Historically Thinking

One California afternoon William Damon received a call from his daughter. A sleepless night had led her to do a little internet sleuthing, and the result was Damon discovering that the father he had thought died in World War II had in fact not only lived, but had a career in the United States Information Agency, before dying in Thailand in 1992 after a long illness. One of the results of that discovery, and the years spent not only learning about his father but reviewing his own life, is Damon’s new book A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present. As one friend of Damon’s has written, it is “a gripping detective story, a deeply touching personal memoir, a critique of developmental psychology, a compendium of life-giving maxims, and a celebration of disciplined life review.” William Damon is Professor of Education at Stanford University, and Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence. For Further Investigation Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets Joseph Amato, Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History Episode 50: Family History is Knowing Yourself--a conversation with Joseph A. Amato

Throughout human history, we have been deeply affected by our environment, particularly climate. At certain times there have been such alterations in climate that they amount to cultural shocks, resulting not only in famine, disease, and violence, but also in religious changes. That's the argument presented by this week's guest, Philip Jenkins, in his new book Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval. We discuss the mechanisms by which the climate is altered, and then alters human history, particularly religious history. Then we move on to discuss several periods of climatic shock that resulted in religious change; and speculate about how future climate change will change world religion. Finally I ask Jenkins for his secrets of being a highly productive historian, and whether or not all of his books are just chapters in an enormous book. Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, where he is also Co-Director of the Program on Historical Studies of Religion.

Throughout early modern Europe it was expected that neighbor would love neighbor as a spiritual practice, and that this corresponded with a discernible set of rules for everyday living. That's Katie Barclay's argument in her most recent book Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self. Moreover she also argues that not only was caritas an ethical norm, it was also an emotion that was part of the experience of people of all levels of society. Using Scottish legal records from the 17th and 18th centuries, she studies how this ethic and emotion of caritas shaped relationships between couples, families, and through the surrounding community. Katie Barclay is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions and Associate Professor in History, University of Adelaide. With Andrew Lynch and Giovanni Tarantino, she edits Emotions: History, Culture, Society.

In 1347 the population of England was something on the order of 5.5 million. After the first wave of the Black Death had crashed upon the island’s shores and then receded, that population had been reduced to 2.8 million. Immense tragedy lies behind that number, and immense consequences as well. But the plague would return to England again in 1361, 1369, and 1375, with further human cost. And the climate made war against the English as well, with a cold period that led to crop loss and famine. Investigating the consequences of the Black Death has been one of the major areas of research for historians of medieval England since nearly the creation of modern history. Now Professor Mark Bailey offers us a new interpretation of those consequences, in a deeply researched and thought through study After the Black Death: Economy, society, and the law in fourteenth-century England. Mark Bailey is Professor of Late Medieval History at the University of East Anglia.

In her new book Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue, Emily K. Abel has written the first history of fatigue, one which also contains a memoir of her own experiences as a cancer survivor afflicted with fatigue. In this wide-ranging history, Abel shows how our view of fatigue is intimately connected with our view of work, and how "the American cultural emphasis on productivity intersect to stigmatize those with fatigue...When fatigue limits our ability to work, our society sees us as burdens or worse." Beyond that one of the particular burdens of fatigue is that is has such an immediate effect on one's life that no friend or medical test can confirm. Abel explains how fatigue how it has been ignored and misunderstood by both the general public and medical professionals, but she also shows how we have attempted to treat it through a variety of sometimes terrifying means. Emily K. Abel is professor emerita of public health and women’s studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of several books, including Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940.

A young boy hands out flags to the public prior to the start of the 1981 Inauguration Day parade. Source: US National Archives “Patriotic history is more suspect these days than it was when I was its young student, 50 years ago,” writes Eliot Cohen. But, he continues, “civic education is also inextricably interwoven with patriotism, without which commitment to the values that make free government possible will not exist” since “civic education depends not only on an understanding of fundamental processes and insttitions, but on a commitment to those processes and institutions…” These are observations contained in Cohen’s contribution to a new title from Templeton Press, How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow's Schools, edited by Michael J. Petrilli and Chester E. Finn, Jr. With me to discuss this essay, civic education, and the possibility of teaching history for the common good are Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of the History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, himself a former public school social studies teacher, and Eliot Cohen, Dean and Robert E. Osgood Professor of the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. We've never tried anything like this on Historically Thinking before--getting together people who disagree about some things, but also respect one another and have a basis from which to reach agreement. But we think that you'll like the result. For Further Investigation Eliot A. Cohen, “History, Critical and Patriotic: Americans need a history that educates but also inspires," Education Next Jonathan Zimmerman, "Civic Education in the Age of Trump: Public schools in the United States Public schools in the United States aren’t teaching students how to engage diverse opinions."

By August of 1916, the combatants in the First World War had been locked in struggle for two years. While the German Empire had enjoyed astonishing and unexpected success on the eastern front, on the Western Front things were very different. The German plan to bleed the French Army dry at Verdun had begun in February, and had months of further futility and agony to go. The Allied attempt to break the German lines along the River Somme had begun on July 1, and would go on to November, with increasingly marginal and catastrophic results. If ever there was a time for both sides to consider a peace settlement, the autumn of 1916 was it. As Philip Zelikow argues in his new book The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917, the possiblity of peace was much more substantial than has been generally realized. The failure to achieve it would have consequences that are almost too many to categorized, and provides us today with profound lessons. Philip Zelikow is White Burkett Miller Professor of History and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the University of Virginia. A past director of the Miller Center at UVA, he was also Executive Director of the 9-11 Commission.

This is the third of our conversations on the skills of historical thinking, and this time the subject is sourcing. It’s a term invented by Sam Wineburg–patron saint of this podcast, whom you can listen to in Episode 100, also talking about sourcing–and it refers to the act of identifying sources, contextualizing and assessing documents for bias, reliability, relevance, and point of view. To paraphrase the title of one of Sam's books, sourcing is perhaps the most unnatural act of historical thinking, and it's one that teachers of history perhaps find the most difficult to teach. That's certainly the case for Leah Shopkow, Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. The difference is that she decided to something about it, not just for herself, but for all those attempting to teach sourcing. This she has done in a new book The Saint and the Count: A Case Study for Reading Like a Historian. It’s an exciting book because it's really what I hope will be a new genre. Simultaneously it's both a monograph on a medieval subject that should be of interest to any medieval historian, and a primer for undergraduates (and graduates; and even faculty) on the art of historical thinking. This is like finding a delicious candy bar that scares away bears, and helps you lose weight. (This week's image was suggested by Leah Shopkow; it's of a reliquary designed to contain a relic of St. Thomas Becket, and on its sides shows his murder. When you listen to the podcast you'll realize how appropriate this is.)

Today's podcast is something we haven't done for a year, a conversation with another history podcaster. A year ago, just as the pandemic was beginning to ooze out over the globe, I talked with Michael Robinson, host of the great Time to Eat the Dogs. This week I talk with Daniel Gullotta, who hosts a podcast I’ve thoroughly enjoyed since it began, The Age of Jackson. Daniel focuses on talking with authors of the latest books that focus on American politics, culture, religion—and just about everything else—in the first fifty years of the 19th century. Lately he has featured conversations on the two Shawnee brothers who shaped American history; fear of Mormons in Jacksonian politics; and “sexual tumult” in 19C America. I talk with Daniel about his funny accent; Sicilian-Australians; why he got interested in American religion; and bespoke tailoring, as well as podcasting, and American evangelical support for the Democratic Party in the 1820s.

In 1696, Isaac Newton, then Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, moved rather suddenly to London. There he took the position of Master of the Royal Mint, residing at first nearby the mint in the Tower of London. He would by the end of his life have spent more time living in London then in Cambridge. Yet historians have often been reticent, even embarrassed, to delve into the second act of Newton's life. After gravity, the calculus, and optics it all seems so pedestrian. Fortunately Patricia Fara, Emeritus Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, has taken Newton's London life seriously. In her book Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career she unpacks Newton's other life: as a royal official, a courtier, a builder of institutions, a proponent and beneficiary of empire, and an acquirer of worldly goods. Along the way she shares such gems with us as the number of silver chamberpots Newton owned when he died (two); what Newton changed about Britain's money; his favorite book of the Bible (Daniel); where he invested his money; and his time in Parliament as Member for the University of Cambridge. And, connecting the various episodes of the book, is an analysis of a painting by William Hogarth, in which there are many Newtonian resonances.

This is the second of Historically Thinking’s yearlong series on the the skills of historical thinking. In our first installment this year, which was Episode 196, we heard cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham explain reading comprehension, without which none of the other skills really work. Today in the podcast's 200th episode we’re going to tackle Connecting. If we put connecting into the form of a question, it would be something like “How does this document [or any other source, from portraits to shoes to stone walls] fit into a bigger picture?” Connecting joins together information from various sources, near and far from each other. It compares & contrasts, it corroborates testimony, it observes interesting links. Connecting introduces the idea that history is first a way of seeing, before it can become a way of thinking. There’s no better way to discuss connecting, or any other skill of historical thinking, than to consider an exemplar of that skill. If you were trying to craft a silver teapot, you wouldn’t want to read a book about it, not even a stack of books. You’d want to watch a master craftsman at work, and be able to ask lots of questions; maybe even have a go at it yourself, under their careful and experienced eye. Today’s exemplar is the book The Ghost of Galileo…in a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War, just published by Oxford University Press. Its author and our guest is John Lawrence Heilbron, Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is also Vice Chancellor Emeritus. Professor Heilbron is a native of the Bay Area, and earned both his AB and MA in Physics from Berkeley, before continuing on at Berkeley to take a PhD Degree in the History of Science under the direction of Thomas S. Kuhn. He has also served as Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Museum for the History of Science, and is an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. His work has ranged across the history of physics and astronomy, from Niels Bohr: A Very Short Introduction (also published by Oxford) to my favorite The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories. He now divides his time between Berkeley and west Oxfordshire, where his local is the Rose and Crown in Shilton.

If you count up all his military service, George Washington was a soldier for about thirteen years. But as an elected representative he served for 26 years, first as a member of the House of Burgesses in Virginia, then as President of the United States. And that's not counting being appointed by Virginia's legislature to the First and Second Continental Congresses, and to the Constitutional Convention. That also passes over his simultaneous service as a Justice of Fairfax County, and member of the church vestry, both of which were important local political roles. Yet for some reason we don't think of Washington as a politician, nor recognize that the use of political power was perhaps his greatest talent. Fortunately David O. Stewart has remedied this deficit with his new book, George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father. There are few better people with whom to talk about George Washington then David O. Stewart. He’s the author of numerous histories, including Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy. For Further Investigation David O. Stewart writes, "I'm a fan of small books on Washington." He suggests: Edmund Morgan, The Genius of George Washington Don Higginbotham, ed., George Washington Reconsidered Paul Longmore, The Invention of George Washington

This bonus episode is with Guy Raffa, last heard in Episode 183 discussing his book Dante's Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy. It was a great conversation about Italy, and the culture and idea of Italy. But then and since I've been wanting to talk about Dante's poetry, particularly about the Divine Comedy. This was my chance to not only do that, but to talk with Guy about how to approach poetry which is notoriously difficult to understand. It's hard enough for us to do that. How does Guy help other people do it? What do we have to do to comprehend difficult things? Here are the passages that Guy and I talk about, with Guy's brief explanations of them: Inf. 34.70-81, 88-93: Virgil’s flip, and the 180 degree change in perspective. Through center of gravity, the world is truly upside down! Purg. 1.1-6, 130-136: Opening verses (poem as voyage, def. of Purgatorio) and final verses of the canto, with the reed of humility (golden bough), Ulysses intratext, main theme—cleansing, renewal, hope—of the entire second cantica. Par. 1.64-72: Blast off from Terrestrial Paradise to the Celestial realm. Glaucus simile (Ovid), neologism (trasumanar)—new language—to represent Paradise, a place “beyond the human”.. They're conceptually difficult passages, which is why Guy chose them. We recommend that you follow along, either in your own copy made from dead trees, or online at Digital Dante.

"Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born, and never could be extinguished." -Harriet Martineau John C. Calhoun was, for his contemporaries, an unforgettable presence whether they despised or cherished him. Harriet Martineau, an English social theorist and pioneering feminist, made the above unforgettable observation. Compared to others of his opponents, she was positively kind. They saw him as the human embodiment of Milton's Satan, a burning bright Lucifer with magnetic personality and brilliant arguments for evil–in Calhoun's case for the "positive good" of racial chattel slavery. Yet even his supposed followers could recoil from him, or rather resent the strong hands by which he guided them. Calhoun was born of a Scots family in the South Carolina backcountry. Raised a Democratic Republican, he was educated in the Federalist bastions of Yale College and the Lichfield Law School. Within a few short years following his graduation he had become one of the leaders of the House of Representatives, and from 1818 to 1824 he served as one of the most dynamic and effective peacetime American Secretaries of War. A contestant for President in the 1824 election, had he secured that office, the political history of the United States might have been somewhat altered. But as Vice President first to John Quincy Adams, and then to Andrew Jackson, he became enmeshed in South Carolina's struggles against the tariff and the power of the Federal government. For nearly the rest of his life, following his falling out with Jackson and his departure in 1832 from the office of the Vice President, Calhoun would serve as Senator from South Carolina, and leader of the Southern forces arrayed against the Northern forces that were bent on destroying the "Southern way of life"–by which they meant chattel slavery. While Calhoun's arguments might be thought to have died with the last guns of the Civil War, his political theories have had a long and curious afterlife. All of this is made clear by Robert Elder in his new biography Calhoun: American Heretic. Bob is Assistant Professor of History at Baylor University. This is second book, and his second appearance on the podcast.

Eliza Lucas Pinckney was born in 1722 on the island of Antigua in the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, one of the tinier colonies of the British Empire, and she died in 1793 in Philadelphia, the capital of the new American Republic. Those places of birth and death, and the seventy-odd years between the two events, encapsulate a life that not only saw tumultuous change, but helped to create it. For Eliza Pinckney was one of the wealthiest, most respected, and influential women of her era. This was not only through the legacy of her remarkable children, and the labor of those she enslaved, but because of her own intelligence, entrepreneurship, and keen understanding of the world around her in all its diversity and complexity—with one or two important exceptions, as Lorri Glover makes clear in her new biography Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution. Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. Her previous books include Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries, and The Fate of the Revolution: Virginians Debate the Constitution. This is her third appearance on the podcast. (The fabric in the image in the header, and in full beneath, is from Eliza Pinckney's bed canopy which featured a design of an indigo plant. As Lorri wrote me, "I love it that she slept below indigo." The fragment of the canopy now held in the Charleston Museum) For Further Investigation Books and digital resources recommended by Lorri Glover Books "I loved this book on the history of indigo": Andrea Feeser, Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life (2013) "For people interested in women in the Revolution, I suggest this collection of essays": Barbara Oberg, ed., Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World (2019) "A great general overview": Matthew Mulcahy, Hubs of Empire: The Southeastern Lowcountry and British Caribbean (2014) "For capturing the material culture and society of 18th-century Charleston": Emma Hart, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (2010) Digital Resources "For the Pinckneys, the starting point is Connie Schulz's digital projects. Both are behind paywalls, but this is necessary to support the team's important work." The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry The Papers of the Revolutionary Era Pinckney Statesmen "Here is the entry on Eliza from the South Carolina Encyclopedia." Photos "And here is a link to the Smithsonian's photos of Eliza's dress."

We've just begun a unique experiment, creating a year long series devoted to explain what historical thinking is, why it's important, and how to do it. The series kicked off this week with a conversation I had with Daniel Willingham about "comprehension", the first necessary skill for historical thinking–without understanding what we read, it's very hard to think about the past. When we're done, there will be twelve monthly conversations, eleven devoted solely to one skill. (The twelfth, in case you're wondering, will wrap it up in a bow and put it by the tree, which is an apt metaphor because it will come in December.) Additionally there will be other conversations (most of them short ones, we hope) that you can find on the Historically Thinking website, three or more devoted to each of the skills. It will be we hope an unparalleled resource for students, teachers, and anyone who's interested in history. So it seems useful to moment to bring a golden oldie up out of the archives, a conversation with my friend Lendol Calder in which we discuss the skills of historical thinking. Note that the list could be shorter; it could be longer. But this is a list that he likes, and that I like, and it's what we're sticking with. As I wrote way back when this was the thirty-ninth episode of the podcast, there are few better to discuss history and how to think historically than Lendol Calder, my onetime colleague in Augustana College's department of history, and a recognized authority in the scholarship of teaching and learning. A Carnegie Scholar, and the 2010 Illinois Professor of the Year, Calder shares these insights with history teachers around the country. Today, we're delighted to have him share them with us. An eminent historian once wrote to me "Lendol Calder has done more than anybody else to teach us about what history teaching is, or should be." So give Calder a listen; he has a right to his opinion. For Further Investigation Lendol Calder, "But What is Our Story?" (teachinghistory.org) Sam Wineburg, "Reading Abraham Lincoln: An expert/expert study in the interpretation of historical texts." Cognitive Science, Volume 22, Issue 3, Pages 319-346. –Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of the Teaching of the Past (Temple University Press, 2011. Sam Wineburg, Daisy Martin, and Chauncey Monte-Sano, Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School History Classrooms Paperback (Teachers College Press, 2012).

When I used to grade historical essays, I would provide students with a rubric that I stole from Lendol Calder, and which allowed them to understand how they were being evaluated, and for what. The very first item on the rubric reads as follows: Comprehension: What do the documents say/mean? Accurately reconstructs the meaning of documents. No misreadings, serious misconceptions of authors’ meanings, or relevant documents ignored. Comprehension is not something I had ever given a lot of thought to, until I began to teach. I think that was a mistake, because the more I taught, the more I realized that comprehension was first on that rubric for a reason. Indeed, I have a hypothesis that most academic problems begin with a problem in comprehension–perhaps rooted in the mistaken belief that just because we've read something we have comprehended it. Without appreciating comprehension and how it works it's impossible to teach reading; and without good reading, there is no historical thinking. But historians don't think a lot about comprehension. That's not our fault, it's not something that we should study. We should leave that to those who study the mind and how it works, and that's why in this conversation I talk with Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Dan's research is focused upon the application of cognitive psychol0gy to K-16 education. Today’s conversation is based around the arguments of his book The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Works. You'll hear us talk about why reading is like cooking Chicken Milanese; what task analysis is, and how it can help us break down the act of reading; why background knowledge is indispensable for reading; and why digital devices are not the problem they're often made out to be.

On December 2, 2020, the University of Vermont announced that it would be eliminating the geology, religion, and classics departments, and also eliminating majors in Asian Studies, German, and Italian as part of cuts to programs in the College of Arts and Sciences with less than 25 or fewer students enrolled, or fewer than five graduates per year. The Academic Socal Internet (or at least its humanities sector) predictably exploded, along lines which are pretty familiar by now to those who follow such things, with anger at neo-liberal corporatism, American anti-intellectualism, and so on. Those who mustered a defense did so by proclaiming that the arts and humanities foster necessary critical thinking skills; or that these were necessary parts of general education at the University of Vermont; that the liberal arts are devalued. Incredibly enough, many of these points repeat those made for over a hundred years, as Eric Adler explains in his illuminating book The Battle for the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debates Can Save the Humanities Today. While the book centers upon intellectual debates in late 19th and early 20th century America, it ranges as far back as Marcus Tullius Cicero, and is as contemporary as the news from Vermont of December 2, 2020. Dr. Eric Adler is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland. His scholarly interests include Roman historiography, Latin prose, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of the humanities. For Further Investigation Charles Francis Adams, Jr. 1884. A College Fetich: An Address Delivered before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa in Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, June 28, 1883, 3rd edition. Boston: Lee and Shepard. Irving Babbitt. 1986. Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities. Washington, DC: National Humanities Institute. Originally published in 1908. Charles W. Eliot. 1969. A Turning Point in Higher Education: The Inaugural Address of Charles William Eliot as President of Harvard College, October 19, 1869. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Roger L. Geiger. 2015. The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Robert E. Proctor. 1998. Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve Our Schools, 2nd edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

During the American Revolution just about everyone in the thirteen colonies—or, after July 2, 1776, the new United States—could be justly termed a traitor. For rebellious colonists prior to 1776, it was Parliament who had betrayed the English constitution. For royal officials, resistance and then rebellion was treason to the monarch. After independence, those who Americans identified numerous traitors in their midst—not only those who remained loyal to the old order of things, but even those who persisted a little too long in neutrality, or pacifism. As a legal issue, treason was in practice connected to numerous other things—to the power to arrest and detain; to the authority of the American military; to the composition of juries; and to the meaning of citizenship. With me to discuss the legal history of treason in the American Revolution is Carlton F.W. Larson, author of The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. It is a legal history, but also a social history of how treason was defined, prosecuted, and adjudicated in the colony, and then the commonwealth, of Pennsylvania. Carlton Larson is Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at the Davis School of Law at the University of California Davis. A leading expert on the laws of treason, he has also just published On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law.

Here's a little lagniappe, a conversation with frequent guest Mark Salisbury of TuitionFit on higher ed headlines of December 2020, and some speculation about the year in higher ed to come. Also contains news you can use!

In the spring of 1918, a young Scottish diplomat began to put together a plot that was intended to change the entire direction of the Great War, and save the Allies from defeat. As Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart began making his plans, Germany’s Operation Michael was threatening to break the western front open before American troops arrived in full strength. Lockhart thought that he could bring Russia back into the war that it had abandoned the year before. He would do this by killing Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, overthrowing the Bolshevik government, and installing a new regime that would attack Germany and reestablish an eastern front. This plot, and the extraordinary personalities and stakes involved in it, are recounted in Jonathan Schneer’s new book The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia, which among other things demonstrates the truth of the moldy old cliché that fact is stranger than fiction. Jonathan Schneer is Professor of Emeritus of History at Georgia Tech in the School of History and Sociology. A specialist in the history of modern Britain, his books include London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis, The Thames: England’s River, Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet, 1940-45, and The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of Arab-Israeli Conflict, which won a 2010 National Jewish Book Award. He is currently working on a book about the British General Strike of 1926.

Anyone who has been in a classroom in the last 25 years has heard someone—perhaps themselves—worry about the effects of “digital distraction” on students’ attention span–perhaps even on their minds. In the 90's there were arguments about whether professors should allow laptops for note-taking, which now seems very quaint. Now we’re wondering if Zoom turns us into Zombies. (Or should that be Zoombies?) My guest Jim Lang has written a book that takes that fretful conversation in a different direction. Rather than worrying about distraction, he argues that we should be increasing our students’ (and children’s) ability to properly attend to things. James M. Lang is Professor of English and director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts . Among is previous books is Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. His most recent book is Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It.

In 1775 Johannes Papunhunk died in a Moravian village in Ohio. He was not a Moravian, or any other kind of European, but a member of the Munsee tribe who had been born some seventy years before. In his long life he had been a prophet, preacher, reformer, and diplomat, dedicated to finding a home where his people could live in peace. As Richard Pointer observes, Papunhunk bewilders us because he breaks apart our categories. He was a prophet who inspired peacemaking not war; a nativist reformer who embraced Christianity; a critic of white practices admired by leading Pennsylvanians; a war refugee, protected by some whites against other whites. Papunhunk refuses to be who we think he ought to be. In his complicated life, we can find a different way of seeing early America. Dr. Richard Pointer is Emeritus Professor of History at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He has previously written Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion and Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Religious Diversity.

In 1709, one of the great European technological achievements of the 18th century was realized—the reverse engineering of a formula for porcelain that the Chinese had used for almost two millennia. That this recipe was recreated in Saxony, in the heart of middle Europe, meant that porcelain would have a special place not merely in the technology, business, industry, and culture of the German states, but at the center of their political economy and in their relation to an ever-globalizing capitalist economy. With me to discuss this fascinating history is Suzanne L. Marchand. She is Boyd Professor of History at Louisana State University, with a particular focus on European intellectual history, and the history of the humanities in modern Europe. But her most recent book is Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, western culture became increasingly interested in regulating society through the precise, accurate measurement of time. “By the late fourteenth century,” writes my guest Ken Mondschein in his new book On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping, “mechanical clocks controlled the bells in medieval towns…These regular bells arguably produced a change in time consciousness at a general level: a device for measuring abstract time began to be used to regulate both personal and public activities.” Ultimately, Mondschein argues, without clocks the western world as we know it would not exist. Ken Mondschein is a historian of the middle ages, with a particular interest in technology and the arts of warfare. He is also credentialed as a master of historical fencing by the United States Fencing Coaches' Organization, and is the translator of several historical fencing treatises.

In 2008 when Jonathan Zimmerman received a teaching award, his dean introduced him by telling the assembled audience what he books and scholarly articles he had written. He writes, “I don’t begrudge her for that, at all. What else could she go on, really? She had never been to one of my classes. And even if she had, how would a single visit—or two—help her say anything meaningful or important about my instruction? What other evidence could she invoke? What did she know about me as a teacher, really? What do any of us know about that?” The answer provided by his new book is…not very much, at all. In The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, he chronicles the ups and downs of teaching in American colleges: the great teachers; the lazy teachers; the complaints by students; the attempts at reform; the denial that such a things as mysterious as teaching are capable of reform; and then the recurrence of the entire cycle, until for the battered reader it seems that time has become a flat circle. Warning: reading the book might be for you like drinking one or three good dry martinis, stimulation and wit, soon followed by haze and depression.

Hello, in 1951 a young historian of science named Derek Price was examining a medieval manuscript in the library of Peterhouse College in Cambridge. When the pages of parchment were unbound from their 19th century binding, to his delight he saw the name “Chaucer”. But this was not a manuscript copy of the Canterbury Tales, or even a letter, but an instruction manual for a scientific instrument. In the end, as my guest Sebastian Falk explains, the manuscript turns out to have been authored not by Geoffrey Chaucer, but an obscure Benedictine monk named John of Westwyk. John’s life, and his scientific interests, affords us a window into the fascinating world of medieval European science, which Falk takes full advantage of in his new book The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. Using the few scraps of information about John that remain, Falk fills out at the rich context of medieval scientific investigation, from the colleges of Oxford, to John's own monastery of St. Alban's, and even to his participation in a crusade to (of all places) Flanders. Seb Falk is not only a historian of medieval science and qualified teacher, but at various times in his life a civil servant, lecturer, museum curator, yachmaster, marathon runner, mountaineer, and a Special Constable.

Based simply on the title, I never would have thought I would be recording a conversation with someone who wrote a book titled How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education. It might sound like that book from a couple of decades book which encouraged readers to become like Leonardo—I have to admit that I never did learn to write with my left hand as a way of becoming ambidextrous and thus much more creative. But Scott Newstok is not just writing a self-help book. It's a series of meditations on certain features of education, many of them lost, and how they might be carefully rediscovered and appropriated. At the heart of it is a really great question, which has bedeviled the minds of many: how did Shakespeare get to know so much? Newstok knows that the answer is the way in which Shakespeare was taught, in both its drudgery as well as in its pedagogical creativity. By recapturing how Shakespeare was taught, we can learn a lot about how we teach, and how we might be better teachers–and students. Scott Newstok is Professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee; and a very nice guy, as I think you'll agree.

For generations, both Asians and Europeans have thought of the Silk Road has been thought of as a highway connecting east to west. But what if both Asians and Europeans have gotten the whole point of the Silk Road wrong. What if instead of connecting the two important ends of Eurasia by bridging the empty central bit, the whole point of the Silk Road was that it was really a network that connected the heart of Eurasia to its distant peripheries. And what if it was thanks to the influences that filtered down that network of roads, the societies at the peripheries were transformed over a period of millennia, with certain eras seeing very rapid changes indeed—particularly from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century My guest today is Pamela Crossley, the Charles and Elfriede Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth College, where she specializes in the quing empire and modern Chinese history. Her most recent book is Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World, published in 2019; and it is the focus of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Akhilesh Pillalamarri, "The Epic Story of How the Turks Migrated From Central Asia to Turkey: How did modern Anatolia come to be occupied by the Turks? The historical story may surprise you." The Diplomat (June 5, 2016) Peter Golden, "The Turkic Peoples: A Historic Sketch" Global and Eurasian History: A research and reading guide created by the Rutgers University Libraries Sino-Platonic Papers: who can resist a website with such an intriguing title?

Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. Stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, obedient to their words So read, Herodotus tells us, an engraving on a memorial commemorating the Spartans who died at Thermopylae, fighting a Persian Army that ridiculously outnumbered them. It has become probably the best known battle of the ancient world. Napoleon, it must be said, could never understand why; after all, he pointed out, it was a defeat. But who were these people, who seem to have willingly committed suicide by fighting against overwhelming odds? What was the society into which they were born, the culture that curbed and directed them? What did they love? What did they hate? These and other questions are the focus of Andrew Bayliss’ new book, The Spartans, which summarizes, synthesizes, and adroitly assesses a mass of scholarship to provide us with a vision of what was Sparta. Dr. Andrew Bayliss is Senior Lecturer in Greek History in the Department of Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology at the University of Birmingham. He first remembers learning of the 300 Spartans and their stand at Thermopylae when he was 12. For Further Investigation Andrew Bayliss on video: a quick three-minute dip into "The Problem with the Spartans", or a long, long swim at 110 minutes with "Playing by the Rules? The Importance of Obedience in Spartan Society" Past HT guest Paul Cartledge is perhaps best known for his studies of ancient Sparta. Here's his classic The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece and Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World. For more on the Spartans (and much else besides), give a listen to the two conversations with the classical historian Jennifer Roberts. In Episode 116: The First Historian, we discuss Herodotus and his history of the Persian Wars. Then in Episode 121: The War Between the Greeks, or, The Forever War, we have a conversation about the war in which Sparta and Athens fought, with all the Greeks choosing one or another side. For more on Thermopylae, you can read about it HT guest Tom Holland's book Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West, and in his translation of Herodotus.

In 1321 Dante Alighieri died in the city of Ravenna, near the shores of the Adriatic. In the years since his perpetual exile from his native Florence, he had lived in a variety of places in Italy. Now he was at rest. But in future centuries even his bones would continue to move, although not so far as his body had moved in life. And, as his body diminished, his influence and legacy grew and grew, sometimes appearing in the oddest of places. Ultimately, the history of Dante’s bones is the history of the idea of Italy. Guy Raffa has written a history of Dante’s legacy, appropriately titled Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy. He is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Texas, and among other achivements has created the brilliant and wonderful Danteworlds website, which is “an integrated multimedia journey­­–combining artistic images, textual commentary, and audio recordings” of the three realms of the afterlife found in Dante’s Divine Comedy. For Further Investigation The website of Guy Raffa Danteworlds: "A multimedia journey–combining textual commentary, artistic images, and audio recordings–through the three realms (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise) of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This site contains, in addition to an abridged version of the original commentary in The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy and Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Inferno, Italian recordings of selected verses and a vast gallery of images depicting characters and scenes from the Divine Comedy. Like the books, the Danteworlds Web site is structured around a geographic representation of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise–the three worlds of Dante’s Divine Comedy." Digital Dante: "Digital Dante offers original research and ideas on Dante: on his thought and work and on various aspects of his reception." Dante's Tomb: a little essay with many photos at Atlas Obscura Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in our time

When Alexander of Macedonia took the throne of his father Philip, he inherited an expansive and wealthy kingdom; a hardened and meticulously constructed army; and a cadre of aristocrats and nobles who were used to victory, and wanted more of it. Moreover, Alexander was well-educated—in part by none other than Aristotle himself—and a military veteran. But when Philip took the throne he possessed none of these advantages. It is impossible to understand the campaigns of Alexander against Persia, and how they transformed Eurasia, without first understanding Philip of Macedon and what he accomplished. Such is the premise of Adrian Goldsworthy’s new history, Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors. Adrian Goldsworthy is a prolific historian and novelist, who lives in southern Wales; this is third appearance on Historically Thinking.

Each year tens of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints visit sites across the United States, like the recreated town of Nauvoo on the Mississippi River, or to "This is the Place" Heritage Park, just outside Salt Lake City. Thousands of young church members push handcarts across the plains, or up over the highest nearby hill, dressed in 19th century clothes. Sara Patterson argues that “as the Latter Day Saints community globalized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its relationship to space was transformed...Contemporary Mormons still want to touch and to feel [the principles of their early church], so they mark and claim the landscapes of the American West with versions of their history carved in stone.” Sara Patterson is Professor of Theological Studies at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana. She is the author of Pioneers in the Attic: Place and Memory Along the Mormon Trail, which is the focus of our conversation today.

In Xanadu, Kublai Khan had a leopard. Well, it wasn’t a leopard really, it was a cheetah. And upon that fact, and upon many other anecdotes and material objects, Timothy Brook builds a bridge that connects the history of China to the history of the world around it. He demonstrates in overwhelming and fascinating detail that far from cut off from the world, China has always been in and of the world, and the world has always been coming to China. Timothy Brook is the Republic of China Chair in the Department of History of the University of British Columbia. The general editor of Harvard University Press' series History of Imperial China, his work has tended to focus on the Ming Dynasty, but has gone back as far at the Mongol occupation of China and forward as far as the Japanese occupation of China. He is particularly interested in China in the world, as attested to by his most recent book, The Great State: China and the World, which is the focus of our conversation today

In 415 BC, Athens sent a fleet of over 100 ships and 5,000 hoplites to attack the city of Syracuse, in Sicily, an expedition that would result in catastrophe. The philosopher Plato writing decades later described a drinks party, held perhaps a few months or weeks before, given by the poet Agathon to celebrate his winning first prize in the Lenaia festival not long before. Among Agathon’s famous guests was philospher and Athenian gadfly Socrates; and coming unvited to the feast later on in Plato’s telling was Alcibiades, the chief mover and proponent of the Sicilian Expedition, and a one-time student of Socrates. Any Athenian who read Plato would have known that; and know also that Alcibiades had ultimately been exiled from Athens not once but twice; and that Socrates had been executed by the city for having “corrupted the young”, young men like Alcibiades, and others. With me to discuss what Alcibiades learned from Socrates, and the importance of political ambition, is Ariel Helfer. He is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wayne State University, and author of Socrates and Alcibiades: Plato’s Drama of Political Philosophy and Ambition, published in 2017 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. For Further Investigation Faulkner, Robert K. The Case for Greatness: Honorable Ambition and Its Critics. Yale University Press, 2008. Forde, Steven. The Ambition to Rule: Alcibiades and the Politics of Imperialism in Thucydides. Cornell University Press, 1989. Plato. Socrates and Alcibiades. Plato: Alcibiades I, Plato: Alcibiades II, Plato: Symposium (212c-223b), Aeschines of Sphettus: Alcibiades. Translated by David M. Johnson, Focus Philosophical Library/Focus Pub., 2003. Plutarch. “Life of Alcibiades.” Lives, vol. 4. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin, Harvard University Press., 1916. Romilly, Jacqueline de. Life of Alcibiades: Dangerous Ambition and the Betrayal of Athens. Translated by Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings, Cornell University Press, 2019. Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides: a Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. Edited by Robert B. Strassler. Translated by Richard Crawley, Free Press, 2008.

“Medieval Mediterranean slavery” is a phrase that might seem a bit puzzling to some listeners—surely there wasn’t slavery in the medieval Mediterrean? Was there? Indeed there was. For hundreds of years a slave trade existed throughout the Medieval Mediterranean world, taking captives from the shores of the Black Sea to Egypt, and to Italy. The slave traders were from the Republics of Venice and Genoa, and the Mameluk Sultanate. “Late medieval slavery was not an afterthought or an aberration,” writes Hannah Barker. “It lay at the heart of Mediterranean society, politics, and religion. A complex of slavery, captivity, trade, and ransom tied disparate parts of the Mediterranean together.” Hannah Barker is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe. Her book That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500, was this yeear awarded the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize by the Journal of Global Slavery; and it is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Hannah Barker has kindly provided the following list of resources and books, complete with descriptions. You should also go back and listen to Episode 95, a conversation with Daniel Hershenzon on captivity and captives in the western Mediterranean. Teaching Medieval Slavery and Captivity: "this is a project that I’m leading to provide English translations of interesting primary sources and selected bibliographies to illustrate what kind of scholarship is already available on the topic of medieval slavery and captivity. The primary audience is teachers, but it’s also set up for browsing by the curious." Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, “Empire, Monotheism and Slavery in the Greater Mediterranean Region from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era,” Past and Present 205 (2009): 3-40. "He explains how the idea of slavery based on religious difference evolved over the medieval period." Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (2009) "I see this book, along with Hershenzon’s, as parallel to mine but focused on the western Mediterranean." Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006) "This is a brilliant explanation of why the abolitionist movement emerged and succeeded at the precise moment it did." Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (2018) Eve Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (2003) "This is also a brilliant book explaining how Ottoman and post-Ottoman elites saw slavery in the context of both colonialism and abolitionist pressure."

In the history of ancient Greece, three cities dominated its politics, society, and culture. Of these, Athens and Sparta are now best known. But set in the plains of central Greece was the third apex of this “fateful triangle”, the city of Thebes. Dismissed by both Spartans and Athenians as rustics, clods, and peasants–“Boeotian swine” according the Athenians–Thebes was nevertheless deeply consequential to the life of those two rival cities. Its myths and legends became the topics of some of the greatest of Athenian drama. Its alliance with Sparta helped tip the balance of the Pelopponesian War in Sparta’s favor. And in the period of Thebes’ greatest power, when it had turned against its old ally, Boeotian armies freed the helots of Sparta in successful campaigns of liberation the like of which would not be see again, until Toussaint L'Ouverture raised up an army in Haiti, and Sherman made Georgia howl. With me to discuss the city of Thebes is Paul Cartledge, the A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, and the Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture. He is the newly elected President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and is an Honorary Citizen of (modern) Sparta. Author, editor and co-editor of (by my count) 32 books, his 33rd is Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation The Archaeological Museum of Thebes Map of Classical Thebes Essays by Paul Cartledge at History Today Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas

In 1763, James Boswell was accompanied by his new friend Samuel Johnson to Harwich, from which the young Scot then travelled to Utrecht in the Netherlands. There he was supposed to study law, which he did with great energy. But he also energetically whored, proposed marriage to eligible young ladies of fortune, and traveled about Europe making the acquaintance of the great and good. One of these was Rousseau; and it was he who suggested that Boswell travel to Corsica, and visit the Corsican revolutionary Pasquale Paoli. So Boswell did, and the book the wrote about his experiences and Paoli made Boswell's career, and made Pasquale Paoli an 18th century celebrity on either side of the Atlantic. For David Bell, Boswell's biography of Paoli is a significant moment of transition. Here was a man engaged in a democratic revolution, at the beginning of an age of revolutions fighting to establish democratic republics in North America, Europe, the Caribbean, and South America. Yet those revolutions were led by leaders who were literally men on horseback, and who had either nascent or actual cults of personality constructed around them by ardent admirers and zealous followers. So democratic republics, militarism, the cult of the dictator, all emerged simultaneously. For Bell, "the history of democracy is inextricable from the history of charisma, its shadow self." David Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University. He has previously written or co-edited seven books; Men on Horseback: Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolutions, is his eighth, and it is the subject of this week's conversation. For Further Investigation The website of David A. Bell David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It David A. Bell, "What Donald Trump and George Washington Have in Common: Charisma doesn’t have to be earned for its impact on democratic politics to be very real." Foreign Policy, August 17, 2020.

This is Nassau Hall. When it was built, it was the largest building in colonial America. Anyone walking through it today when visiting Princeton University might have some strange resonance with their own college experience. There are some differences, but...parts of it look amazingly like a late 20th century dormitory. Historians are supposed to be chroniclers of change, and sternly against the claim that things are “always that way.” But American dormitory makes one question historicism. Students are now very, very different than their predecessors of even fifty years ago, let alone three hundred years ago. And yet the residence hall remains, and thrives, often in ways that the young men of the College of New Jersey in 1772 might recognize. My guest Carla Yanni—picking up on the ideas of Marta Gutman—argues that this is because physical space is not simply a backdrop for college students. The two build each other. Or, as the architectural critic Winston Churchill once said, "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us." Carla Yanni is Professor of Art History at Rutgers University, specializing in social history of architecture in 19th- and 20th-century Britain and the United States. Her most recent book is Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory. For Further Investigation Carla Yanni's website Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's University Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson's Education Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges

This is a bonus episode of Historically Thinking, hopefully the first of several short episodes that will deal with higher ed in the time of COVID. It's changed much else, and it would seem (as the autumn semester of 2020 begins, more or less) that American higher education is going to be very different on the other side of the pandemic. Maybe. I talk with two people of very different perspectives and ways of thinking and seeing. Holly Taylor is a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health. Carla Yanni is an architectural historian at Rutgers University, whose latest book is on the history of American dormitories. Together they have a interesting take on what's going on now on campuses across the nation, and what isn't going on.

“In terms of time, my work will start with the 140th Olympiad” wrote the historian Polybius at the beginning of his History: Before this time things happened in the world pretty much in a sporadic fashion, because every incident was specific, from start to finish, to the part of the world where I happened. But ever since then history has resembled a body, in the sense that incidents in Italy and Libya and Asia and Greece are all interconnected, and everything tends toward a single outcome. That is why I have made this period the starting point of my treatment of world events. With me to discuss the historian Polybius and his work is Steele Brand. He is Professor of History at The King’s College in New York, and author of Killing for the Republic: Citizen-Soldiers and the Roman Way of War, which he and I discussed in Episode 124. For Further Investigation Arthur Eckstein, Moral Vision in the Histories of Polybius Frank W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius Brian C. McGing, Polybius' Histories Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison, eds., Polybius and His World: Essays in Memory of F.W. Walbank Polybius, translated by Robin Waterfield, The Histories Episode 45: The View from Thucydides' Tower Episode 11: The First Historian

Hello, the French thinker Blaise Pascal wrote this when considering the ability of humans to think: Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. A thinking reed.—It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world. This week's conversation is about thinking: the necessity of doing it for its own sake, and its essential aspect as part of human happiness. Talking with me is Zena Hitz, a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, and author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. For Further Investigation Scott Newstok, How To Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods Joseph Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture Mortimer Adler, How To Read A Book

In 1892, the whaling ship Progress under the command of Captain Daniel W. Gifford made an unusual voyage, not out to sea for a two to three year voyage, but up the St. Lawrence River and into the Great Lakes—the entire time under tow, rather than under sail. Its destination was Chicago and the great Columbian Exposition of 1893. With me to discuss the last voyage of the Progress, and the decades of experience that led to that voyage, is the great-great-grandson of Daniel Gifford—who is also named Daniel Gifford, but instead of a ship captain teaches history at the University of Louisville. His book that we’re discussing today is The Last Voyage of the Whaling Ship Progress: New Bedford, Chicago, and the Twilight of an Industry. It is a microhistory, a community history, the history of an inudstry, and it is full of questions about memorialization, memory, and public history. For Further Investigation The New Bedford Whaling Museum The Mystic Seaport: where among many other wonderful things you can find the Charles Morgan, the whaling ship that survived. The Chicago World's Fair The opening pages of The Last Voyage of the Whaling Ship Progress can be found here

In 1280 a enormous eruption disturbed the peace of the Chinese city of Yangzhou. It was “like a volcano erupting,” wrote one who experienced it, “a tsunami crashing.” Ceiling beams three miles away were thrown down, and tiles rattled on buildings as far as thirty miles away. The reason for this destruction was an explosion of gunpowder in Yangzhou’s imperial arsenal, which killed at least 100 men, and left behind a crater ten feet deep. How did Chinese scholars first develop gunpowder? And what does the development of gunpowder tell us not only about technological and military progress, but about innovation of all kinds, including political innovation? These are some of the questions at the heart of Tonio Andrade’s book The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History, published by Princeton University Press in 2016. Tonio Andrade is Professor of History at Emory University, where he researches and teaches in the areas of Chinese and Global history.

My great-grandfather Louis Corsiglia emigrated to the United States as a boy from Genoa, and he was a lifelong anti-imperialist Democrat. So it followed from those two things that a dictum of his was that “A Sicilian is no more an Italian than a Filipino is an American.” In its way, it’s a phrase from a lost world. If you know that Genoa is in the far north of Italy, and Sicily the uttermost south, then you get the picture. But what’s the connection between Filipinos and Americans? My guest Christoper Capozzola’s book Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century is a long answer to that question about conections. In 2011, the Obama Administration announced that the United States would be making a “pivot” to the Pacific. But as Capozzzola makes clear, the United States has always always been involved in the Pacific, and the Phillippines has always been near the heart of that involvement. Christopher Capozzola is professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology He has previously authored the award-winning Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen, and is a co-curator of “The Volunteers: Americans Join World War I, 1914-1919,” a traveling exhibition that originated at The National WWI Museum and Memorial—which devoted listeners to the podcast will know I think is one of the best history museums in the country. For Further Investigation Bound by War: the Instagram account Photography & Power in the Colonial Philippines: the US Conquest and Occupation (1898-1902) Photography & Power in the Colonial Philippines: Dean Worcester's Ethnographic Images of Filipinos (1898-1912) FilVetREP, the Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project

This week’s conversation is a rather unusual. There’s one guest, as there usually is, but this time there are two hosts—or, two people asking the questions. The guest is David Staley, whom longtime listeners to the podcast will recognized from Episode 111, where he talked about his book Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education, a collection of ideas about the kind of higher education we might have in America if we wanted to. What I didn’t really appreciate then was that David is the rare historian who is as interested in the future as he is in the past. Indeed, he’s written essays, and even an entire book about this, which is appropriately enough titled History and the Future: Using Historical Thinking to Imagine the Future. We’ve talked about history and the future before, in Epsiode 46 with Professor David Hochfelder, and since I’m deeply skeptical about this concept I thought it good to talk with David about it. And even more reason to, considering how in the summer of 2020 we are deeply uncertain about our future. The other fellow asking questions is an old friend of mine, Brent Orrell, who is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on issues of career and technical education, criminal justice reform, and prison education and reentry. Indeed, he has a podcast about these issues called “Hardly Working” (here's a link to the latest episode, which has some very handy ways of subscribing). I thought that Brent would have a lot of great questions to ask David from a very different perspective, and I hope you agree that it was.

On January 15, 1817, a group of some of the most prominent African-American leaders called a public meeting at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, which had at that time one of the largest communities of free blacks in the United States. They had intended to support a plan for settling American blacks in Africa. But the audience of supposed supporters vociferously disagreed. They saw themselves as American citizens, and had no desire to go to an Africa which they had never seen. My guest Christopher Bonner argues that African-Americans did not seize onto American citizenship; they actually created it. Citizenship in the early nineteenth century was a malleable concept. African-Americans took advantage of that, and by contributing to the developing legal and political definition of citizenship were an essential part of transforming the legal order of the republic. Christopher Bonner is Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship, which is the focus of our conversation today.

In the movie The Third Man, Orson Welles delivered this sensational adlibbed speech: You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. This was unfair to Swabia, which invented the cuckoo clock, and to Switzerland, whose mercenaries had been up to their elbows in that bloodshed, transmuting blood into gold which flowed into Switzerland funding banks, dairies, clockmakers, and the multiplex knife. But Welles’ take on 16th century history is not that far removed from Catherine Fletcher’s new history The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West, which reminds us that the art of the Renaissance existed in a world of warfare; and that its literature thrived despite, or because of, deep religious passions. Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, and Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has previously published The Black Prince of Florence, a biography of Duke Alessandro de Medici of Florence, and has served as adviser to the set designers of the TV series Wolf Hall. For Further Investigation Michael Mallett and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars 1494-1559–a detailed account of the military side. BBC In Our Time: discussions on The Borgias and The Medici. Alexander Lee Machiavelli and Erica Benner Be Like the Fox–two recent contrasting takes on the thinker’s life and times. The Hidden Florence app for a virtual walking tour through Florence A virtual tour of the Palazzo Te in Mantua: Ali Smith, How To Be Both–a fascinating piece of fiction on the themes of gender and Renaissance art

In 1728, philosopher, theologian, and Anglican minister George Berkeley wrote these verses: The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime Barren of every glorious theme, In distant lands now waits a better time, Producing subjects worthy fame. Not such as Europe breeds in her decay: Such as she bred when fresh and young, When heavenly flame did animate her clay, By future poets shall be sung. Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last. As Michael Kimmage reminds his readers in his new book The Abandonment of the West: the History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy, in the 1860’s Americans took this poem as a kind of prophecy, so much so that they memorialized it with a painting in the United States Capitol, and named the new home of the University of California for the philosopher-bishop. How that idea of the West became enshrined in American architecture, politics, and diplomacy is Kimmage’s story—as well as how it has fallen out of all those things. Michael Kimmage is Ordinary Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the Catholic University of American in Washington, DC. From 2014 to 2016 he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio.

For generations historians have talked about "the ancient economy". When they want to be more specific, they have written of "the ancient Mediterranean economy." Given the diversity of the ancient Mediterranean world, that's not much more specific. Indeed, sometimes the search for unity has obscured the beauty of specificity, and even how economies and cultures changed over time. In his book The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome, J.G. Manning seeks to understand the economies of the ancient Mediterranean prior to the rise of Rome. But he's also meditating on theories of the origin of economies, and their interconnection both to one another and to the human and natural world around them.. It's not a large book, physically, but there is a great deal between its covers. Joseph G. Manning has 2009 been the William Kelly and Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of Classics and History at Yale University. He is also a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School and, believe it or not, Professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies in the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Author of numerous monographs and articles, he’s most recently published The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome, which is the subject of our conversation today.