, Whenever I'm reading a source of the Ming, I pick out the prices of things when prices of things are mentioned. [00:04:43] Tim: Now, there is no European historians have got a huge edge on China historians over the question of prices because there's any number of sources that European scholars can use, market sources, parish records, and so [00:05:00] forth. In China,

The plays of William Shakespeare contain within them a whole world of human action and purpose. They are, said Samuel Johnson, "a faithful mirror of manners and of life." We seem to watch over Shakespeare’s shoulder as he turns that mirror this way and that, from medieval England, to the coast of Bohemia, to republican Rome, to a desert island beset with the spirits of the air. And from time to time, as the mirror turns, we see our faces there as well. In those moments we sometimes come to realize, writes my guest Eliot Cohen, that while "we like to think that whatever we see in the mirror is beautiful…Shakespeare forces us to realize that there may be ugly or even hideous things there as well." Eliot Cohen has been a faithful viewer of William Shakespeare's mirror for many years, and his new book is a distillation of those lessons shaken together with his equally long study of statecraft and strategic thought. It is The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. Eliot A. Cohen is the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Among his many books are Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. He has also served as an officer in the Army Reserve, as a director in Defense Department’s planning staff, and from 2007 to 2009 was Counselor to the Secretary of State. This is second appearance on Historically Thinking; since he was on to talk with Jonathan Zimmerman about civic education in Episode 205, he has gotten into podcasting, co-presenting “Shield of the Republic” with partner in crime Eric Adelman. I highly recommend it. For Further Investigation Our previous conversation on Shakespeare was with friend of the podcast Scott Newstok in Episode 186 After listening to the conversation, or in the midst of it, you'll want to watch several–or all–of these soliloquies from The Guardian's "Shakespeare Solos"

“The scientific community is by any measure a very strange kind of community”, writes my guest. “For starters, no one knows who exactly belongs to it... Its members are a miscellany of individuals but also of disparate institutions…Nor does it have a fixed location. …the village conjured up by the term “scientific community” is scattered all over the globe and its inhabitants meet only occasionally, if at all. Far from living in neighborly harmony or even collegial mutual tolerance, the members of this uncommunal community compete ferociously and engage in notoriously vitriolic polemics … Although modern science has been called the locomotive of all modernity, the scientific community more closely resembles a medieval guild…” Given this, one is bound to ask how precisely this scattered contentious stratified “community” even exists, let alone cooperates. Yet cooperation has been a continuous strand uniting modern science. Lorraine Daston has described the growth and mutations of that community in her new book Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate. She is the Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute of Advanced Study. For Further Investigation Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By Here is an excellent conversation with Lorraine Daston about her book Rules which, unfortunately, was not a conversation on Historically Thinking We've had numerous conversations about topics within the history of science over the years. Here is a list. The featured image below is of the Fifth Solvay Conference, at which every luminary of past and future physics seems to have been gathered. Hopefully you recognize the bushy-haired man with the big mustache more or less in the center of the first row. Less identifiable than Albert Einstein: Max Planck (first row, 2nd from left); Marie Curie (first, row 3rd from left); Niels Bohr (second row, extreme right); Paul Dirac (second row, fifth from left); Ernst Schrödinger (third row, sixth from right); Wolfgang Pauli (third row, fourth from right); Werner Heisenberg (third row, third from right). And many more who deserve mention, which you can find here.

"Today’s international system is like a ship adrift during a pandemic. With the captain lost to the virus, and the most capable and conscientious members of the crew self-isolating in their cabins, the deck is now teeming with contagious megalomaniacs. Rather than collaborate, each thinks he knows how to steer the ship better than the admirals.” That is the cheerful first paragraph of Jason Pack’s book Libya and the Enduring Global Disorder. Jason Pack is also a NATO Foundation Senior Analyst, co-host of the new Disorder podcast, and international man of mystery who was kidnapped twice in Syria, led wine tours in Georgia, is a backgammon champion and–most importantly–is a long time listener to Historically Thinking who can only be described as a super-fan. He’s here to talk about his book, the ongoing disorder in Libya, how Historically Thinking changed his life, his new podcast, and Georgian wine. For Further Investigation Given its influence on Jason, you can't go wrong with listening to my conversation with Steele Brand (not a pseudonym) about the great Polybius of Megalopolis. Also very much related to this conversation is my conversation about "Empire and Jihad" with the late Neil Faulkner in Episode 240 (one of the most popular in the history of the podcast) and with Glenda Sluga in Episode 257 on the Congress of Vienna, titled "Inventing a New World Order." Jason Pack, "Libya's Chaos is a Warning to the World" Alexandra Sharp, "Mass Flooding Submerges Libya in Disaster" Lorenzo Rusconi, "Backgammon and the Meaning of Life" The Georgian Wine House, importers to the United States of fine Georgian wines; and, once you're hooked, take a tour with the Birthplace of Wine Experience to see what "the wines of the Greeks, Romans, and ancient Near East tasted like". Or travel in your mind with Atlas Obscura's Guide to Georgia. Bake a khachapuri for a crowd Visit Washington, DC, not for the monuments or museums, for its Georgian restaurant

In 1785, Jane Welborn Spurgin of Abbots Creek in Rowan County, North Carolina petititioned the North Carolina Legislature, attesting her right to 704 acres of land so that she might provide for her family of 12 children. Her husband, William Spurgeon, had been a leading Loyalist combatant during the Revolution. Now Jane sought to reclaim some of the property that had been taken from them by the rebel government of North Carolina. The Revolution had split their family, upended hierarchies, and now made Jane Spurgin claim citizenship and some of the rights pertaining to it. Cynthia A. Kierner captures Jane Spurgin, her world, and her voice in The Tory's Wife, A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America. Cindy Kierner is professor of history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She was last on the podcast to discuss her book, Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood. For Further Investigation The State Archives of North Carolina The Regulator Movement, described by the North Carolina Encyclopedia. For an overview of the American Revolution in the South, see my conversation with John Buchanan in Episode 110 Transcript [00:01:23] Al: Let's talk about your first meeting with Jane Wellborn Spurgeon. [00:01:30] Al: Do you remember? Do you remember where you were and what you felt? Because I bet you do. [00:01:37] Cindy: I, so like back in the mid 90s, I was writing a book about southern women, mostly white women. In the colonial and the revolutionary era, and it was a very open ended project, but from reading other books about the revolution, people like Linda Kerber in particular had used women's petitions to the state legislatures as a way of [00:02:00] getting at their voices. [00:02:01] Cindy: In other words, women who might not have left behind any other documents have left behind these documents where they told the legislators about their lives, about their problems as a way of getting some sort of help. And so I'm like, okay, I'm going to read all of these for Virginia and North and South Carolina, all the ones that were written by women. [00:02:22] Cindy: And what I'm really hoping to find is, women saying things like, Oh, we had this revolution. Isn't that awesome? Now we have rights. Woohoo. None of them did that. None of them did that. What they did when they asked for help was basically they said, Oh, I'm a poor, weak woman. Sob, sob, please help me. [00:02:43] Cindy: The one exception to that was Jane Spurgeon who, submitted three petitions between 1785 and 1791 and with each successive petition, when she didn't get what she wanted, she got madder and finally said, look [00:03:00] I should have the common rights of other citizens. And so I first. [00:03:03] Cindy: I met Jane in the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh in the mid 1990s, and I wrote a little bit about her at that point, but I've really been thinking about her petitions and her very strongly worded [00:03:18] Al: So we have to talk more about petitionary literature in a little bit because I get so nerdy and excited about it. It's like the coolest damn thing. Petitionary literature throughout the 18th century. But how many are there of these petitions? [00:03:32] Cindy: There were hundreds submitted by women alone within this sort of, 10 or 20 year period. Many more were submitted by men and groups of men. But what's different about this period is that prior to the revolution at least in these States women almost never, they did occasionally, but it was very rare. [00:03:55] Cindy: What the revolution did and what the war did really was created situations where a [00:04:00] lot of these women were on their own and they were needing to collect debts, needing tax relief, wanting their husbands back pay if their husbands were soldiers and so forth and so on. And they petitioned the legislature in order to get that.

Way back in April, I dropped the first two podcasts in what are intended to be a series on historical thinking and intellectual humility. They were designed to introduce the concept to an audience who had never really heard of "intellectual humility." The first was with philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch, on epistemology in the age of information, and the challenges of intellectual humility when confronting the “internet of us”. That was followed by a podcast with Igor Grossman, a social psychologist who has investigated the concept of intellectual humility as part of his research into how people make sense of the world around them through “their expectations, lay theories, meta-conditions [or] forecasts.” Today’s podcast is a long delayed follow-up to those two earlier podcast, making an introductory trilogy to the series. I thought I should try and make the connection to intellectual humility from historical thinking to be as clear and explicit as I could. And who better to do that, the Lendol Calder, the man who first taught me about the concept of historical thinking, and from who I first heard that one of the benefits of historical thinking was intellectual humility. In the weeks to come, each Thursday I'm going to drop a conversation of about thirty minutes with a historian in which I ask them about how they became a historian, about what they have gotten right in their work, and about what they have gotten wrong–and how they learned to tell the difference. I think you’ll find them interesting. But I’m also hopeful that social psychologists might find them a useful repository of. Information from which to theorize and conduct further studies on history and intellectual humility. Please let me know what you think of the series, and, better yet, if the concept of intellectual humility resonates with you, and why. Please send an email to [email protected], and put “Intellectual Humility” in the subject line. Transcript 00:01:11] Al: Today's podcast is a long delayed followup to those two earlier conversations, making a sort of introductory trilogy to a series on historical thinking and intellectual humility. I thought I should try and make the connection to intellectual humility from historical thinking to be as clear and explicit as I possibly could. And who better to do that than Lendol Calder, the man who first taught me about the concept of historical thinking.\, And from who I first heard that one of the benefits of historical thinking was intellectual humility. While I was interested in hearing how he had made that connection and how it worked, I began by asking him to review what historical thinking is, and where did the concept come from. [00:01:53] Lendol: Historians in the United States, in Canada, in Great Britain, [00:02:00] in the Netherlands, Germany, Australia and Sweden, all in the 1990s began turning their attention to the problems of historical pedagogy. And independently, these historians began groping towards The idea that we should refocus history education away from just content towards learning how historians think. [00:02:36] Lendol: This probably was influenced by Simultaneous investigations being made in social psychology. There's been an off and on again interest in learning how experts think and what defines expertise and historians picked up on that movement and began trying to define what it is [00:03:00] that makes historical thinking different from any other kind of thinking such as mathematical thinking or natural science thinking or poetic thinking. [00:03:12] Lendol: I always think, what makes this practice different from any other practice? It's like a stonemason thinking about, how am I being a stonemason? What am I doing? How am I, what are the practices I do to be a stonemason? It's inhabiting a craft, which you have to do in order to pass on a craft to to someone else, I think. [00:03:33] Lendol: Yeah, I'd say that's half of it.

‘If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus…The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.’ These are the words of Edward Gibbon, writing in the first volume of his history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That wealth, that luxury, that peace, had been purchased by the legions of Rome. As Tom Holland writes in his new book PAX, “the capacity of the legions to exercise extreme violence was the necessary precondition of the Pax Romana”. And despite Gibbon’s wistfulness about that happy and prosperous age, that bloodily-won peace was enjoyed by a people very different from ourselves. Tom Holland is the author of numerous bestselling books. PAX: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age is the third volume of a Roman history which began with Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, and Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. He was last on Historically Thinking for Episode 139 to discuss his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Since then, he has started to podcast in a small way himself and now The Rest is History–which he co hosts with Dominic Sandbrook–is by some measures one of the the most popular podcast in Britain. Which means that this is like the Chairman of Tesco visiting a small alternative co-op in north Devon that reeks of patchouli, and sells at least 99 products made of hemp.

In 2016, Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk published a chilling essay based on extensive survey data in the Journal of Democracy. It discovered that there was a growing desire for non-democratic alternatives among both young Americans and Europeans. Indeed, the younger and richer you were, the more likely you were to believe it would be “good” for the army to take over. That essay was one of the many indicators and auguries of that and the preceding years something seemed just a touch off with the state of democratic institutions, and those who used to love them. But my guests Brook Manville and Josiah Ober retain their confidence in the power of the ideas and the culture that democracy contains. In their new book The Civic Bargain they offer a “guide for democratic renewal”, contained within a history of the rise, fall, rise and evolution of democracies. By focusing on Athens, Rome, Britain, and the United States, they demonstrate some of the commonalities of democratic governance between very different cultures and ages–and they show how democracy remains the best way of establishing and maintaining the civic bargain. Brook Manville is an independent consultant who writes about politics, democracy, technology, and business; in previous lives he was previously a partner with McKinsey & Co. and an award-winning professor at Northwestern University. His books include The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens and A Company of Citizens: What the World’s First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations, which he co-wrote with our second guest. Josiah Ober is the Constantine Mitsotakis Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of many books, among them The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, he is also co-author of the Reacting to the Past game The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 BC, which in many ways is the seed that eventually sprouted into this podcast. For Further Investigation A podcast on Reacting to the Past with its originator, Mark Carnes More on the Roman Republic, with Steele Brand Transcript [00:02:00] Al Zambone: Gentlemen, welcome to Historically Thinking. [00:02:19] Brook Manville: Al, thank you for having us. [00:02:20] Josh Ober: Indeed. Thanks very much. [00:02:22] Al Zambone: Let's begin with the title which is provocative and clear at the same time. What's the Civic Bargain? Josh, why don't you start? [00:02:31] Josh Ober: Our core argument is that democracy is based on a bargain. In order to figure that out, we had to come up with a new definition of democracy. And I'll throw that over to Brooke to give us that. [00:02:51] Brook Manville: Yeah, I think that, I think it's really the right place to start. The problem is there's so many books coming out about how to save democracy [00:03:00] and people argue about it all the time now. But very often they don't define it. And I think one of the features of our book is we tried to define it very simply. [00:03:09] Brook Manville: Something that was universal across anything that looks or smells like democracy. We basically say it's citizens governing themselves, but then we simplify it even further. And we say, look, at the end of the day, it's people making decisions together without a boss. And we use boss, obviously, in a figurative sense. [00:03:32] Brook Manville: Sometimes it's literal, but like a king, like an oligarch, like a authoritarian tyrant. But basically, at the very most fundamental level, it's People want to be free. And so living and making decisions together without a boss is our starting point. But, and now back to the bargain, we put a big asterisk on that. [00:03:54] Brook Manville: We say, people living and making decisions without a boss, yeah, but [00:04:00] actually, you do have a boss, each other. The whole notion of democracy is that if you don't have a boss,

An Ambassador from the Kingdom of the Kongo to the Papal Court On July 20, 817, Pope Paschal began a project to transform the Church of Santa Prassede, the resting place of the sisters and martyrs, Pudenziana and Prassede, executed in the second century, legendarily believed to be daughters of the Roman senator Pudens, the first or one of the first converts of St. Peter himself. To accompany them in their rebuilt church, Paschal removed 2,300 bodies from the catacombs and interred them in walls that were covered with glittering, colorful mosaics, lit by hundreds of candles. It was symbolic of everything the Roman church had been, and had become: built upon the bones of martyrs, but now wealthy, sponsored by the Emperor of the West, and shepherded by a powerful Bishop, who at the very least was first among equals. Indeed, as my guest writes, Paschal had himself depicted “shoulder to shoulder with Peter, Paul, Pudenziana, and Prassede.” This was a key moment in the history of papal Rome–a period in the history of the city in which the Papacy was key to the identity of both the place and its inhabitants. With Constantine’s removal of the imperial capital to the new city of Constantinople, the papacy gradually became the point of reference for Romans, and then eventually for all of those people in western Europe who called themselves Christians. Eventually, even though its universal and awesome power had diminished by the middle of the nineteenth century, it still took an army to remove the Papacy from its position at the city’s heart. And still, from time to time, it has the ability to relativize all other powers in the city. My guest Jessica Wärnberg is a historian of the religious and political culture of Europe. She has written about popes, princes, inquisitors, and Jesuits. She is the author of City of Echoes: A New History of Rome, Its Popes, and Its People, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation The episode is illustrated with a photograph of the Church of Santa Prassede, looking towards the altar and the portraits of Peter, Paul, Prassede, Pudenziana, and Pope Paschal in the apse. The small illustration is of the Kongolese ambassador to the Papal Court. If you're new to the podcast, and liked this episode, you'll also like my conversation with philosopher Scott Samuelson about his book Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour For a taste of that classical Roman stuff that we avoided in the discussion–or some of the lower layers of the Roman cake–try this conversation with Ed Watts about the later Roman Republic. Conversation with Jessica Warnberg [00:00:00] Al: Welcome to Historically Thinking, a podcast about history and how to think about history. For more on this episode, go to historically thinking.org, where you can find links and readings related to today's podcast, comment on the conversation and sign up for our newsletter. And consider becoming a member of the Historically Thinking Common Room, a community of Patreon supporters. [00:00:22] Al: Hello, on July 20th, 817, Pope Pascal, the first began a project to transform the Church of Santa Procede, the resting place of the sisters and martyrs, Pudenziana and Prassede, executed in the second century, legendarily believed to be daughters of the Roman Senator Pudens, who was himself believed to be one of the first or the first convert of St. Peter himself. To accompany the two sisters in their rebuilt church, Pascal removed 2300 bodies from the catacombs and interred them in walls that were covered with glittering colorful mosaics, lit by hundreds of candles. [00:01:00] It was symbolic of everything the Roman Church had been and had become built upon the bones of martyrs. [00:01:06] Al: Now literally so wealthy, sponsored by the Emperor of the West and shepherded by a powerful bishop who at the very least was first among equals indeed. As my guest writes,

A Sassanid cataphract in Oxford–fortunately a re-enactor From the Ionian revolt of the 490s, through the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, the vastAchaemenid Persian Empire was pitted against the pitifully small Greek states on its western periphery, until the astonishing successes of Alexander of Macedon decapitated it, placing him and his companions atop that imperial trunk. But Alexander’s death, and the wars of his successors, gave an opportunity for a new power to rise in the far west and march eastward. In time imperial Rome would face new Persian dynasties; and for centuries Rome and Persia warred in the Caucuses and across Mesopotamia, until at the beginning of the seventh century an apocalyptic struggle resulted in the downfall of Persia, and the crippling of Rome, just as a new world-changing force emerged from the Arabian peninsula. That is a pretty good analogue to a Chat GPT description of a millennia’s worth of history, and while some of the facts are correct, nearly all of its interpretations are false. Such is Adrian Goldsworthy’s argument in his new book Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry. While there were periods of warfare, they were given the length of the two empires coexistence very sporadic indeed. Moreover, both empires had a respect for each other that they offered no other polity, and the trade and commerce between them–not just in products, but also in cultural mores–was perhaps the most important feature of their relationship. This is Adrian’s fourth appearance on the podcast. He was last on the podcast discussing his book Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors; he has also explained how Hadrian’s Wall worked, and why Julius Caesar needs to be taken seriously as a historian. For Further Investigation The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars AD 226-363: A Documentary History, edited by Michael H. Dodgeon and Samuel N. C. Lieu, and The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars AD 363-628, edited by Geoffrey Greatrex and Samuel N. C. Lieu–Adrian writes that "both very well done for the later periods with sources and comments" Ammianus Marcellinus, The Late Roman Empire (AD 354-378) Goldsworthy also recommends the Perseus Digital Library for all your classical reading and research needs For why battles aren't as important as you think they are, see my conversation with Cathal Nolan Conversation with Adrian Goldsworthy Al: [00:00:00] Welcome to Historically Thinking, a podcast about history and how to think about history. For more on this episode, go to historically thinking.org, where you can find links and readings related to today's podcast. Comment on the conversation and sign up for our newsletter, and consider becoming a member of the Historically Thinking Common Room, a community of Patreon supporters. Hello, from the Ionian Revolt of the 490s, through the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, the vast Persian Empire of the Achaemenid Dynasty was pitted against the pitifully small Greek states on its western periphery, until the astonishing successes of Alexander of Macedon decapitated it, placing him and his companions atop that imperial trunk. But Alexander's death, and the wars of his successors, gave an opportunity to a new power to rise in the far west. In time Rome, first as republic and then as empire, would face new Persian dynasties. For centuries, Rome and Persia warred in the Caucasus and across [00:01:00] Mesopotamia, until at the beginning of the 7th century, an apocalyptic struggle resulted in the downfall of Persia, the crippling of Rome, just as a new world changing force emerged from out of the Arabian Peninsula. That is a pretty good analogue to a chat GPT description of a millennia's worth of history. And, like lots of chat GPT descriptions, while some of the facts are correct, nearly all of the interpretations are false. Such would be Adrian Goldsworthy's argument in...

From 1941 to 1945, a platoon of Anglo-American reporters (and one or two Australians and Canadians) were housed in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. They were there to report on the defense of the Soviet Union against the Nazi invasion, and many of them were not disposed to tell anything other than the most positive imaginable stories. Yet the regime of Josef Stalin treated them with the greatest possible suspicion, keeping them safely under watchful eyes in the Metropol, carefully controlling what they could see and hear. Nevertheless, even in the wilderness of mirrors that was Stalinist Russia, truth had a way of breaking through. While some of the women translators who assisted the reporters were spies, artfully delivering disinformation through the reporters to their western audiences, others were secret dissidents who took the opportunity to whisper the secrets of everyday Soviet life. Some of the reporters radically reversed the views which they brought with them to the Metropol; while others, seemingly less ideological at the start, sunk into a comfortable moral and intellectual torpor. The Metropol as the stage, and the reporters who crossed it, are the subject Alan Philps new book Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin's Propaganda War. Alan Philps was Moscow correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Telegraph, has been foreign editor of the Telegraph, and editor of the journal of Chatham House, The World Today. For Further Investigation Previous related conversations include Nadezhda Ulanovskaya in conversation with William F. Buckley

Hello, at 2:09 in the morning on October 5th, 1930, the British airship R-101 crashed some 90 miles northwest of Paris. It was just a few hours into a journey that was supposed to take it to Karachi, then a premier city of the British Empire of India. Impacting the ground at approximately 13 mph, the 5.5 million cubic feet of hydrogen gas that gave the airship its buoyancy immediately caught fire. Forty-eight of the fifty-four on board died, including Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson, a Labour peer, and the Secretary of State for Air, who had staked his policy program on R101’s successful voyage. It was a greater loss of life than that suffered in the more notorious Hindenburg crash of 1937–but, incredibly enough, it was not the greatest number of lives to be claimed by an airship accident. And on that record of death and destruction–and why it was tolerated for so long–hangs a tangled story. The story of how R101 came to its rapid end is told by S.C. Gwynne in his new book His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine. S.C. Gwynne has written numerous books, including the New York Times bestsellers Rebel Yell and Empire of the Summer Moon. For Further Investigation Some of themes in the conversation were touched in earlier conversations: one with Tom Misa, on the history of technology, and the other with Iwan Rhys Morus on how Victorians conceived of the future. Harold G. Dick and Douglas H. Robinson, The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships: Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg E. A. Johnston, Airship Navigator: One Man’s Part in the British Airship Tragedy 1916-1930 Nick Le Neve Walmsley, R101: A Pictorial History Nevil Shute, Slide Rule: An Autobiography Thomas Paone, "Before Top Gun, Hollywood Promoted Naval Aviation with Dirigible"

On two separate trips, he traveled throughout the southeastern corner of the North American continent. He collected plants, and seeds, which he sent to interested amateur plantsmen and gardeners, as well as some of the foremost naturalists of the age. But he also collected animals and birds, and spent his time making drawings of birds. Eventually he would even read a scientific paper before the Royal Society in London that was the first to describe the migration of birds. This pioneering naturalist was not, as some of you might have guessed, John James Audubon. Nor was it, as some of the smart kids in the front row might think, either John or William Bartram. It was Mark Catesby, whose two separate sojourns in Virginia and South Carolina–lasting together over a decade–led many years later to the publication Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, the first ever illustrated account of American flora and fauna. And yet very few of you have ever heard his name. With me to talk about Mark Catesby and his world, both natural and cultural, is Patrick Dean, author of Nature’s Messenger: Mark Catesby and his Adventures in a New World. He was last on the podcast in Episode 223 describing the first expeditions to reach the top of Denali, described in his first book A Window to Heaven. For Further Investigation A digital edition of the Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands--Patrick Dean writes, "I used it a lot, as you can imagine!" For more on Catesby's era and context, see Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?: England, 1689-1727; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783; and John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century And if you're into coloring books for adults, why not Mark Catesby's Nature Coloring Book: Drawings from the Royal Collection

In the early 11th century, an English monk wrote an imaginary conversation between two men haggling over the price of a book. After finally agreeing to a price, they then “needed to establish what means of payment would be used, and the buyer reeled off a daunting list of thirteen possible ways of settling the transaction, ranging from gold and silver to beans, clothing, and goats.” But in the end the seller wants to be paid in coin for, he says, “he who has coins or silver can get everything he wants.” But those fictitious monks lived in a time of coin scarcity. Indeed, for about seven centuries–between the end of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century, and the economic growth of the twelfth, coins were in short supply. Yet nevertheless, argues my guest Rory Naismith, people found coins important because they established a means of “articulating people's place in economic and social structure.” Medieval money, and the making of it, turns out to be a point of contact between economic, social, and institutional history. Why? Because making money is also about making meaning. Rory Naismith is Professor of early medieval English history at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Corpus Christi. Among his previous books are Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England: The Southern English Kingdoms, 757-865. His most recent book is Making Money in the Early Middle Ages, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation We've talked about coins before, and their use as historical evidence, in Episode 217 with Frank Holt–which turns out to be a pretty good introduction to this conversation with Rory Naismith. As regular listeners know, I like talking about credit, and money. Past conversations about credit include Episode 218, with Sara Damiano about women's use of credit in early America. I talked about banking in the early American republic with Sharon Ann Murphy. And while our conversation wasn't focused on credit or banking, Rowan Dorin and I did talk a lot about both in Episode 304. Rory Naismith writes: "I'd urge listeners to spend some time with the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds. For reading, the classic overview (other than my new book!) is Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe; also very good for what comes next in the story is Jim Bolton, Money in the Medieval English Economy. A very good survey of the wider historical picture in the early period is Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome."

For more than two centuries, the American South has fascinated Americans–and increasingly those outside North America. Its economy, politics, religion, race relations, literature, and food have influenced all the commensurate parts of national life. Now A New History of the American South draws together the talents of several historians to create a new narrative of southern history, from the distant past of prehistory to the present. Drawing on old and new scholarship, the New History considers all the experiences of all the peoples of the South: indigenous, black, and white; male and female; poor, elite, and middling. W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the editor of A New History of the American South, which means is the impresario and manager of the troupe of actors involved in the creation of an edited volume. Otherwise he is the William Umstead Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written on lynching, utopian socialism in the New South, white and black historical memory in the South since the Civil War, and the history of torture in the United States from the time of European contact to the twenty-first century; and he is currently working on a study of Civil War prisoner of war camps. For Further Investigation I've previously talked about the New New South with Zachary Lechner, author of The South of the Mind, way back in Episode 81, in a rare face-to-face, recorded in his office conversation C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 James Cobb, C. Vann Woodward: American's Historican W.J. Cash, Mind of the South John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South And I've talked with John Reed twice, once about Bohemian New Orleans, and another time about North Carolina barbecue. Both of them extremely important subjects. I mean it.

John Singer Sargent, Henry Cabot Lodge At the 1920 Republican Convention the journalist and H.L. Mencken observed with great amusement and interest the behavior of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the chair of the convention. “Lodge’s keynote speech, of course, was bosh,” wrote Mencken, “but it was bosh delivered with an air…Lodge got away with it because he was Lodge—because there was behind it his unescapable confidence in himself, his disarming disdain of discontent below, his unapologetic superiority. This superiority was and is quite real. Lodge is above the common level of his party, his country and his race, and he knows it very well, and is not disposed toward the puerile hypocrisy of denying it.” It is extraordinary, given how Mencken saw Lodge, that we are much more likely to know who H.L. Mencken was then to recognize the name of Henry Cabot Lodge. Of a prominent seafaring family, he received one of the very first PhDs granted by Harvard, was involved in Massachusetts politics from 1880, and in 1892 was elected to the United States Senate—where he served until his death in 1924. He was one of the great political personalities of his age, alongside Theodore Roosevelt, his friend of 35 years, Theodore Roosevelt. Together, as Laurence Jurdem describes in his new book, The Rough Rider and the Professor: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Friendship that Changed American History, they formed an unbeatable team, with Roosevelt thrusting ahead, while Lodge offered canny tactics and strategy, serving as Roosevelt’s one man think tank and advisory group. Though their friendship was threatened by Roosevelt’s third-party run for the White House, their final years were warmed by their mutual detest for Woodrow Wilson. Laurence Jurdem is currently an adjunct professor of history at Fairfield University and Fordham College’s Lincoln Center campus. The author of Paving the Way for Reagan: The Influence of Conservative Media on U.S. Foreign Policy, he is a frequent commentator on American politics. For Further Investigation Think of this conversation as begin the third of a Summer 2023 trilogy on late 19th century American politicians and political culture. It began with President Garfield, then moved backward to describe the context and foundation of "Civil War politics" in the "Age of Lincoln", and now moves out of the Age of Lincoln with two men who were very much born in the Age of Lincoln, but then shaped the foundations of progressivism. Henry Cabot Lodge, Alexander Hamilton–some have said that Roosevelt was one of the few people to respect Hamilton between his death and the late twentieth century. If so, he learned to do it from Lodge, for whom Hamilton was symbolic of what he desired to be as a politician and a policymaker. Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, Hero Tales from American History–a co-written book, composed of biographical essays they wrote for The Century Magazine. Lodge's heroes are George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, John Quincy Adams, Francis Parkman, Grant at Vicksburg, Robert Gould Shaw, James Russell Lowell, Sheridan at Cedar Creek, and Abraham Lincoln. With the exception of Grant and Sheridan, it's a collection of Federalists and Bostonians, which is about right. I quoted several times in the podcast from H.L. Mencken's "Lodge", an essay that he included in his A Mencken Chrestomathy. Very much worth seeking out. H.W. Brands, T.R: The Last Romantic Two by Patricia O’Toole, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and his Friends, 1880-1918, and When Trumpets Fade: Theodore Roosevelt After The White House John Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography William H. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt

On a wall outside the reading room of the Museo Correr hangs a map of the world. It is not just any map. The oceans are painted cerulean blue, and on their waves travel ships of every nation. On land, the constructions of every culture are shown: cities and towns, castles and arches, mosques and cathedrals, tombs and towers. Moreover it is a map filled with words, the words written in Veneziano, the Italian dialect of Venice, with beautiful multicolored penmanship. The map was created in 1459 by a Venetian monk, who in doing so produced the most advanced description of the world yet seen in Europe–or, perhaps, anywhere else. It was, argues my guest Meredith Small, a key moment, when maps and cartography became a proto-science–something like we understand it today–rather than the expression of cultural and religious concepts, a view now very foreign to us. Meredith F. Small is a professor of anthropology at Cornell University. She has previously written Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization. Her latest book is Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World, and it is the focus of our conversation. For Further Investigation For other conversations related to this one, go at once to my conversation with Ioanna Iordanou about the Venetian Secret Service; and my conversation with Catherine Fletcher on the Italian Renaissance. As for mapmaking, this was touched on when Robyn Arianhrod and I talked about the versatile and curious Thomas Hariot. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana– the home of Fra Mauro's map Museo Galileo–Fra Mauro's World Map The National Library of Australia–"Mapping Our World: From Terra Incognita to Australia"–as video mentioned by Meredith in our conversation, with wonderful details and commentary San Michele in Isola–the site of Fra Mauro's monastery. While the Venetian congregation of Camaldolese was closed in the early twentieth century, the order of Camaldolese Hermits of Mount Corona continues.

It’s no secret that historians love to create periods and errors, and then physically argue about them. We love to talk about the long 18th century, the short 18th century, the long 19th century, the short 19th century, the short 20th century — and God knows what will say about the 21st, but we will have something to say about it, of that you can be sure. But often by breaking things into discrete periods such as antebellum, Civil War, and reconstruction, we miss commonalities between periods of time that amount, from the perspective of a medieval or classical historian or anyone focused on the longer duration, to just a few decades. Paul Escott’s new book The Civil War Political Tradition: Ten Portraits of Those That Formed It likewise refuses to divide things into neat and discrete boxes. Rather it profiles very different people who nevertheless all endorsed or rebelled against a political tradition that emphasized individual ambition, short-term thinking, compromise, and a pragmatic approach to problems—a tradition that did not, however, have the necessary power to resolve the crisis over slavery and race. Paul D. Escott is the Reynolds Professor of History Emeritus at Wake Forest University. He was last on the podcast in Episode 294. For Further Investigation Think of this as a background to last week's conversation about James Garfield; he's an example of a politician whose life and views were completely framed and formed by the Civil War. We've talked about John C. Calhoun with Bob Elder; and with Michael Burlingame about Abraham Lincoln. Note that Burlingame and Escott have different perspectives on Lincoln. There is a Papers of Jefferson Davis project, and they have a bibliography of works related to the best qualified American President ever. The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, which has an excellent web page on the reach of Uncle Tom's Cabin Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838-1905)