Historically Thinking

In August 1944, Fred Bailey jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, landing in a disused brickyard. Growing up he had been a sickly child with a heart condition, which led his family to move out of London for his health. But in 1941 at age 18 he had joined the British Army’s Royal Armored Corps, and served with the Desert Army. Bored after the fight for North Africa was over, he volunteered for special duties, and soon found himself in the Special Operations Executive, assigned to be a radio officer in a Jedburgh team–groups of three soldiers designed to jump into France and support the French resistance in conjunction with the Allied invasion. Fred Bailey died on January 29, 2023, at age 99, the last veteran of the Jedburgh teams living in Britain. When I read his obituary it seemed to me a very good time to have Ben Jones back on the podcast. Ben Jones is the State Historian of South Dakota and Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society, and he appeared in Episode 290 to talk about both of those jobs. But he is also a historian of the Second World War, and author of Eisenhower’s Guerrillas: The Jedburghs, the Maquis, and the Liberation of France, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation At the Imperial War Museum in London are records related to the Special Operations Executive, Section F, Operation Jedburgh. Among them are oral histories, including one with Fred Bailey. Recorded on December 11, 1990, it's wonderful. Interestingly Bailey emphatically says "we went in far too late...", and very crisply and incisively explains how the effects of the operation would have been better had they arrived two or three months before. You can also listen to his team leader, John Smallwood, talk about his experiences. Obituary of Fred Bailey Bernard Knox, "Premature Anti-Fascist" John K. Singlaub William Colby in Norway A Brian Lamb interview with Robert Merry about Joseph Alsop and (more importantly, for our conversation) Stewart Alsop

In October 1569, a captain of a French ship off the northern coast of Nova Scotia was summoned on deck. Alongside was a canoe, and in it were three Englishmen–David Ingram, Richard Browne, and Richard Twide. They claimed to be the survivors of a group of 100 men marooned on the Gulf coast of Mexico by an English slave-trading expedition. From that point, the three of them had walked north for 3,600 miles, making the journey in about a year. Thirteen years later, in August 1582, David Ingram was interviewed and his answers recorded by none other than Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s secretary of state and chief of intelligence. Shortly after the publication of his testimony, and ever after, Ingram has been regarded as one of the great liars of his era. He described such impossibilities as large cities, kings carried about in crystal chairs, American natives working with and using iron, and the appearance of penguins and elephants along the eastern seaboard of North America. Add to that the claim of his extraordinary journey, and little wonder that Samuel Purchas in 1625 observed of his account that “the reward of lying is not to be believed in truths.” But Dean Snow, who once believed like most people that Ingram was at best given to tall tales, has changed his mind about Ingram’s journey. In his new book The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in Native North America, Snow reconsiders the evidence and recreates the context of Ingram and his journey through an America that just fifty years after his long walk had faded away. Dean Snow is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Penn State. A past President of the Society for American Archaeology, he is particularly known for his work on archaeology of native North America with a long-standing focus on the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) people. For Further Investigation If you haven't already, get a great overview of David Ingram's era in Episode 303 when Lucy Wooding described some of the characteristics of Tudor England; and while we didn't talk about him in the conversation, Dean Snow has a lot to say about Thomas Harriot. If you listen to Episode 109, you can find out why Thomas Harriot is one of the most fascinating intellectuals that you have never heard of. When Dean Snow referred to Francis Drake escaping from the Battle of San Juan de Ulua in small ship, he was not getting. Drake's Judith was just 5o tons. By way of comparison the Pride of Baltimore II, a modern reconstruction of a early 19th century Baltimore sailing ship, is 97 tons. And that doesn't mean it's a particularly big ship... The Susquehannock town that Ingram visited was probably the "Schultz site"; you can find out more about the Susquehannocks' culture and landscape here. There are apparently a lot of crystal mines in upstate New York, enough for a great vacation.

In 1835, Oberlin College in Ohio determined that it would admit black students. A very few other colleges did at the time, but Oberlin was unique in that it chose to do so as an explicit matter of college policy. At Oberlin, and a few other places both before and after the Civil War, black and white students were allied first in the cause of emancipation, and then for civil rights. Yet following the end of Reconstruction, even once revolutionary campuses like Oberlin and Berea College in Kentucky began to have color lines drawn across them. As John Frederick Bell demonstrates in his new book, Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race, while blacks remained in the classroom at Oberlin and Berea, they were gradually discriminated against in every other aspect of college life. Given that these colleges had been established to shape not the mental so much as the moral community on its campus, this amounted to a counter revolution that overthrew the ideals upon which Oberlin and Berea College had been established. John Frederick Bell is Assistant Professor of History at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Degrees of Equality is his first book. Erratum: At 34:30, John Chapin was named as the fundraiser for New York Central College; John Bell says he should have said William Chaplin. (About whom you can read here on Professor Wikipedia.) For Further Investigation In the course of asking "why" I mentioned my conversation with Doug Egerton on the decline and fall of the Adams family; and I should also note an even older conversation with Doug about the history of Reconstruction The featured image is a late 19th century stereoscope of the campus of Oberlin College Berea College, according to Professor Wikipedia; and Adam Harris, "The Little College Where Tuition Is Free and Every Student Is Given a Job". The Atlantic (October 2018) Nat Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War: The True Story of the Community That Stood Up to Slavery–and Changed a Nation Forever Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America Ronald Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning ,and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876 Christi Smith, Reparation & Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education John Frederick Bell, “Early Black Collegians and the Fight for Full Inclusion” Black Perspectives (May 24, 2022)

“At the start of the twelfth century,” writes Rowan Dorin, “western European rulers almost never resorted to the collective expulsions of wrongdoers from their domains; ecclesiastical authorities evinced little concern about the Jewish communities living under Christian rule; and the church’s efforts to repress usury focused largely on clerics who engaged in money lending. By the late thirteenth century, expulsion had become a recurring tool of royal governance in both England and France; bishops across Latin Christendom were advocating for harsh restrictions on Jewish life; and Popes, theologians, and canon lawyers had recast usury as menacing the whole of society…” Why and how this dramatic change comes about is the focus of Dorin’s new book No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe. There is much in it which will overturn casual assumptions, and provoke new perspectives on the present–for if the use of expulsion by governments has a beginning, its ending has certainly not yet occurred. Rowan Dorin is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. No Return is his first book. (Below are his wonderful suggestions for further reading, complete with Rowan's own summaries.) For Further Investigation Robert Chazan, Refugees or Migrants: Pre-Modern Jewish Population Movement (2018)–"A wonderfully readable overview of Jewish migrations during antiquity and the Middle Ages that overturns many widespread assumptions about the dynamics of the Jewish diaspora." Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Expulsion as an Issue of World History,” Journal of World History 7, no. 2 (1996), 165-180–"A provocative and insightful article that outlines the emergence of mass expulsion as a historical phenomenon." R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (1987; 2nd ed. 2007)–"The book that launched a thousand dissertations - still essential reading for anyone interested in how medieval authorities came to see deviance as dangerous." Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages, trans. Patricia Ranum (1988)–"A brilliant account of the growing concern with usury and moneylending in medieval Europe, written by one of the twentieth century's greatest historians." Miri Rubin, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (2020)–"For anyone wondering what life was like for foreigners or Jews living in a medieval city, this collection of lectures is the place to start." Daniel Lord Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (2016)–"A wide-ranging exploration of debt and debt collection in the medieval Mediterranean world." Francesca Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (2019)–"The histories of Jews and Lombards continued to be intertwined even after the Middle Ages, as Trivellato shows in this masterful study of early modern commercial culture."

On a January night in 1897, a crowded Episcopal church in Philadelphia was the stage for a curious ceremony. In the Church of the Evangelists, located in south Society Hill just ten or so blocks from Independence Hall, a gaggle of clerics unveiled a life-size painting of Charles I, King of England and–so far as the clerics were concerned–saint and martyr. Then Williams Stevens Perry, the Episcopal Bishop of Iowa, ascended to the pulpit to explain to the assembled multitude how Charles I, far from being an absolutist and enemy of liberty, had laid the foundations of American political order. This striking scene begins Michael Connolly’s description of a curious moment in the history of Anglo-American political thought and sentiment, a resurgent Jacobite movement that championed the cause of the Stuart monarchs as a means of opposing the corruptions of the modern age. It begins his new book Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880-1910. Michael Connolly is Professor of History at Purdue University Northwest; this is his third time on the podcast. For Further Investigation Michael Connolly has previously talked on the podcast about American presidents, way back in Episode 2 (!!!) and then in Episode 60 We touched on the execution of Charles I in Episode 127, which focused on the escape of two of the men who signed his death warrant into the wilds of Connecticut

On 11 October 1537, Henry VIII finally received the son for which he had been waiting for decades. The day before the future Edward VI was born, friars, priests, livery companies, and the mayor and aldermen of London all processed through the city streets, praying for the Queen’s safe delivery. With his birth te deums were sung in London’s churches, bells were rung, fires were lit in every street, and volleys of gunfire resounded from the walls of the Tower of London It was a classic Tudor event, combining as it did fears of a failed royal secession; civic drama; at times contradictory religious impulses and emotions; thrusting military power; and seemingly endless classical images and allusions. Tudor England is not composed simply of the reigns of the Tudor monarchs but by “decades of war and poverty, disease and destruction…a subtle but strong transformation in the nature of government, and complex shifts within economy and society… an outpouring of words [and] an ideological revolution in religious belief…” With me to touch on some of the characteristics of this tumultuous era is Lucy Wooding, Langford fellow and and Tutor at Lincoln College in the University of Oxford, and author of Tudor England: A History. For Further Investigation Scott Newstok in Episode 186 on how Shakespeare benefited from an English grammar school education If you can't get enough of Henry VIII, then travel through time with Dominic Sandbrook in Episode 226 Stephen Berry in Episode 279 explains why he think constant deaths took their toll Robert St. George, ed., Material Life in American, 1600-1860, for all your atropopaeic needs.

On May 11th, 1745, the British Army went into battle against the army of France near the village of Fontenoy, in what is now Belgium. 15,000 British soldiers marched forward bearing not only their muskets, but the reputation that they had gained in the continental campaigns of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. But Marlborough had by then been dead for nearly 25 years, and the British Army had not adapted or altered. The result was a humiliating defeat, with 6,000 of those 15,000 British either killed or wounded. Another result was a long process of reform, the creation of new forms of knowledge, new approaches that had to be conceived, innovated upon, and then deployed “in the face of organizational tradition, institutional resistance and personal suspicion of change.” My guest Huw Davies describes this long process of reform, and the always speedier process of forgetting, in his new book The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War. It is not only a book about the British Army, the “Second 100 Years War”, the Enlightenment, and the long 18th century, but also one about creating new institutional cultures, change management, and the reform of complex organizations in difficult circumstances. Huw J. Davies is reader in early modern military history at King’s College, London. His previous books include Wellington’s Wars: The Making of a Military Genius and Spying for Wellington: British Military Intelligence in the Peninsular War. For Further Investigation Kutuzov and the military enlightenment in Russia was the subject of my conversation with Alex Mikaberidze Cathal Nolan described the enduring and nearly always futile quest for a decisive, war-determining victory in battle in Episode 79 The experience of an army learning, and then forgetting; and learning, and then forgetting, was also a focus of Episode 215, on the book The Other Face of Battle I discussed the Howe family with Julie Flavell when we talked about her book The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain's Wars for America

Welcome to Episode 300 of Historically Thinking! Design theorists popularized the idea of “tame problems” and “wicked problems.” “Tame problems” are answers to questions like how to get to Chicago, or how to increase the battery life of a cell phone. As in mathematics and chess have clarity in their aims and their solutions. “Wicked problems” have neither clarity in their aims or in their solutions. But what about wild problems? By wild problems, my guest Russ Roberts refers to the problems of who to marry, whether to have children, where to move, how to forge a life well-lived. These are problems that can’t be solved by calculation; in fact, argues Roberts, they are in parts of life that are “outside the reach of science or the scientific mind.” But wild problems are not wicked problems, which are very nearly impossible to solve. Wild problems are the most important struggles of each and every life. They are also, not too surprisingly given the title, the subject of Roberts' most recent book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Russ Roberts is the President of Shalem College in Jerusalem, and John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and host of the podcast EconTalk. This is his second appearance on Historically Thinking; he previously appeared in Episode 99, when we discussed his essay Gambling with Other People’s Money: How Perverse Incentives Caused the Financial Crisis, and what thinking through the 2008 financial crisis had taught him about intellectual humility. For Further Investigation To see if there is any editorial theme at work in this podcast, we suggest you listen to Episode 100 and to Episode 200, after finishing this one of course. Send notes! You might have noticed that Shalem College doesn't sound much like any college you know about in the United States. But you might also notice that it's beginning to seem that colleges in the United States increasingly resemble one another. Why might this be the case, and how we can do things differently, was the topic of an old conversation with David Staley in Episode 111: Alternative Universities, or, Thinking Way Outside the Box

What lover of American literature doesn’t remember these haunting lines: “Tell about the Midwest. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” Of course that was, as some of you quickly recognized, a deliberate mangling of a famous passage from William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom. It’s more than a little disconcerting, as I hope you noticed, to substitute Midwest for South. The South is haunted, and mysterious, and interesting. The Midwest…isn’t. But the charge that Shreve McCannon laid upon Quentin Compson can be laid upon any historian of any place in any era. Even the Midwest, as Jon Lauck would certainly agree. He’s the author of The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900. The last time he was on the podcast was way back in Episode 13, when we talked about his manifesto The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History. For Further Investigation We haven't had that many talks about the Midwest, or its people; but recently we talked about South Dakota with Jon Lauck's friend and neighbor Ben Jones. Much farther in the rear view mirror is a conversation with Jane Simonsen about Black Hawk, chief of the Saux and Meskwaki tribes, which involved the forced removal of those people from the lands in the Midwest. The Midwestern History Association The Midwestern History Association has a journal, the Middle West Review; and a podcast, Heartland History Was the Midwest the American Boeotia? There's a comparative history question for you. Episode 294: Black Suffrage The Town That Started the Civil War was mentioned in the course of the conversation; the book for children or teens I was thinking of is The Price of Freedom: How One Town Stood Up to Slavery One book to read about Oberlin, Ohio as a utopian community that failed is Elusive Utopia, which focuses on Oberlin after the Civil War I was trying to remember Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, which focuses on Villisca's Company F (which is the only company in the Iowa National Guard to build its own armory with funds raised from the local community) as well as other units from southwest Iowa that served in the battles for North Africa. Know Your Memes: "This is Fine"

The Victorians didn’t actually travel to the moon. But they were the first people, observes my guest Iwan Morus, to think that travel to the Moon was not only possible, but that “their science already possessed – or would soon possess – the means of getting there.” This confidence was based on the cascades of “new technologies, new ways of making knowledge and new visions about the future came together during the nineteenth century to create a new kind of world.” In an important sense, then, it was indeed the Victorians who took us to the moon. Iwan Rhys Morus is professor of history at Aberystwyth University in Aberystwyth, Wales. Among his recent books are Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (20127) and Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future (2019); his most recent book is How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon. For Further Investigation For a related conversations, see Episode 251 on the history of technology, from the early modern world to the present; and Episode 258 with Simon Heffer on the early Victorian era as the "pursuit of perfection" The Public Domain Review offers "A 19th Century Vision of the year 2000" An excellent website devoted to the Wright brothers and their achievement Collections at the Oxford History of Science Museum "On Verticality": a blog about "the innate human need to leave the surface of the earth"

If the Parthian Empire is known at all, it’s by students of Roman history who see it pop up from time to time, before disappearing once again. Marcus Licinius Crassus, a member of the first triumvirate– consisting of himself, Pompey, and Julius Caesar– died in battle against the Parthians. At the moment of his assasination, Caesar was preparing for a campaign against Parthia; and Mark Anthony, of the second triumvirate, was defeated by the Parthians when he attempted to realize Caesar’s dream. The Emperor Trajan some 150 years later finally achieved victories against Parthia, making his way as far as the shore of the Persian Gulf. But who were the Parthians, on their own terms, not just as antagonists of the Romans? Where did they come from? How did they come to power? What was the extent of their Empire? And how were they integrated with the world around them, apart from their seemingly continual warfare with the ever-growing Roman Empire? With me to answer these questions is Nicholas Overtoom, Assistant Professor of History at Washington State University, and author of Reign of Arrows: The Rise of the Parthian Empire in the Hellenistic Middle East. For Further Investigation Think of this as the second in a series of conversations on the powers and principalities that occupied the territory of Iran. The first of these was with Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, about the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Some time in the next six months we'll get to the Sassanids, who overthrew the Parthians. For more on the importance of nomads, see my conversation with Pamela Crossley in Episode 185; her book on the importance of nomadic thought and culture for all of Eurasia is Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World.

I can't introduce Cathal Nolan's book Mercy: Humanity in War any better than he does himself, with these words: This is not a book about war. It is about mercy and humanity… Mercy happens in a microsecond, wrapped inside a surprise moment of mortal danger; it restrains baser instinct and reminds us about higher things. This book shows that mercy limits cruelty in ways laws and honor codes seldom do, because mercy is the highest personal and moral quality any of us achieves. It is above all other virtues, even justice and courage. It is superior to bravery, especially in a soldier. It is the greatest gift we give to those we meet in civilian life who are suffering and for whom it is in our power to aid or harm. Greater still when offered to the defenseless in war. Mercy is the grace that happens between those who have a fleeting superiority of physical power and those who cannot save or protect themselves. It is greater than a gift to the helpless and the innocent, for as Shakespeare wrote, it elevates the merciful, too. Cathal J. Nolan is Director of the International History Institute at the Pardee School of Global Studies and Professor of History at Boston University. His most recent book was The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost, which we discussed in Episode 79.

When the Massachusetts Historical Society was founded in 1791, its august members probably did not anticipate that one day its archives would contain not only family papers, but family dresses–as well as waistcoats, wigs, and at least two scarlet cloaks worn by fashionable men in the late eighteenth century. Kimberley Alexander (who is Director of Museum Studies and Lecturer at the University of New Hampshire) was last heard on the podcast talking about shoes, but more recently curated a 2018 exhibition "Fashioning the New England Family." Our conversation is about the book that eventually accompanied that exhibition, also titled Fashioning the New England Family. In it, with the help of an able supporting cast, Alexander describes the history of New England in what some New Englanders wore over three centuries, from the first English settlement, to the beginning of the twentieth century. For Further Investigation A New York Times article on cochineal Priscilla Mullins and John Alden A swatch from the dress of Priscilla Mullins Alden's dress The tracing of a quilted petticoat pattern from the Leverett family John Leverett's buff coat Two waistcoats: one from the wardrobe of Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor William Tailer (d. 1732), and a truly incredible one worn by Andrew Oliver, Jr. (1731-1799) Henry Bromfield's wig; and a short history of the rise and fall of the wig Two crimson cloaks: one belonging to Peter Oliver (1713-1791) and another belonging to Henry Bromfield (1727-1820), described as "the last gentleman in Boston to cling to old fashioned styles of the 18th century" Abigail Adams, painted by Gilbert Stuart, an exemplar of how to modulate the latest French fashion in a way that suits you; and a more billowing style, from c. 1830

On April 11, 1865, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd gathered outside the White House. He spoke not of recent victories, or those to come, but to the shape of the peace that would follow. Now that the Thirteenth Amendment had been passed by Congress, he urged that it be ratified. Moreover, it seemed to him, Lincoln said, that it was necessary for “the colored man” to have the right to vote. “I myself,” Lincoln told the crowd, “would prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” That might now seem like a timid suggestion, but not to one man then standing in the listening crowd. When John Wilkes Booth heard Lincoln’s words, he turned to a companion and vowed “That’s the last speech he will ever make!” It was not the fall of Richmond, the flight of the Confederate government, or the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s army that finally made Booth decide to act, but the threat of black suffrage. With me to discuss the cause of black suffrage in the weeks, months, and years following Lincoln’s death is Paul D. Escott, Reynolds Professor of History Emeritus at Wake Forest University. He is the author of numerous books, including Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives; The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North; and most recently Black Suffrage: Lincoln’s Last Goal. For Further Investigation Many previous conversations on this podcast are related to this one. For an overview of Reconstruction, see my conversation with Douglas Egerton in Episode 67; how Black Americans created American citizenship was the focus of a conversation with Christopher Bonner in Episode 167; and most recently my conversation with Clayton Butler discussed Unionism as an ideology, and in part how it explains part of the mentality of Andrew Johnson. For a different take on Lincoln than that held by Paul Escott, see my conversation with Michael Burlingame in Episode 242; Burlingame would argue that Lincoln was never interested in colonization prior to the war, and never serious about colonization during the war.

At the end of the 19th century, Amsterdam was home to nearly seventy diamond factories, in which were 7,500 steam-powered polishing mills. The workers who cut and polished the diamonds, brought there from the mines of South Africa, were not all Jewish–but many of them were. Indeed, in the late 1890s Jews were about 10% of the population of Amsterdam, and half of them were economically reliant on what the Dutch called simply “the profession”. The Jewish community in Amsterdam were not the only Jews who worked with diamonds. In her new book A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting, Saskia Snyder traces the involvement of Jews not only in Amsterdam factories, but in the fields of South Africa, in London, and in the growing consumer market of the United States during the late 19th century. She also examines how the involvement of Jews with diamonds became a feature of anti-semitism. Saskia Coenen Snyder is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, where she is also a core faculty member of the Jewish Studies Program. For Further Investigation Numerous conversations on this podcast tie in with something mentioned in the course of this conversation. Way, way back in the beginning, when this podcast was newly hatched, is Episode 5: Diamonds are a Problem, which focused on the mining of diamonds in South Africa, and elsewhere in Southern Africa. In Episode 19, I talked with historian Vicki Howard about small local department stores in the United States, which were often founded and managed by immigrants like Jews and Italians. Some of the themes of the "democratization of luxury" were touched on along with many other things in Episode 91: Wanamaker's Temple, which was about the very, very large department store created by John Wanamaker. And most recently we talked about postcards and the importance of mail delivery with Lydia Pyne in Episode 249: Postcards from the Past.

It is perhaps the greatest scandal and sea-story of the first half of 19th Century America that nearly everyone has forgotten. It led to a court martial, endless headlines, a fistfight in a meeting of the President’s cabinet, and quite possibly to the foundation of the United States Naval Academy. And given that nearly everyone who went to see in the early American republic seemed to know one another, there was one degree of separation between this story and James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, and future Confederate naval captain Raphael Semmes. It was nothing less than an attempted mutiny aboard the USS Somers in November 1842, led by–of all the people in the United States of America—the son of the United States Secretary of War who supposedly wanted to become a pirate. With me to discuss this incredible story is James Delgado, historian and underwater archaeologist, whose new book is The Curse of the Somers: The Secret History Behind the US Navy’s Most Infamous Mutiny For Further Investigation James Fenimore Cooper: proud of his four years a merchant sailor and then a midshipman in the United States Navy, Cooper's fourth novel was The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea, probably the first American nautical novel. Richard Henry Dana, Jr.: now curiously forgotten, Dana was a Harvard dropout who enrolled as a merchant seaman, sailed to California and back, wrote about it in a bestseller titled Two Years Before the Mast, and then went on to become a prominent lawyer. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry: young brother of naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry, "Old Bruin" became one of the most prominent officers of the US Navy between 1814 and 1861, most famously leading the expedition that forced Japan open to trade and international interaction Raphael Semmes: once commander of the USS Somers, he became an officer in the Confederate Navy, and most famously commanded the CSS Alabama Herman Melville: elements of the Somers mutiny can be found in both White Jacket and Billy Budd

In late November, 1864, David R. Snelling visited his uncle, who then lived in Baldwin County near Milledgeville, Georgia. As a boy, he had worked in his uncle’s fields alongside those his uncle enslaved. Now Snelling returned home as a Lieutenant in the Army of the United States, commanding Company I of the First Alabama Cavalry–though detached on temporary duty as commander of the headquarters escort for General William Tecumseh Sherman. The homecoming was not a happy one, at least for Snelling’s uncle. The troopers who accompanied Snelling took what provisions they could find, and then at Snelling’s direction burned down the family’s cotton gin. Snelling and the First Alabama were some of the very small percentage of Unionists who persisted in the Deep South following secession. Yet Clayton Butler argues that their importance in the minds of both the Union and the Confederacy “helps to shed light on some of the most crucial issues of the entire era.” He examines these Unionists, and those illuminated issues, in his new book True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction. For Further Investigation The Andrew Johnson National Historic Site, in Greeneville, Tennessee An informative website constructed by historical reenactors who interpret the First Alabama Cavalry (USV) The image is of a Union scout in Louisiana, during the Red River campaign of 1864. For more, ""Union Scouts in Louisiana," artist's impression, Harper's Weekly, May 1864, detail," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College For an introduction to Reconstruction, see the conversation in Episode 67 with Douglas Egerton. For a view of the Civil War that dovetails nicely with this conversation, see Episode 132, a conversation with historian Elizabeth Varon.

My guest today is Dr. Ben Jones, Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society and the South Dakota State Historian. Ben Jones served for 23 years in the United States Air Force, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. During his service he taught at the Air Force Academy. Subsequently he was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at South Dakota State University from 2013 to 2019, and Secretary of Education of South Dakota from January 2019 to December 2020. He is now the 9th director in the 120-year history of the South Dakota State Historical Society. In 2016, he published Eisenhower's Guerrillas: The Jedburghs, the Maquis, and the Liberation of France. Currently he is working on a history of South Dakota and hosts a bi-monthly podcast, History 605. For Further Investigation Take a look at the Cultural Heritage Center of the South Dakota State Historical Society Jon Lauck was mentioned; we talked way, way, way back in Episode 13 about the history of the Midwest. It's not South Dakota related, but for an interesting insight into Native American history, see Episode 58: What Black Hawk Wore "All Guns Fired At One Time": Native Voices of Wounded Knee, one of the excellent productions of the publishing arm of the South Dakota State Historical Society

For over a generation the history of the American West has been described by scholars as one of violence, including genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and settler colonialism. While it replaced an older history which spoke of “winning the West” and the triumph of civilization, curiously enough both the old and the now aging histories of the west focused on violence. After all, in the popular imagination, every Western town hosted a gunfight in its one street on a nearly daily basis. But what if amidst the violence there were also moments of concord and overcoming difference? What if these moments of concord played out in more or less the same place and time as moments of violence? This is the argument of Stephen Aron in his new book Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West, which investigates moments where unexpectedly peaceful relationships were built in the American West. Stephen Aron is Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA, and President of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. (The painting by Thomas Cole, done in 1826, is titled "Daniel Boone Sitting at the Door of His Cabin on the Great Osage Lake") For Further Investigation It was mentioned in the conversation, so here is Episode 149: Edges are Interesting, or, A History of Eastern Europe Two other podcasts very much connected to our brief discussion of Dodge City is Episode 101: Yippie-Ki-Yi-Yay and Episode 131: Red Meat Republic, or, the American Beef Economy of the Late 19th Century The book that began the new history of the American west was Patricia Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West Also mentioned in the podcast was John Mack Farragher, who has written several books on these themes including a biography of Daniel Boone; Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Lost Angeles; and most recently California: An American History

In 1780, captured American naval officer Joshua Barney escaped from prison in Plymouth, made his way to London, and with the help of some English sympathizers to the American Revolution was able to take the ferry to Ostend, the principal port of the Austrian Netherlands. During his journey he struck up an acquaintance with an Italian noblewoman after curing her seasickness. Grateful, she insisted that he accompany her by carriage to Brussels, where in a “certain hotel” a porter ushered the two of them into the presence of the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II of Austria. As Barney remembered it decades later using the third person, he was surrounded by “big whiskered Germans and spruce Italians who eyed him with a stare of surprise equal to his own.” Barney’s was far from the only interaction between American rebels, and the Austro-Hungarian empire, its rulers, or its inhabitants. Take, for example, the proud parents who in 1778 at the baptismal font of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the heart of Vienna had their infant son christened Benjamin Silas Arthur Schuster, his first three names those of the three American commissioners then in Paris–Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee. This is one of numerous anecdotes and instances that Jonathan Singerton deploys in his new book The American Revolution and the Hapsburg Monarchy, to support the somewhat surprising argument that “the American Revolution had a deep-rooted impact in the Habsburg lands which ultimately lasted through to the nineteenth century.” Jonathan Singerton is currently a lecturer and research associate at the University of Innsbruck; this is his first book. For Further Investigation For previous conversations related to this topic, you might consider Episode 149: Edges are Interesting, or, a History of Eastern Europe (in which I propose the radical and unprovable hypothesis that the Habsburg Empire was doomed because Joseph II hated his Latin tutor); and my conversation with Glenda Sluga in Episode 257 on the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Jonathan Singerton recommends the website Die Welt der Hapsburger (in English, if necessary) when you want "to get into the Habsburg's more" Jonathan says that, for more reading, Pieter M. Judson's The Habsburg Empire: A New History "is essential, as is" Martyn Rady's The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (as it's titled by in the States)

In 1776 a massive British fleet of more than 400 ships carrying tens of thousands of soldiers arrived outside New York Harbor. Many of these soldiers were German, hired from their princes by the British government. Americans then and now have called them Hessians. For the next seven years, these German soldiers marched, fought, and suffered seemingly everywhere in eastern North America, from the walls of Quebec City to the sandy beaches of Pensacola Bay. When the British army left, many Germans were left behind–both the living, deserters who had found new lives or others who settled with Loyalists in Canada, and the dead. Just this summer, on the battlefield of Fort Mercer, across from Philadelphia, an archaeological dig discovered a grave with the remains of thirteen German soldiers–and that just a fraction of the Germans who died in that place on October 22nd, 1777. With me to describe the Hessians and their American odyssey is Friederike Baer, Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, Abington College, and author of the new book Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War. For Further Investigation Friederike writes, "for those interested in researching their Hessian ancestors, try this database of records at Hessian State Archives, Marburg, Germany and the Johannes Schwalm Historical Association (which also publishes an annual journal) A digitized collection of maps related to the Revolutionary war in the Hessian State Archives Marburg, Germany (collections 28 and 29) "A classic to read is" Edward J. Lowell, The Hessians and the other Auxiliaries of Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. Port Washington, 1965; orig. publ. 1884. "A study with focus on troops from Hessen-Kassel is" Rodney Atwood, The Hessians: Mercenaries from Hessen-Kassel in the American Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. "On German prisoners of war see" Daniel Krebs, A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War during the American Revolution. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013 and Kenneth Miller, Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. "Stephen Conway has published extensively about Britain’s use of foreign troops more broadly." Read Stephen Conway. Britannia’s Auxiliaries: Continental Europeans and the British Empire, 1740-1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. See also Mark Wishon, German Forces in the British Army: Interactions and Perceptions, 1742-1815. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. And here's a list of particularly informative published primary records: Marvin L. Brown and Marta Huth. Baroness von Riedesel and the American Revolution: Journal and Correspondence of a Tour of Duty, 1776-1783. University of North Carolina Press, 1965. Helga Doblin, ed. An Eyewitness Account of the American Revolution and New England Life: The Journal of J.F. Wasmus, German Company Surgeon, 1776-1783. New York: Greenwood, 1990. Helga Doblin and Mary C. Lynn, eds. The American Revolution, Garrison Life in French Canada and New York: Journal of an Officer in the Prinz Friedrich Regiment, 1776-1783. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. Helga Doblin and Mary C. Lynn, eds. The Specht Journal: A Military Journal of the Burgoyne Campaign. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. Charlotte S. J. Epping, ed. Journal of Du Roi the Elder, Lieutenant and Adjutant, in the Service of the Duke of Brunswick, 1776-1778. Americana Germanica 15. [Philadelphia]: University of Pennsylvania, 1911. Bernhard A. Uhlendorf, ed. Revolution in America: Confidential Letters and Journals 1776 -1784 of Adjutant General Major Baurmeister of the Hessian Forces. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957.

The history of the ancient Near East can seem like staring down a deep, deep well of time, so deep that it gives one vertigo. It stretches back to 3,500 BC: that is, I’ll do the math for you, 5,522 years ago. In thinking about its 3,000 years of history, one begins to think not in terms of years, but in decades and centuries. Yet there were continuities amidst change, not simply within those three-plus millennia, but between then and now. For surely it would be impossible to imagine what 2022 would be like without writing, families, getting right with higher powers, kings and rulers, laws and litigation, cities and watering the garden. And all of those things can be found in the Ancient Near East With me to give a I hour overview of 3,500 years is Amanda H. Podany. She is Professor Emeritus of History at California State Polytechnic University, and author most recently of Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East. By the way, if you were listening to the conversation, you'll recognize our featured image: it's Amanda's drawing of the clay impressions of the feet one of the children sold into slavery, found in the Museum of Aleppo–which has by now experienced its own much more contemporary tragedies. For Further Investigation Amanda writes: "since we talked about brick-makers, an interesting image is of a clay brick with a cuneiform inscription. And this impression of a cylinder seal shows weaving women working at a loom..." "There are just so many books and articles and websites that might be interesting for listeners. Here's a list I wrote recently for Shepherd.com" "Another option is this website created by the British Museum about ancient Mesopotamia, though apparently it will only be available until December, after which it will be retired." Three previous podcasts have gone back to about 1000 BC, which now seems a trivial, juvenile sort of date. They were with Dimitri Nakassis, who discussed Mycenaean Greece and his excavations of the site at Pylos in Episode 33; Eric Cline on the First Dark Ages in Episode 62 (though admittedly he argued that the term "dark ages" was a base slander); and Joe Manning laid out his arguments about the ancient Mediterranean economies prior to the rise of Rome in Episode 164.

At her 80th birthday party Agatha Christie described a conversation she had once overheard about herself. She had been on a train, and there listened to two ladies talking about her, copies of her latest mystery perched on both their knees. “I hear,” said one, “that she drinks like a fish.” Christie’s latest biographer Lucy Worsley begins her new book with that anecdote because for her it so nicely captures at least three things about the author. First, that she told the story on her 80th birthday shows her longevity. Second, that both of the ladies had a copy of her latest book—Christie was a bestselling author of truly titanic sales records. Third, that Christie was a close observer of life around her, always ready to transmute it into art. And fourth, that in the story Agatha Christie was part of the background, so ordinary as to not excite any interest from anyone—yet, all the while, being quite extraordinary. As she describes it, by day, Lucy Worsley is Joint Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces—and by night she enters peoples homes by means of documentary films, and best-selling books–the latest of which is titled, in the United States at least, Agatha Christie: An Elusive Women. For Further Investigation Lucy Worsley has previously written about another great English author, Jane Austen, in her Jane Austen at Home: A Biography. She has also previously written The Art of English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock Agatha Christie was a surfer, maybe one of the first Britons to learn to stand upright on a board. No, really, it's true. Lord Flashheart; and Archie Christie. I rest my case, m'lud. Thought Archie does need a bigger mustache, to be quite honest.

If we know Mikhail Ilarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov, we know him as Tolstoy imagined him, as an old man, before Austerlitz, “with his uniform unbuttoned so that his fat neck bulged over his collar if escaping… in a low chair with his podgy old hands resting symmetrically on its arms'' who begins to snore loudly and rhythmically as his generals plan the battle. Why? Because he alone understands the hand of providence, or the finger of fate; because he alone “recognizes that there are forces in the universe that are ‘stronger and more important than his own will’.” Tolstoy’s Kutuzov therefore decides not to decide; diminishes himself in order to triumph; realizes that he is an observer rather than pretending to be an actor. But who was Kutuzov really? And how can we know him? Those are the questions at the heart of Alexander Mikaberidze’s new biography Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace. It is as concerned with Russia in the late eighteenth century, and with what was subsequently made of Kutuzov’s legacy–to the very moment we record this conversation–as he is in Kutuzov’s life story. Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of European History at the Louisiana State University at Shreveport, where he is also Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair for the Curatorship of the James Smith Noel Collection. This is his fourth appearance on Historically Thinking. For Further Investigation Alex Mikaberidize talked about the Napoleonic Wars as a world war in Episode 14, and then again in Episode 155, after the publication of his book The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (which won the 2020 Gilder-Lehrman Military History Prize) He also appeared in Episode 241: Doing the Research Brian Cox seems pretty well-cast as Kutuzov; but if you listened to the podcast closely, you'll see that the makeup people made an error

For centuries the Kingdom of England faced northeast, across the northern seas towards Scandinavia. Indeed, under King Canute, England was part of Scandinavia. But with the Norman invasion–even though the Normans were eponymously “North-men”–that changed dramatically. Within a few decades, the French and English royal trees began to intertwine, to graft branches to one another, to make love and war, sometimes at one and the same time. Catherine Hanley's new book Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100-1300 with these words: This is a book about people. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the personal could influence the political to a great extent, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in the relationship between the ruling houses of France and England, whose members waged war, made peace and intermarried – sometimes almost simultaneously – in a complex web of relationships. These people, these kings and queens, siblings, children and cousins, held positions determined by birth; positions that often involved playing a role on the national and international stage from a very young age. Their life stories, their formative experiences and their interpersonal relationships shaped the context of decisions and actions that had the potential to affect the lives and livelihoods of millions. Catherine Hanley was last on the podcast in Episode 122, discussing the Empress Matilda, the subject of her previous book Matilda: Empress, Queen, and Warrior. She was born in Australia, lives in Somerset in the west of England, and when watching cricket supports “Somerset, Australia, and Tasmania—in that order.” For Further Investigation Two books by Catherine who are set within the period she chronicles in Two Houses, Two Kingdoms, are the aforementioned Matilda: Empress, Queen, and Warrior and Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England, For just a taste of what comes after the end of Catherine's book, that whole "Hundred Years War" business, you might listen to Episode 66: A People's History of the Hundred Years War An introduction to medieval France, from the Metropolitan Museum Medieval English timeline at the British Library The Magna Carta Project, which Catherines says "has some good stuff about the early thirteenth century, King John, and Louis’s invasion" Relevant primary sources for England and for France at the invaluable Internet Sourcebook

For thousands of years humans have in war and peace attempted to poison one another—or, perhaps for variety, burn each other to death. We might think of poison gas, biological weapons, or the use of unwitting victims to spread epidemics as being modern innovations, but such horrors have been employed since the earliest recorded history. Moreover, for nearly that entire time humans have debated the morality of employing those weapons. My guest Adrienne Mayor describes this history in Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Unconventional Warfare in the Ancient World, now being issued in a revised and updated edition by Princeton University Press, along with her collection of essays entitled Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws. As she does in all of her books, in both of these she travels through that complicated landscape where the borders of history, science, archaeology, anthropology, and popular knowledge all adjoin each other, and seeks there the realities and insights embedded in myth, legend, and folklore. Adrienne Mayor’s other books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, a finalist for the National Book Award. She was previously on the podcast in Episode 107 discussing her book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology.

In 1815, John Adams wrote to a correspondent of the importance, of all things, of the Boston Committee of Correspondence in the 1760s: …I never belonged to any of these Committees and have never Seen one of their Letters Sent or received... But in my Opinion the History of the United States never can be written, till they are discovered. What an Engine! France imitated it, and produced a Revolution. England and Scotland was upon the Point of imitating it, in order to produce another Revolution and all Europe was inclined to imitate it for the Same Revolutionary Purposes. The History of the World for the last thirty Years is a Sufficient Commentary upon it. That History ought to convince all Mankind that Committees of Secret Correspondence are dangerous Machines. That they are Causticks and Inscision Knives, to which Recourse Should never be had but in the last Extremities of Life; in the last question between Life and Death. My guest Micah Alpaugh believes that John Adams was, despite his typical gift for epistolary hyperbole, absolutely and interestingly correct. And Alpaugh makes that argument in his new book Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Micah Alpaugh is Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri; this is his second book. For Further Investigation The English cartoonist James Gillray, who has claim to be the first great political cartoonist, made the London Corresponding Society a frequent target of his artistic abuse. The "London Corresponding Society, Alarm'd" imagined the members of the corresponding societies as feral subhumans, alarmed at the charges made against Tom Paine for the second part of his Rights of Man. On the other hand "Copenhagen House" was an almost sympathetic depiction of a mass-meeting of corresponding societies–with plenty of dissenters and abolitionists among them. A related conversation, covering the curious connections between revolutions in Europe and the Americas, was in Episode 176: Men on Horseback, or, What Charisma Has to Do With It. And for a deep dive into the French Revolution, see the conversation with Jeremy Popkin in Episode 144: The French Revolution; and Episode 234: The Fall of Robespierre

Well, this is something new. After 279 podcasts, someone is asking Al Zambone questions about the podcast. Carol Adrienne, recently heard talking on Episode 278 about her book Healing a Divided Nation: How the Civil War Revolutionized Western Medicine insisted that it was a really good idea that she be allowed to record a podcast about this podcast. So she did. It turns out to be a pretty good introduction to the podcast, if you're new to the podcast, as many references are made to past episodes. Even if you've listened to most of those 279 episodes, you'll still learn something as Zambone explains the methods and perspectives that enables him to put together the podcast. For Further Investigation Here's the Edmund Morgan quote which still blurbs Charles Royster's book: "[The book] is social history, intellectual history, institutional history, political history, and not any single one of them, which is to say that it is good history." Boundary crossers Elisabeth Leake and Jamie Belich Three historians writing one big book in many volumes: Dominic Sandbrook, Tom Holland, and Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. Multi-lingual historians of the medieval and early-modern Mediterranean World: Hussein Fancy, Daniel Hershenzohn, Hannah Barker Thomas Gieryn discuss "truth spots" in Episode 106 Based on the advice of Professor Wikipedia, Zambone is forced to withdraw his remarks about Jerusalem Syndrome, despite this Culture Trip essay; or Paris Syndrome. Statistically. given the number of visitors to Jerusalem or Paris, it seems insignificant.

Stephen Berry begins his new book Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It with these two paragraphs: This is a book about death and data or, more specifically, about the dead as data. The dead and the formerly living are not the same. The formerly living built the Parthenon and the Brooklyn Bridge…[they] also made brutal wars and ghastly decisions we are still struggling to live down. Revered or reviled, however, the formerly living have always counted because we still talk about them. Loved or hated, they built our world. This is a book about a group that did not count for a very long time—the actual dead—the great ghostly horde who made their mark not in their living but in their collective dying, producing patterns of mortality that proved critical to the systematization of public health, casualty reporting, and human rights… In Berry's telling, one of the greatest episodes in the history of humanity is the doubling of life expectancy between 1850 and 1950. But for him this is not a story simply of medical progress. It begins with the seemingly simple, mundane, and boring creation of death registration, beginning with the 1850 census when for the first time causes of death were recorded. This, Berry argues, was the foundation of the public health profession, and of the progress that followed. Without knowing a thing, without naming a thing, progress could not be made. Stephen Berry is a "historian of mortality", which craft he practices at the University of Georgia, where he is Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era. He has authored or edited six books, including House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War, and Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges.

When Confederate cannons fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, the United States Army was comprised of only 16,000 soldiers. Its medical staff was numbered just 113 doctors. And here’s another fun fact: taking into account all of the doctors then practicing in the United States, possibly as few as 300 doctors in the entire United States had witnessed surgery, or seen a gunshot wound. Over the next four years all of those numbers would dramatically increase. To meet the unprecedented casualties of the American Civil War, American medicine had to make unprecedented changes. As my guest Carole Adrienne describes in her new book Healing a Divided Nation: How the American Civil War Revolutionized Western Medicine, these changes are reflected “in every ambulance, every vaccination, every woman who holds a paying job, and in every Black university graduate.” Carole Adrienne received her B.F.A. from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. She has organized an archive for Old St. Joseph’s National Shrine, twice chaired “Archives Week” in Philadelphia and has served on advisory panels for the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historic Research Center, The Mutter Museum’s “Civil War Medicine” exhibit and its “Spit Spreads Death: The 1918 Flu Epidemic” exhibit. She is working on a documentary film series on Civil War medicine and lives in Philadelphia, PA. For Further Investigation You might think of this conversation as a prequel to Episode 252: The Great War and Modern Medicine; the Civil War changed the culture of American medicine, and possibly accelerated the postwar changes in the field. The Great War–the First World War–changed nearly everything about medicine everywhere. For another related discussion, this time on rabies and medicine in the late 19th century United States, see Episode 133: Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers. The United States Sanitary Commission Frederick Olmstead and the United States Sanitary Commission Clara Barton National Historic Site Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Museum A video introduction to Thomas Eakins' Portrait of Dr. Samuel Gross (The Gross Clinic) Dorothea Dix, Social Reformer, Superintendent of Nurses Cornelia Hancock

On March 15, 1938, Adolf Hitler addressed 250,000 Austrians in Vienna, announcing the end of the Austrian state. Close by on that same day, Nazis entered the apartment of Dr. Sigmund Freud and his family. They were literally bought off when first his wife Martha offered them cash, and then daughter Anna Freud opened a safe and gave them the equivalent of $840. At this point “the stern figure of Sigmund Freud himself suddenly appeared,” writes my guest Andrew Nagorski, “glaring at the intruders without saying anything…They addressed him as Herr Professor, and backed out of the apartment... After they left, Freud inquired how much money they had seized... He wryly remarked, 'I have never taken so much for a single visit'." It seems astonishing that the author of Civilization and Its Discontents, who seemed to have so few illusions about mankind and its “aggressive cruelty”, should have been there to witness the Anschluss. It’s even more astonishing that even after the Anschluss he continued to insist that his life was safe, and that it was possible to “ride out the storm.” But a circle of friends and disciples not only persuaded Freud to leave, but then arranged his emigration to England, where he lived he last sixteen months of his life. Andrew Nagorski was bureau chief for Newsweek in Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw, and Berlin. Author of seven books, his latest book is Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation One of Nagorksi's previous books is Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power. We discussed a part of that dystopian country's terrain, and how it came into being with horrifying speed, in a conversation with Peter Fritzsche that you can find in Episode 244: Hitler's First One Hundred Days. The general recommendation for the first place to read Freud are the lectures he gave at Clark University in 1909, published as Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Given the topic of Nagorski's book, you might also want to have a look at Civilization and Its Discontents The Sigmund Freud Archives in the Library of Congress; and a brief history of the collection Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna Freud Museum, London

New college students usually get lots of advice. “Go to office hours.” “Ask good questions.” “Declare a major as soon as you can.” “Take some time to figure out who you are.” “Get some research experience.” “Get good internships with real-life experience.” “Sit in the front row.” “Avoid procrastination.” Some of this advice is obvious, some of it is contradictory, and some of it is bad.. It almost never explains why, or even how. So the new college student is apt to ignore all of it. In their new book The Secret Syllabus: A Guide to the Unwritten Rules of College Success, Jay Phelan and Terry Burnham begin at the most foundational level, and work upwards. The result is probably the best book that you could give to a first-year college student–or a second-year college student. Or maybe even a senior who’s finally getting it together. For Further Investigation At the end of the conversation, I said that students should be given this book before going to college, while their parents should read Chambliss and Takacs, How College Works. I stand by that recommendation, and to see why you can listen to my conversation in Episode 56, in which I talk to Dan Chambliss. There are a lot of other conversations about higher ed on the podcast, and here they all are gathered under the title "Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed." Among them are some of the best conversations I've had on the podcast.

The pandemic of 1346–the Black Death–in some areas of Europe killed as much as 50% of the population. But this first outbreak, while the worst, was not the last. For three centuries it persisted, with at least 30 further outbreaks. Such numbers indicated that the Black Death resulted in unimaginable suffering and tragedy from which no-one was untouched. But the Black Death also brought about a cultural and economic renewal. Labor scarcity encouraged the development of new or improved technologies, like wind power, water power, and gunpowder. A growth in disposable incomes led to an increase in consumption of silks, sugars, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. It was not despite the Black Death that Europe flourished, argues my guest James Belich, but because of the Black Death. James Belich is the Beit Professor of of Imperial and Commonwealth History at the University of Oxford, and cofounder of the Oxford Centre for Global History. His books include a two-volume history of New Zealand, but his most recent book is The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe, which is the focus of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Belich's two-volume history of New Zealand is comprised of Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century and Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders, 1880-2000 Most recently Belich wrote Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, which as he mentioned in the conversation raised many questions in his head that required him to write The World the Plague Made We've previously talked about some of the more immediate consequences of the Black Death with Mark Bailey in Episode 207: After the Black Death. Another conversation which discussed disease and history and much more besides, from a very wide perspective indeed, was with Philip Jenkins in Episode 209: Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith

In December 24, 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. They entered a country already engaged in a civil war. Figuratively, Afghans had been engaged in a war for nearly 100 years over their identity and direction. Dissension had finally led to political violence in 1978, as Afghans sought to impose upon one another their preferred model of statehood. What happened in Afghanistan, argues Elisabeth Leake, was never determined solely by the rules of the Cold War, or the desires of policymakers in Moscow and Washington. It was the crucible of regional desires, and above all the crucible of Afghan desires, plans, and dreams. “This failure of Afghan politics,” she writes, “was not preordained and was a messy, protracted affair.” Elisabeth Leake has been Associate Professor of International History at the University of Leeds, and as of August 1 is the Lee E. Dirks Chair in Diplomatic History at Tufts University. Previously the author of The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936-65, her latest book is Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan.

The Dictator and His Daughter (c. 1934) On the morning of November 10, 1918, the overnight train from Berlin arrived in Warsaw station. One of its passengers was Josef Pilsudski. For twenty-six years he had been striving for the liberation of Poland from the Russian Empire, and its re-creation as an independent state and culture. Now, at the end of that train journey, he not only found himself at long last in a free Poland but surrounded by ever-growing crowds that saw him as the leader of the new nation. Pilsudski did become the leader and defender of that nation, and in 1922 ceded dictatorial powers to democratically elected representatives. Yet just four years later this avowed champion of democracy, pluralism, and federalism seized power in a coup, and ruled Poland as a dictator to his death in 1935. He imprisoned his enemies, suppressed the press, ignored the legislature, and turned old friends against him. ”So much did his style of rule change,” writes my guest Joshua Zimmerman, “that he is often portrayed as if he were two entirely different men…Poland’s greatest champion for freedom and independence…abandoned the principle of democracy as freedom bound by the rule of law.” Joshua Zimmerman is is Eli and Diana Zborowski Chair in Holocaust Studies and East European Jewish History and Professor of History at Yeshiva University. Two of his previous books include The Polish Underground and the Jews: 1939-1945, and Poles, Jews and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892-1914. Given that, it was as close to inevitable as a historian could allow that his most recent book would be Josef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland. For Further Investigation Joshua Zimmerman recommends, for further reading about Pilsudski, Waclaw Jedrzejewicz, Pilsudski. A Life for Poland (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1981) and Antony Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland (1972) You might also consult Norman Davies, God's Playground: A History of Poland. Volume II relates the story from 1795 to the present. The Jozef Pilsudski Institute of America George Washington had his seasoning; Josef Pilsudski has mustard. Earlier podcasts that recall some of the themes in this conversation are my discussion with David Bell in Episode 176 about his book Men on Horseback: Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolutions. While it ends long before Pilsudski's life, he also was a man on horseback. Also my conversation with Rick Hernandez way back in Episode 65 on the first year of the Russian Revolution.

When the Bavarian naturalist Moritz Wagner travelled in the kingdom of Georgia, in 1819, he encountered there thousands of Germans, some of them living in what he described as a “ganz deutscher Bauart”, a German-designed village. They or their parents hhd emigrated there after the Napoleonic Wars. What Wagner found in the Caucusus could also be encountered elsewhere in Russia, as well as in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, “the triangular area between Cincinannti, St. Louis, and St. Paul”, and in places considerably closer to his native Bavaria. They were communities of people who were, as my guest Glenn Penny describes them, “German and something else.” Their stories are the heart of Penny’s new book, German History Unbound: From 1750 to the Present. Glenn Penny is Professor of History and the Henry J. Bruman Endowed Chair in German History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent publications include In Humboldt’s Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology. He is currently working on a book entitled Belonging in the Southern German Borderlands since 1800. For Further Investigation One interesting moment in the conversation was when it turned to imagining German history without necessarily including the Third Reich. A couple of conversations from the podcast do indeed discuss German history without the telos of Adolf Hitler. They are Episode 119: The Curious Case of the Lion's Blood, or, How Anna Zieglerin Came to Be Burned at the Stake and Episode 190: Porcelain We talked about Germans who emigrated to Russia; and some of that population who then left Russia for the Americas. Here's the Germans from Russia Heritage Society, where you can learn more about these peripatetic people. They even have a list of German villages in the Caucasus.

My guest today is Martin Clagget, author of A Spark of Revolution: William Small, Thomas Jefferson, and James Watt; The Curious Connection Between the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. It’s the first biography of William Small ever written. If Small is remembered at all, it’s because he was the tutor of Thomas Jefferson at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. But Clagget meticulously demonstrates that his life contained much more than that. For Small was a Scotsman who was clearly one of the great eighteenth century polymaths. His interests extended from the moral philosophy of the Scottish “common sense” school, to medicine and surgery, and even to building and tinkering with machines. Amazingly enough, all of these talents were employed in his short life. Not only did he become a fixture of Williamsburg society, educating a future generation of revolutionary leaders, but on returning to Britain he settled in the growing almost-industrial city of Birmingham. There he became fast friend with Matthew Boulton, a pioneering industrialist, and brought together the influential group of thinkers and tinkerers known as the “Lunar Society.” And there in Birmingham he encountered a fellow Scot, James Watt, and interested Boulton in Watt’s design for a steam engine. Indeed, so closely linked was Small to the project, that had he lived he would have split the royalties on the steam engine with Watt and Boulton. Truly Small was at the heart of two revolutions, both the American Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution that sprang forth from the English Midlands. For Further Investigation Martin Clagett speaks at Monticello about his book. Martin Clagett, Scientific Jefferson, Revealed Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men–"In the 1760s a group of amateur experimenters met and made friends in the English Midlands. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the center of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world."

Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson of Salem County, New Jersey Joseph T. Buckingham, editor of the Boston Courier in the 1830s, had a way with invective: The mere fungus of an offensive plant which one cannot touch without an immediate application of soap and water with an infusion of eau de cologne, to sweeten the hand…O ye caterers of luxuries, ye gods and godesses of the science of cookery! Deliver us from tomatoes. You have to wonder what Buckingham said about politicians. Everything has a history, and that includes tomatoes. For when Buckingham wrote his anti-tomato diatribe, not very coincidentally the United States was in the midst of tomato-eating health craze that included (for some) the consumption of life-enhancing tomato pills; while in that very year, Italians persisted in eating pasta that had been cooked in broth for as much as hour before being tossed with pork lard and eaten by hand. These and other excellent facts are found in William Alexander’s Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World: A History. His previous books include The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden. For Further Investigation If you haven't already listened to it, find out more about Dr. Wiley and his crusade for pure food in my conversation with Jonathan Reese; for a discussion that busted lots of myths regarding food, and how we came to eat things the way we do, see the conversation with Rachael Laudan Bill Alexander's website The Tomato Pill Craze New York Times article on the GMO tomato Andrew Smith, Pure Ketchup: A History of America's National Condiment, with Recipes Massimo Mortinari, A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce: The Unbelievable True Story of the World's Most Beloved Dish

By 1861, there were 250,000 free people of color living in the American South. They were signs of contradiction amidst a slave society built upon the concept of white supremacy in a racial hierarchy. Laws curtailed and denied their rights seemingly in every conceivable way, from prohibiting their legal testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. Whites attempted to control them through classification, variously and contradictorily terming them "negroes," "mulattoes," "mustees," "Indians," "mixed--bloods," or simply "free people of color". The last of these was the only one which these people seemed to accept for themselves, and make their own. But while these free people of color faced every conceivable attempt to deny them of power and personhood, they succeeded in raising families, building communities, establishing businesses and organizations, and enabling them to flourish. Some even rose to economic prominence in their own communities, even gaining the respect of their white neighbors. And often both groups interacted: in business, in churches, and even in families. My guest Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr., has written three books about free people of color: Hertford County, North Carolina’s Free People of Color; North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885; and Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South. As you can see from the tiles, they have moved from investigating a North Carolina county, to gradually encompassing the entire American South. This is therefore a very comprehensive and purposeful project; as you'll find out in our conversation, it's also a deeply personal one. Warren Milteer is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. For Further Investigation This is the third and final podcast of the month focusing on the experience of Black Americans in both slavery and freedom. In Episode 266, I had a conversation with Isabela Morales about the incredible story of the Townsend family; and in Episode 267, David Hackett Fischer described some of the regional cultures of Blacks in early America. Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Luther P. Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830–1860. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1942. Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll. Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2010. A. B.Wilkinson, Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes and Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

In early December, 1777, Joseph Plumb Martin and his comrades in the Continental Army sat down to feast upon a Our Hero: Rhode Island Quaker ironworker turned Major General and logistician Thanksgiving meal, mandated by the Second Continental Congress. “...To add something extraordinary to our present stock of provisions, our country, ever mindful of its suffering army,” wrote Martin decades later, “ opened her sympathizing heart so wide, upon this occasion, as to give us something to make the world stare. And what do you think it was dear reader?—Guess.—You cannot guess, be you as much of a Yankee as you will. I will tell you: it gave each and every man a half a gill of rice, and a table spoon full of vinegar!!” Martin’s faux banquet was the result not of tightfistedness, but of bankruptcy and what my guest Ricardo Herrera describes as “the slow moving, staggering debacle that was its supply and transportation system.” If it’s true that amateurs study tactics, and professionals study logistics, then Herrara’s new book Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 is definitely for professionals—but there is much in it for others to learn from as well. Ricardo A. Herrera is professor of military history at the School of Advanced Military Studies at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. The views that he expresses here are not those of the SAMS, the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, the United States Government; really, any person or institution other than Ricardo Herrera himself. For Further Investigation We've talked about Harry Lee with biographer Ryan Cole for two hours; and in Episode 110 about Nathanael Greene and the campaign for the South with John Buchanan, author of The Road to Charleston. Wayne K. Bodle, Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002) Bodle, “Generals and ‘Gentlemen’: Pennsylvania Politics and the Decision for Valley Forge,” Pennsylvania History 62, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 59–89 Benjamin H. Newcomb, “Washington’s Generals and the Decision to Quarter at Valley Forge,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 117, no. 4 (Oct 1993): 311–29 Ricardo A. Herrera, “‘[T]he zealous activity of Capt. Lee’: Light-Horse Harry Lee and Petite Guerre.” The Journal of Military History 79, no. 1 (January 2015): 9-36 Herrera, “‘[O]ur Army will hut this Winter at Valley forge’: George Washington, Decision-Making, and the Councils of War.” Army History, no. 117 (Fall 2020): 6-26 Herrera, “Foraging and Combat Operations at Valley Forge, February-March 1778.” Army History, no. 79 (Spring 2011): 6-29 Valley Forge National Historic Park Valley Forge Muster Roll You might remember that I tried to pronounce auftragstaktik, at least once. Rick Herrera doesn't really care if I pronounced it correctly or not...as you can see here in this YouTube conversation "The Myth of Auftragstktik and the history of Mission Command"

In 1609 a free man of African and European ancestry, Juan Rodriguez, left the Dutch ship Jonge Tobias anchored off Manhattan Island with “eighty hatchets and some knives” to set himself up in trading with the local Indians. Ashore in coming years he fought off Dutch rivals, married an Indian woman, and started a family, all the while prospering by trading in bear and beaver pelts. His is one of the many stories presented by David Hackett Fischer in his new book African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, which examines nine Afro-European regional cultures in North America. Following in the footsteps of his previous books Albion’s Seed, Liberty and Freedom, and Champlain’s Dream, in African Founders, Fischer seeks to determine in this case how individuals both free and enslaved within these cultures “acted with purpose and resolve to change the ways that free and open systems worked in what is now the United States.” David Hackett Fischer is University Professor and Warren Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. Author of numerous books in addition to those already mentioned, his Washington’s Crossing won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Hello, when Samuel Townsend died in 1856 near Huntsville, Alabama, he was the era’s equivalent of a multimillionaire. He had thousands of acres of cotton-land, and hundreds of enslaved people who planted, harvested, and processed that cotton to make him rich. Like many other parents, he left it all to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces. But in this case all of them were slaves. And that crucial event is not even the beginning of the intricate, horrible, thrilling, and ennobling story of the Townsend family, which Isabela Morales tells in her new book Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom. R. Isabela Morales is the Editor and Project Manager of the Princeton & Slavery Project and the Digital Projects Manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum. She received her PhD in history from Princeton University. Happy Dreams of Liberty is published by Oxford University Press. For Further Investigation For more on the internal slave trade, and the kidnapping of free blacks in the north for enslavement in the South, see Episode 141; for a discussion on American slavery, see Episode 25 The Septimus D. Cabaniss Papers at the University of Alabama–Isabela writes "The full collection has been digitized, so you can explore the actual letters and other sources I use in the book." Direct link to the 1856 will of Samuel Townsend Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (W. W. Norton, 2006) Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (University of California Press, 2005) Daniel Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: Three African American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (The Penguin Press, 2011)

You might as well admit it; you’ve always wondered how you would do in a vicious struggle for power. Those thoughts might be prompted by an over-long project planning meeting for a new software produce, an angry meeting of a humanities department with an associate dean, or from binge-watching Game of Thrones one too many times. But for high-ranking officials in authoritarian regimes, such thoughts are simply part of careful and judicious Thinking Ahead. In his new book Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, Joseph Torigian anaylyzes four power struggles in Leninist regimes, arguing that party institutions did not prevent power struggles from being shaped by “the politics of personal prestige, historical antagonisms, backhanded political maneuvering, and violence.” If he’s right, then we might even be able to learn something about the future from studying the past. Joseph Torigian is an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. For Further Investigation Some of the same events discussed here with Tony Saich, when in Episode 213 we discussed the one-hundred year long history of the Chinese Communist Party. Another conversation in which historical knowledge is applied to political possibilities.

Some 5,000 years ago nomadic peoples of central Asia settled on the Iranian plateau. Their descendants would be the nucleus of an extraordinary empire that reached north to the lands of their ancestors, eastwards to India and China, and west as far as the Libyan desert and the Aegean Sea. These were the Persians, who not only created the first of the world-empires, but also brought about the first period of significant and continuous contact between the east and the west. What is typically known about the Persians comes from Herodotus, who in his Histories told the story of how Persia came to invade Greece, and how the Greeks were able to repel the greatest empire yet known to mankind. But what is the Persian version of the story? What would the Persians have said about themselves? With me to discuss the Persian Empire of the Achaemenid Kings is Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, chair of ancient history at Cardiff University, and director of the Ancient Iran Program for the British Institute of Persian Studies. His latest book is Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, and it is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Early in the conversation, when discussing the importance of the Persian's nomadic past, I made reference to a conversation with Pamela Crossley. This was Episode 185; her book on the importance of nomadic thought and culture for all of Eurasia is Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World. Lloyd had some tough things to say about Herodotus; for a different perspective, see my conversation in Episode 116 on "The First Historian" with Jennifer Roberts, a Herodotus scholar.

This is the second and final part of my conversation with Olivier Zunz about his new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, The Man Who Understood Democracy, just published by Princeton University Press. When last we left Tocqueville, he had just experienced a brilliant success with the publication of the first volume of Democracy in America. In this conversation, we will as promised discuss Tocqueville’s formative trip to Britain, and how it influenced his writing of volume II of Democracy; his political career; his experiences of the revolution of 1848, and the Second Empire; his great work The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution; and his death at a moment when it seemed that in both France and America the experiment to which he had devoted his life was on the point of failure. Olivier Zunz is the James Madison Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author, most recently, of Philanthropy in America: A History (also published by Princeton University Press ). He has edited the Library of America edition of Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels, all in collaboration with the translator Arthur Goldhammer. He has also co-edited The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics. For Further Investigation Exploring American Democracy with Alexis de Tocqueville as Guide: a 2015 seminar led by Olivier Zunz and Arthur Goldhammer at the University of Virginia still has a website, with an unparalleled collection of resources, including bibliographies of magnificent detail. Arthur Goldhammer describes his collaboration with Olivier Zunz: a "harmonious collaboration" that became an "intellectual friendship" The benchmark historical-critical edition of Democracy in America by Eduardo Nolla

In 1835 a young French author on the verge of publishing his first book wrote “the best thing that can happen to me is if no one read my book, and I have not yet lost hope that this happiness will be mine.” But Alexis de Tocqueville’s hopes were not fulfilled. Although the first printing was just 500 copies, Tocqueville almost immediately became an intellectual celebrity. When he heard people speaking about his book, said Tocqueville, he wondered “whether they are really talking about me.” Olivier Zunz argues in his new biography The Man Who Understood Democracy: A Life of Alexis de Tocqueville that Tocqueville was a passionate advocate for democracy, judging it the only system that could provide both liberty and equality. He did this both as a scholar and a politician, dying at a moment when it seemed that in both France and America the experiment to which he had devoted his life was on the point of failure. In the first of two conversations, Zunz and I discuss Tocqueville's family; his early life and intellectual development; his unhappy attempt at a legal career; and his famous journey to the young United States. We conclude this conversation with the moment described above, when the publication of the first volume of Democracy in America led to Tocqueville's instant intellectual celebrity. In our second conversation, we will discuss his turn to political action, and its outcomes. Olivier Zunz is the James Madison Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author, most recently, of Philanthropy in America: A History (also published by Princeton University Press ). He has edited the Library of America edition of Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels, all in collaboration with the translator Arthur Goldhammer. He has also co-edited The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics. For Further Investigation Exploring American Democracy with Alexis de Tocqueville as Guide: a 2015 seminar led by Olivier Zunz and Arthur Goldhammer at the University of Virginia still has a website, with an unparalleled collection of resources, including bibliographies of magnificent detail. Arthur Goldhammer describes his collaboration with Olivier Zunz: a "harmonious collaboration" that became an "intellectual friendship" The benchmark historical-critical edition of Democracy in America by Eduardo Nolla

For most of human history, the wealthy of any given society have been those who owned land. Therefore to change concepts of property ownership has been to change concepts of society itself. In her new book The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights, Jo Guldi focus on land and its distribution as an overlooked engine driving politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of course, the history of land reform is far older "strategies for turning the land over to the poor date as far back as ancient Canaan or the Roman empire; and yet, modern proposals for state-engineered 'land reform' appeared for the first time in nineteenth-century Britain, and the first “rent control” law dates from Ireland in 1881." From land reform policies in nineteenth century Ireland and India, to post-colonial Africa, Guldi's study ranges the globe. She argues that land redistribution is crucial to understanding the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, and internationalism, as well as the spread of information technology and free-market economics. Jo Guldi is associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches courses on the history of Britain, the British Empire, modern development policy, and property law. She describes herself as a "historian of capitalism [whose] interests have ranged widely over problems of the past and methods for knowing the truth." For Further Investigation You might be interested in reading some of Jo's many essays. They can be found here, on her excellent website. I learned about Jo's book from Scott Nelson, who was on to talk about grain and history. You can listen to that conversation here, if you haven't already heard it. In our conversation about his book Petrarch's War: Florence and the Black Death in Context, Bill Caferro offered some criticisms of "the long view" and some reasons why focusing on the "short view" is a good thing.

Richard Cohen begins his new book Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past with two particularly appropriate epigrams. First, from the historian E.H. Carr: “Before you study history, study the historian.” Second, the historical novelist Hilary Mantel: “Beneath every history, there is another history—there is, at least, the life of the historian.” The life of historians is the subject of Cohen’s book, and he ranges from Herodotus and Thucydides in the Very Long Ago, to Ibram X. Kendi and the 1619 Project of Just Yesterday. Since this is a book about how historians make make history, it is therefore a book about how historians see the past, and think about it. Richard Cohen is the author of By the Sword,Chasing the Sun, and How to Write Like Tolstoy. The former publishing director of two leading London publishing houses, he has edited numerous prize-winning and bestselling books, and written for most UK quality newspapers. He is a Fellowof the Royal Society of Literature. For Further Investigation The podcast now has several conversations devoted to the subject of "Historians and Their Histories". To mention two historians of Rome who were also men of action, here's one with Adrian Goldsworthy on Julius Caesar, and another with Steele Brand on Polybius, onetime soldier, Greek, and historian of the Roman Republic. A site devoted to Shakespeare and history, which is suitably named shakespeareandhistory.com Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford: the house that historical novels built David Irving, mentioned in the podcast conversation, became notorious as Holocaust denier. In turn denying this charge, he sued historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel, the stakes of which were "not only Irving's contention that his reputation and livelihood had been harmed, but also a bitter argument about the nature of historical evidence and its interpretation." You can read more about the result of the trial in a contemporary source here.

The sociologist Edward Shils said or wrote somewhere that one of the three principle means of education were bookstores—preferably a used bookstore. Shils, for two generations a student and then faculty member at the University of Chicago, spent a lot of time in bookstores, and particularly in the Seminary Co-operative Bookstore, of which he was the 8,704thmember. Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which in 2019 he helped incorporate as the first not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling. (You can get some idea of the range of the Co-Op's enterprises from Jeff's annual letter.) He is the author of In Praise of Good Bookstores, which is the subject of our conversation today. It is not only a loving tribute to an endangered civic institution, but an imagining of a future in which bookstores not only endure but thrive. Jeff and I talk about many things, including his grandfather and my great-grandfather; how to arrange your books; types of browsing; and the need for getting lost in a bookstore. For Further Investigation At the back of Jeff's book, you'll find a QR code that takes you to this site: Princeton University Press has set up a page through which you can find an independent bookstore near you. New Dominion Books: the closest independent bookshop to my house City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg, SC

Britain in the 1840s should have been, observes Simon Heffer, a time of great social improvement. Instead it was a country that was beset by poverty, unrest, assassination attempts on young Queen Victoria and her Prime Minister, and fears of revolution. Yet just forty years later, it was as if none of that had ever happened. It had become a prosperous and progressive nation, transformed by advances not only in industrialization, but also in politics, science, religion, and education. That Britain had become such a society was not an accident, but the result of intelligent and directed purpose The story of that purpose, and what it wrought, is the subject of Heffer’s book High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. It is an investigation not simply of political, social, or cultural change, but of a change of mind—by which I mean not merely changing ideas, like changing clothes from season to season, but of changing the way things are seen Simon Heffer is an eminent British journalist, essayist, historian, and author of numerous books, including lives of the 19th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle and 20th century politician Enoch Powell, and a series of histories of Britain of which High Minds is the first. For Further Investigation In our wide-ranging conversation we touched on topics covered in previous episodes of the podcast. If you haven't already, then listen to Jonathan Rose talk about the intellectual life of the British working class; or Will Hay describe the importance of an obscure Prime Minister. High Minds was published in 2013 in Britain, but is only now being published in the United States by Pegasus Books. It has been followed by The Age of Decadence–A History of Britain: 1880-1914, which was confusingly published in the United States before High Minds. Staring at God: Britain in the Great War has not been published in America; you'll need to order it from Britain along with the good Cadbury's chocolate they keep for themselves. The final volume in the series, now being written, will end the story in 1939.