Historically Thinking

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.

In 1814, representatives of the grand coalition that had defeated Napoleon gathered in Vienna. There in meetings and balls–interrupted only by Napoleon’s 100 days after his return from exile on Elba–they developed a new order for Europe that connected peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights. These ideas, writes Glenda Sluga, came not only from male aristocrats and diplomats, but from female aristocrats, and bourgeois men and women, who imagined a new kind of European politics. Glenda Sluga is professor of international history and capitalism at the European University Institute, Florence, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow and professor of international history at the University of Sydney. Her most recent book is The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon, and it's the subject of our conversation. For Further Inquiry On two podcasts Historically Thinking listener favorite Alex Mikaberidze has held forth on the global consequences of the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. They can be found here and here. Napoleon's "100 Days" rudely interrupted the Congress of Vienna, before he and his reconstituted armies were stopped at Waterloo. Way back in the early days of the podcast, Gareth Glover gave a detailed account of that battle, based on his comprehensive knowledge of the related sources. Further reading: two books mentioned by Glenda that might be of interest to you are Beatrice de Graaf, Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815, and Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon For a quick read, see Stella Ghervas, "What was the Congress of Vienna?", History Today Volume 64 Issue 9 September 2014 The historical novelist Shannon Selin, author of Napoleon in America, has a very nice miniature biography of Klemens Prince von Metternich on her website.

On the coast of Greece there is an ancient monument that no-one pays very much attention to; and yet it marks one of the most consequential battles in the history of Rome, or really all of Europe. It was ordered to be built by Augustus, first Emperor of Rome, to mark his victory at Actium. At that place a fleet loyal to him defeated one commanded by Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The result determined not simply politics, but society, culture, and possibly even religion for hundreds of years to come With me to describe Actium, what led to it, and what came from it, is Barry Strauss. He is Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, and Corliss Dean Page Fellow at the Hoover Institution, as well author of numerous books. This is third appearance on Historically Thinking; he has previously been with us to discuss the death of Caesar, and the historian Thucydides. His most recent book is The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium. For Further Investigation Barry Strauss' website I highly recommend Barry's memoir Rowing Against the Current: On Learning to Scull at Forty. "In the midst of the standard dreary midlife crisis--complete with wine-tasting courses, yoga classes, and a failed attempt at a first novel--a 40-year-old Strauss falls unexpectedly and passionately in love with rowing." You might find yourself wondering where you can start rowing.

On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey was hung for attempting to lead a slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina. Also executed that day were five of his supporters. Over the next month, a total of 35 men were hung in public executions for their involvement in Vesey’s plot—on one day, 22 were killed in a mass execution. Both “Vesey’s prosecutors and his allies”, writes my guest Jeremy Schipper “appealed to the Bible to decry or justify the insurrection plot.” In this way their behavior mirrored Abraham Lincoln’s words decades later in his Second Inaugural Address: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other.” Yet while Lincoln seems to have been referring to Northerner and Southerner, in this instance those words applied to White and Black Southerners, to enslavers and enslaved. How they read the same texts, how they prayed them, is therefore of intense interest to anyone seeking to understand that moment in Charleston, or for that matter any other moment in the history of slavery and racial conflict in the United States. Jeremy Schipper is Professor of Religion at Temple University, in Philadelphia, PA. Author of several books, his most recent is Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation We have previously discussed Nat Turner's Revolt in Episode 161. Doug Egerton was mentioned in the conversation, and is thanked by Jeremy Schipper in his acknowledgements. Doug has been on the podcast in Episode 67 talking about Reconstruction, and again in Episode 137 discussing the Adams' family.

In 1871 an expedition entered the territory now encompassed by Yellowstone National Park. Led by doctor and self-taught geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, it was to be the first scientific expedition into that mysterious place. But it was also, says my guest Megan Kate Nelson, part of a larger struggle over the expansion of federal power during Reconstruction. Hayden would be one of the three men who would strive for control of Yellowstone, and the surrounding territory. The others were Jay Cooke, a Philadelphia investment banker raising capital for the Northern Pacific Railroad; and a Lakota leader known to English speakers as Sitting Bull, who was determined to stop the building of the Northern Pacific. These are some of the protagonists of Nelson’s new book Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America. Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian, living in Massachusetts. She was previously on the podcast in Episode 23 discussing her book Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. For Further Investigation An excerpt from Megan's book appears on the website of Smithsonian magazine If you're interested in learning more about the historical discipline of Environmental History, you should listen to this very early conversation with my old friend Brian Leech

“The story of beer,” writes John Arthur, “is a chronicle about how we as a species have interacted with each other, created prosperous societies, survived difficult and challenging times, and ended up where we are today. Beer continues to be a critical food source for millions of Indigenous people today, providing a fulfilling and nutritious meal. After water and tea, it is the most consumed beverage in the world and continues to unite the vast majority of communities through daily and ritual life.” Through its very long history, beer has “led to new technologies, ensured health and well-being, imbu[ed] life with ritual and religious connections, and [built] economic and political statuses.” John Arthur is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. His most recent book is Beer: A Global Journey Through the Past and Present, which ranges from Mesopotamia to 21st century sour beer hipsters. For Further Investigation A scientific paper on Raqefet Cave Cider made by burying and fermenting the apples

From the first weeks of the Great War, in August 1914, medical practice was overwhelmed, not simply by the mass casualties produced by the war, but the types of trauma to which human bodies were being subjected. The result was a transformation over four years not just of warfare, but of medicine. Ideas and hypotheses that had been developed in the thrilling decades of laboratory discovery prior to 1914 were implemented on a gigantic scale; and new ones were developed and tested and put into practice, in a matter of months. By 1919, medicine was utterly different than it had been just five years before. My guest Thomas Helling is Professor of Surgery and head of the Division of General Surgery at the University of Mississippi in Jackson. He has vast experience in military medicine, trauma, and critical care, and is the author of The Great War and the Birth of Modern Medicine, which is the focus of our conversation today. For Further Information Books by Thomas Helling Timothy J. Jorgensen, "Marie Curie and her X-ray vehicles’ contribution to World War I battlefield medicine" An old online exhibit– "Harvey Cushing: A Journey Through His Life"

“My underlying goal,” writes my guest Tom Misa, “has been to display the variety of technologies, to describe how they changed across time, and to understand how they interacted with diverse societies and cultures. There’s no simple definition of technology that adequately conveys the variety of its forms or sufficiently emphasizes the social and cultural interactions and consequences that I believe are essential to understand. The key point is that technologies are consequential for social and political futures. There is not “one path” forward.” These words come from the conclusion of Misa’s Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present, now being published in a third edition by Johns Hopkins University Press, as one of the structural pillars of the Johns Hopkins Series in the History of Technology. Thomas J. Misa recently retired as Professor of the History of Technology at the University of Minnesota, where he directed the Charles Babbage Center (history of computing); taught courses in the Program for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; and was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering For Further Investigation Dutch fluit ships, the embodiment of the commercial/capitalist era FIAT Lingotto factory on YouTube; chase-scene in original Italian Job movie (1969) [and our "cover art" for this episode's web page] Reading Questions for every chapter of From Leonardo to the Internet More interesting web sites!

Grain traders wandering across the steppe; boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the first fast food breakfast; and war socialism. It's all crammed into this discussion of wheat, and what it wrought, with Scott Nelson. Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Georgia Athletics Association Professor of the Humanities at the University of Georgia. Author of numerous books, his latest is Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World, and it is the subject of our conversation today.

The Howe famly was at the heart of Britain’s long eighteenth century. Connected to the Hanoverian ruling family by blood, they were addicted to Whig politics, high society, warfare and statecraft, and writing letters. In no less than four wars, Howe men bled and died for Britain, leading ships, regiments, fleets, and armies from Savoy and the western approaches of the Atlantic, to Quebec, India, and Brooklyn; while at home in England, the women of the Howe famly engaged in the politics of supporting and furthering their family’s ambition and position. With me to describe the Howe’s, and their importance to Britain and America, is Julie Flavell, author of the new book The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Mlitary FAmly and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America. It’s a book based on hitherto overlooked or unconsidered sources, providing us with both an exciting narrative and a comprehensive reassessment of the Howe family. For Further Investigation Rules for Period Games "In Praise of Older Women" Battle of Brooklyn Brandywine Battlefield

“Postcards,” writes today’s guest Lydia Pyne, “have left an indelible imprint on the history of human communication, unmatched by any other material medium. They owe their success to the decentralization of their manufacture as well as the physical material connection they created between sender and recipient. Postcards and their digital descendants continue to be about personal connections…We recreate old social networks—old postcard social lines, if you will—with every post of a digital picture.” In her book Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network, Julie Pyne describes the history of the postcard, and those connections it created between senders and recipients. Lydia Pyne is a writer and historian, who has previously written about how phony things teach us about real stuff; a history of seven celebrity human fossils, and what they taught their descendants; and bookshelves. For Further Investigation Lydia Pyne's fantastic website Postcards at the Library of Congress If you like a podcast about postcards, how about one on shoes? The importance of the history of everyday life

In 510 BC, an obscure Greek city located literally on a backwater revolted against its tyrant. This was not extraordinary; such things happened regularly in the many Greek city-states. What followed however was extraordinary, and even world-changing. Athens became a democracy. Then just seventeen years after that, Athens and its tiny ally of Plataea defeated a raid by the mighty Persian Empire. The great century of Athenian glory had begun.Yet the history of Athens did not end with either Spartan victory in the Peloponnesian War, or with the supremacy of Macedon, or even with conquest by Rome. While never quite attaining its heights under Pericles, Athens was often important; and even when it was relatively unimportant, it always remained interesting. The history of Athens, both during its decades of glory and its centuries of relative peace and quiet, is chronicled by Bruce Clark in his new book Athens: City of Wisdom. Clark is a writer for The Economist, where he covers European affairs and religion. He moves from Athenian origins, to Periclean Athens; from to the medieval city when the Parthenon was the castle of the Duke of Athens, to Ottoman conquest; to Greek independence, and Athens becoming the capital of a new Kingdom of Greece; and all the way into the 21st century. For Further Investigation Also by Bruce Clark, a history of events mentioned in our conversation (as well as in the conversation with Roderick Beaton): Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Formed Modern Greece and Turkey For a very important part of Athenian history we deliberately ignored, see the conversation with classical historian Jennifer Roberts in Episode 121: The War Between the Greeks, or, The Forever War For another different perspective on Athens, see Episode 179: What's the Good of Ambition, or, Socrates and Alcibiades The Acropolis Museum Atlas Obscura is one of my favorite sites to browse, and here's The Atlas Obscura Guide To Athens: 55 Cool, Hidden, and Unusual Things to Do in Athens Greece

For nearly 3,000 years, the question of what it means to be Greek has been one of perennial interest—and, incredibly enough, not only to the Greeks. How a collection of of small cities and kingdoms around the northeastern Mediterranean Sea laid down precepts for science, the arts, politics, law, and philosophy is one of the great historical stories. Their influence would eventually reach far beyond the shores of the Mediterranan, and for long after what is typically thought of as the zenith of their civilization—and not simply throught the continuation of ideas that Greeks originally put in motion. For throughout their history, the Greeks have not only excelled in exporting ideas, but exporting goods through trade, exporting faith through missionary endeavour, and exporting themseves, most recently in a 20th century diaspora that took them to five continents. Roderick Beaton surveys these Hellenic millennia in his magisterial The Greeks: A Global History. He is the Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, Language & Literature at King’s College London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and one of the foremost authorities on modern greek literature. For Further Investigation Hiva Panahi: her blog (in Greek, of course), and a little about her

For thousands of years, laws have not only been used to impose order by the powerful on the powerless. In the very process of their codification they often became instruments of control by the powerless, the expression of their hope for a better world. The "common people", not only the rulers, used laws to define their communities, regulate trade, and build their civilization. What truly unites humanity, argues Fernanda Pirie, is an amazingly common belief that laws can produce justice, combat oppression, and create order from chaos. Law is very closely connected to the holy and the numinous. That should not be surprising. The Hammurabi stele (shown on the right) shows the eponymous King of Babylon receiving the legal code we name after him from Shamash, the god of the sun. Fernanda Pirie, Professor of the Anthropology of Law at the University of Oxford. A specialist in Tibetan anthropology, she is author most recently of The Rule of Laws: A 4,000 Quest to Order the World, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Fernanda Pirie, The Anthropology of Law. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014. ____"What Ancient Laws Can Teach Us About Holding Autocrats to Account Today", Time, December 23, 2021 More legal history: the intermingling of law and love, as seen in Episode 208 Even more legal history: The importance of bourbon to American corporate and consumer law

For nearly a century after the First Crusade captured Jerusalem, that ancient city became the nucleus of a several kingdoms and principalities established by the crusaders. At the political, social, and cultural heart of their subsequent history were a series of remarkable women who exercised power and influence in a way nearly unknown in western Europe at that time. Katherine Pangonis is the author of the Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule, a remarkable chronicle of lives lived in times of extreme danger and immense complexity. For Further Investigation Another medieval woman who tried to rule, briefly mentioned in the podcast, was Mathilda (who married Fulk of Anjou's son, Geoffrey). Mathilda was the subject of Episode 122, a conversation with her biographer Catherine Hanley. The Melisende Psalter Sarah J. Biggs, "Twelfth-Century Girl Power" Catherine Pangonis, "Crusader Queens: the formidable female rulers of Jerusalem"

On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany. Occurring simultaneously with Franklin Roosevelt's "One Hundred Days", Hitler's first one hundred days were even more dramatic and consequential–the most sudden change, Peter Fritzsche writes, in all of German history. "A very partisan and divided society, fragmented between left and right, between Social Democrats, Communists and National Socialists (Nazis), between Catholics and Protestants, seemingly transformed itself – by terror from above and “conversion” from below – into a seemingly unified society recognized widely as a 'people’s community'." In his book Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, Fritzsche examines this transformation in its tumultuous, kaleidoscopic, and terrifying details. He describes elections and arrests, bonfires and executions, the patriotic rallies and anti-Jewish boycotts, getting at the transformation that Germany experienced between January 30th and May 10th. "Compared with day one, Jan. 30, 1933, Germany was not recognizable on day 100, at least to outsiders. To sympathizers, German history had healed itself in 100 days." Peter Fritzsche is the W.E. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of History at the University of Illinois in Champagne-Urbana. The author of numerous fascinating studies of German history, Hitler's First Hundred Days is his lates.

Storytelling, writes my guest Jonathan Gottschall, is the way in which people have for thousands of years not only bound themselves together into communities, but the art which built civilization. But story-telling is also the best way of forcing people apart, for manipulating one another, for destroying the capacity to think rationally. Behind our greatest ills, he argues, are mind-disordering stories. This naturally has implications for how we tell stories about the past. Jonathan Gottschall is distinguished research fellow in the English department at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Stories Builds Societies and Tears Them Down, which is the focus of our conversation today.

This is the first in a new series of podcasts. Long time listeners will remember that when my book Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life was published, I did a number of podcasts with experts delving into aspects of Daniel Morgan’s life—from the place where he lived, to how he was flogged, to the rifles that he carried. But I thought that this was unsatisfactory for a podcast called “Historically Thinking”. It’s the conversations that historians have before they write a book that show how a research project comes together, and how historical thinking gets done. So, in something of a leap of faith, I’m going to have conversations with other historians on topics that apply to a project that I’m now working on…more about that, perhaps, at the end of our conversation. In effect I'm doing podcasts on spec, which fills me with superstitious dread. My guest today Mark Anderson, author of Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians’ First Battles in the Revolution. It's a fascinating study of native politics, diplomacy, and war on the Canadian border during the first year of the American Revolution, a politics which would have confused a Renaissance Italian diplomat. Mark has previously written The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America’s War of Liberation in Canada, 1774-1776. In a previous life, before establishing himself as one of the few American authorities on revolutionary-era Canada, he was an officer in the United States Air Force.

In a eulogy to Abraham Lincoln delivered on June 1, 1865, Frederick Douglass posed the question “what was Lincoln to the colored people or they to him?” His answer was that Lincoln was “emphatically the black man’s President, the first to show any respect for the rights of a black man, or to acknowledge that he had any rights the white man ought to respect.” With me to discuss his new book The Black Man’s President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality is Michael Burlingame. The Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield, Burlingame is perhaps the foremost living authority on the sixteenth president.

In February, 1853, Augustus De Morgan, Professor of Mathematics at University College London, drew the last of a series of diagrams illustrating logical syllogisms. A the center of this one was a face, writes Joan L. Richards, of “a calmly alert being… For [De Morgan] this image of the human and the divine meeting in logical space was…an expression of his aspiration to find…a map of reason that encompassed both the human and divine mind.” De Morgan was one of a series of fascinating people whose family experience, and intellectual and spiritual lives, are chronicled by Richards in her book Generations of Reason: A Family Search for Meaning in Post-Newtonian England. She describes an all-encompassing pursuit of reason that takes readers into all of the chief events in English cultural and political history, as well as into some rather more obscure corners. Joan L. Richards is emeritus professor of history at Brown University, where she served as director of the Program of Sciences, Society, and Technology. For Further Investigation William Frend, Evening Amusements, or, the beauty of heavens displayed... A quick bio of Augustus De Morgan The wit and wisdom of Augustus De Morgan

So what does research mean to you? Does it mean looking for someone somewhere on the internet who agrees with you? Then you should really listen to this podcast. This is another of our continuing series on the “moves” of historical thinking, or what I like to think of as “what historical thinking can do for you.” For if history is a way of seeing the past, then it is also a way of knowing. And that means that history can teach habits of seeing and knowing that are useful for everyone, not just professionals. Defining research in the form of a question, it means "where can I find more evidence?" It uses relevant, significant sources, found on one's own in other books, on scholarly websites, and in other places. With us to talk about research, and how he does it, is Alexander Mikaberidze, 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, one of the largest private collections of antiquarian books, prints, and maps in the United States. Acclaimed as one of the “great Napoleonic scholars of today”, this is his third appearance on the podcast. He was last on to discuss his book The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History. For Further Investigation Zotero: this program could change your life The IRISCan Book 5 Wifi–not Mikaberidze approved, but useful Episode 155: The Second World War, or, the Napoleonic Wars Episode 14: Alex Mikaberidze on the World History of the Napoleonic Wars

In 1914, at the start of the Great War, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire called for a “Great Jihad” against France, Russia, and Great Britain. It was a logical conclusion to over fity years of conflict between European and indigenous powers in the Middle East and North Africa, a conflict that eventually became a radical Islamic insurgency supporting an ancient slave trade against Western colonialism that exploited “coolie capitalism”. This is the complex story that Neil Faulkner tells in his new book Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920. Ranging from the Congo basin to the deserts of North Africa, he traces the complex interweaving of humanitarianism, colonialism, nationalism, and Islamism—arguing that Jihad was a reactionary response to modern imperalism. Neil Faulkner is an archaeologist and historian, who works as a lecturer, writer, excavator, and occasional broadcaster. He is editor of Military History Matters, and the author of fifteen books. For Further Investigation Neil Faulkner, Lawrence of Arabia's War: The Arabs, the British and the Remaking of the Middle East–the precursor to Empire and Jihad Neil Faulkner, A Radical History of the World–there's much of this previous book also to be found in Empire and Jihad Last year in Episode 148 we discussed the exploitation of the Congo with Robert Harms, an intimately related topic to this. Together they're really a matching set of conversations.

This is one of the last in our year-long series about the skills of historical thinking, and today our focus is on one of simplest, but perhaps also the most contentious. It is Change and Causality. Defined in the form of a question it’s to ask “What has changed, and why?” Among other things, it’s the skill that allows us to recognize and sometimes even explain notable change over time. It’s attentive to multiple causations, and thereby avoids simplistic monocausal explanations. (As faithful listeners know, monocausal explanations are very, very, very bad.) With me to discuss change and causality are Pamela Crossley, Charles and Elfriede Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth College, a specialist in modern China, last heard on this podcast in Episode 185 describing what the Central Asians did for us; and Suzanne L. Marchand, Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State, who joined us in Episode 190 to explain the importance of porcelain in European history.

At about 8 in the morning on March 22, 1622, warriors of the chiefdoms making up the Powhatan confederacy attacked the settlements of the colony of Virginia. By nightfall, the devastating attacks had killed between a quarter and a third of the English settlers, destroyed many settlements and farms—including their food supplies, and forced the survivors to take shelter in fortified locations where they were unable to grow their food because of groups of warriors who continued the attack. Suddenly, just when Virginia seemed to be on the verge of success, it was thrown back into the position where it had been 13 years before when it was just a few hundred people within the palisade surrounding the settlement of Jamestown—under attack, and on the verge of the starvation. It was the beginning of a brutal war that would last for years, the second fought between the native of Virginia and the English interlopers. With me to explain the long life of the man who planned the attack of 1622 is James Horn, President and Chief Officer of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, which is affiliated with Preservation Virginia, a private non-profit organization and a leader in historic preservation. Horn is the author of numerous books, from Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake, to his most recent A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America. While this is conversation will be about one of the most critical moments in the history of North America, and about one of its most fascinating unknown personalities, it’s also a conversation in our continuing series on historical thinking. As you’ll see, James Horn’s book deals with many questions of evidence. And evidence is the answer to the question “How do I know what I claim to know about my question?” As you’ll hear, that is a question that James Horn had to ask himself many times as he worked on this book. For Further Investigation A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy Opechancanough--his biography in the Encyclopedia Virginia Historic Jamestowne

Great podcast title, right? Those words still trigger a sort of survival reflex in me, based upon experience with an eminent professor. When he said those very words, you could bet that he would be talking for at least the next ten minutes, seemingly without commas, certainly without periods. By minute five you began to wonder if it was really possible to sleep with your eyes open; by minute eight you began to suspect that words could beat you to death. Detail of " Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555" (oil on canvas) by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525-69) Today in our continuing series on historical thinking we're talking with David Staley about what “context” actually means. The official podcast definition of context, which as always is in the form of a question, is “what background knowledge helps us understand these documents?” For example, a sentence in a memoir reading “After our wedding, my husband travelled alone to California” has different weight if it was written in 1850, then if it was written in 1935—the difference between the California Gold Rush, and the Dust Bowl; or to be literary, between Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. David Staley is an associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, where he also holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Design--where he has taught courses in Design History and Design Futures--and Educational Studies. His research interests include digital history, the philosophy of history, historical methodology, and the history and future of higher education(following him on Twitter @davidstaley8). This is his third appearance on the podcast; he has previously been on to talk about alternative universities, and the history of the future—wherein we talked with my friend Brent Orrell about life after COVID, four months after COVID hit the United States. For Further Investigation Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America Crane Britton, The Anatomy of Revolution David Bell, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich

Sometimes, Higher Ed can feel like a battle. But not because of COVID, or CRT, or POTUS, or FL GOV...it's because someone in the administration asked the faculty if they might be so kind as to fill in for cafeteria staff. Now that's going too far. That makes Hulk want to smash. For Further Investigation Historically Thinking's Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed. Prime Salisbury steak can be here, in our last conversation about Higher Ed during COVID. Charlie Munger's simple plan for USCB; and what it's like to live in a Mungerbox TuitionFit...which could really improve its twitter game, if you ask us.

If there’s one thing Americans know about James Madison, it might be that he was the shortest American President, ever–just 5’4”, or that he was married to Dolley Madison, who was not only a first lady but the baker of snack cakes. If they know a little bit more about James, then they know that he is remarkably, even dangerously, contradictory: an author of The Federalist Papers, the “Father of the Constitution”, who also penned the dangerous doctrine of nullification, and opposed his friend Alexander Hamilton at every step of the way; a creator of political parties who as a practical politician was one of the worst presidents in history, presiding over the half-baked disaster of the War of 1812 before slinking off the executive stage. With us to demonstrate how a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing—indeed, perhaps one of the most dangerous things of all–is Jay Cost, author of James Madison: America’s First Politician, a book which is not only about Madison, but about the political culture that he more than anyone else put into place, the ideas he set in motion—and those that he ignored. Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford Nonresidential Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is his fourth book.

“We seek an order of things in which all the base and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions are awakened by the laws; where ambition becomes the desire to merit glory and to serve our country; where distinctions are born only of equality itself; where the citizen is subject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, and the people to justice; where our country assures the well-being of each individual, and where each individual proudly enjoys our country's prosperity and glory…” These are the words of Maximilien Robespierre, delivered on 5 February 1794. It all sounds very good, if you’re not a monarchist. Yet later in this speech, sometimes labeled “On Political Virtue”, Robespierre also makes his clearest call for terror as the means with which to save the future of the republic from the enemies within as well as those without. In the end, he would himself be identified as one of those internal enemies, and be himself eliminated. This is the subject of Colin Jones’ new book The Fall of Robespierre: 24 hours in Revolutionary France. It is an hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute chronicle of Robespierre’s last full day. But it is also more than that. It is a day in the life of the French Revolution, in which not only Robespierre crosses the stage, but journalists, the public executioner, shopkeepers, laborers, and all the faces of the crowd. Colin Jones is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London, a fellow of the British Academy, past president of the Royal Historical Society, and currently visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Among his previous books is The Smile Revolution: In Eighteenth-Century Paris; yes, even smiles have a history.

Each year millions and millions of whatever currency you’d care to have are spent explaining generations to one another. Inherent in that expensive explantation is the idea that people born at about the same time are basically alike, and very different from people born at other times. But, as Bobby Duffy explains in his book The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think, while this can be the case, it ain’t always necessarily so. Generational identities are not fixed, but fluid. They change over time. And beware of those who try to sell you simplistic—or simply false–concepts like generational warfare, or inevitable social decline; that only the kids care about the environment, or that Gen Z is “the suicidal generation”. Bobby Duffy is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London. Formerly director of research at the public opinion firm Ipsos MORI, his most recent book was published in the United States under the title Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything.

In 1924 the eminent nerve-specialist Sir Roderick Glossop urged Bertie Wooster and his friend Charles “Biffy” Biffen to attend the British Empire Exhibition being held at Wembley. “It is the most supremely absorbing and educational collection of objects,” Glossop enthused, “both animate and inanimate, gathered from the four corners of the Empire that has ever been assembled in England’s history.” After arrival at Wembley, Bertie’s genius-level manservant Jeeves shimmered off, and the heat, exertion, and education of it all became so overwhelming that Bertie and Biffy sought solace inside an ice-cold glasses of Green Swizzle, served up by a bartender in the Jamaican Tent. Perhaps Jeeves, who was known to curl up with a volume of Spinoza in his off-hours, attended the principal intellectual attraction at Wembley, the Conference on Some Living Religions within the Empire. This awkwardly named meeting of world religions is one of several chronicled by my guest Tal Howard in his new book The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue. In doing so, he traces how inter-religious dialogue was defined; how it in turn defined religion; and how it reflected and reinforced ideals and concepts such as pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and orientalism—not always in the ways one might expect. Tal Howard is Professor of History and Humanities, and Richard and Phyllis Dusenberg Chair of Christian Ethics, at Valparaiso University. This is his second appearance on Historically Thinking; he was previously on the podcast talking about the historian Jakob Burckhardt.

This is another episode in our year-long series about the skills of historical thinking, and today our focus is on multiple perspectives. Putting it in the form of a question, it’s when a historian asks herself How might others plausibly interpret this evidence differently? To do that, we must consider more than one point of view, and then either refute or concede objections to our argument. The theme of “multiple perspectives” takes us into a strange and interesting landscape where history, logic, phenomenology, and ethics meet—and hopefully assist one another. Touring that landscape with me today are two frequent guests of the podcast. Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. Her last appearance on the podcast was in January when she talked about her most recent book Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution. Bob Elder is Associate Professor of History at Baylor University, and we most recenlty talked about his book Calhoun, American Heretic. It should be noted that neither of them are from South Carolina.

When people speak of “the Amish” they are using a very simple term that covers over rather than reveals. It’s a term that applies to forty affliations or subgroups, each with a distinctive way of life—from dress and carriages, to technological and cultural choices. And within those forty affiliations are 2,600 church districts, with different religious and social practices. “Yet amidst this diversity,” writes Donald Kraybill, “many common traits—beliefs and rituals—still make it possible to talk about ‘the Amish’ as one social group.” Donald Kraybill is Distinguished College Professor at Elizabethtown College, where he is also Senior Fellow of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. He has written numerous books about the Amish and their related brethren; the latest is What the Amish Teach Us: Plain Living in a Busy World, just published by the Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press.

Alumni of the University of Virginia enjoy pointing out that while Thomas Jefferson’s tombstone declares his foundation of that university as his third great achievement, it does not so much as mention his presidency of the United States. Jefferson had a vision of what a great university could and should be, and the political talent and allies to see that vision implemented. That vision was an intimate part of his republican political philosophy, and of his hopes and fears for the fate of the republic in whose creation he had participated. As Andrew O’Shaughnessy writes in his new book The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University, “Acknowledging that his ideas were utopian, [Jefferson] regarded himself as an idealist who wanted to benefit humankind, improve society, and offer a happier life.” Andrew O’Shaughnessy is Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, and the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. His most recent book was The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of Empire, which was awarded the George Washington Book Prize.

Joseph Wright, a native of the West Riding of Yorkshire, started working in a factory at the age of 6. He did not learn to read until he was 15, inspired to do so by a workmate who read news bulletins about the Franco-Prussian War. Wright was taught by another worker who used the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress as texts. He then attended night school, for six pence a week; practiced shorthand by taking down sermons in the Methodist chapel his family atteneded; was part of a Sunday school where he organized a lending library; and at the age of 18 started his own night school. But the time time he was 21, he had saved up enough for a term at the University of Heildelberg, to which he walked 250 miles from the port of Antwerp in order to save his money. Eventually he earned a PhD from Heidelberg in comparative linguistics, and from 1901 to 1925, Joseph Wright was Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford, a pioneer in the study of regional English dialect, and taught among others J.R.R. Tolkein. While his eventual profession might make Wright extraordinary, many of the particulars of his education were absolutely typical, as Jonathan Rose makes clear in his monumental book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Published in 2001, it won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize and the British Council Prize. Its third edition is published this fall by Yale University Press. Jonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. He served as the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and also as the president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association.

In the last days of 1358, thousands of French villagers across northern France revolted against a faltering regime, from Normandy in the west, to Picardy and Champagne in the east. Castles and manor houses were burned and looted, noblemen and the families were assaulted, murdered, and possibly raped. Enraged nobles counterattacked, executing rebels, or those they believed to be rebels, and burning whole villages. This was the Jacquerie, taking its name from “Jacques Bonhomme”, the sobriquet given to its participants. It was one of the many calamitous events of that decade, which had begun with the Black Death in 1348. But what is its story? Why did the Jacquerie arise? Who were they? Why did this revolt so quickly end? And were there any lasting effects? With me to describe the story of the Jacquerie is Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Senior Lecturer at the University of St. Andrew’s, and author of The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasant’s Revolt. A former fellow of All Souls Oxford, she is also a general editor of The Medieval Journal, and editor in chief of St. Andrew’s Studies in French History and Culture.