Shows
Historically Thinking1942: Peter Fritzsche on the year when war engulfed the worldIn this episode of Historically Thinking, host Al Zambone speaks with historian Peter Fritzsche about his book "1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe." The conversation explores how 1942 marked the transformation of regional conflicts into a truly global war, examining the unprecedented scale and movement of the conflict, the suffering and displacement of millions, and the ideological forces at play in every one of the warring powers. Key topics include the Holocaust, anti-colonial movements, industrial mobilization, and how the memory of World War II has been shaped by the specter of World War III.00:00 — Introduction: 1942 as...
2025-10-0127 minHistorically ThinkingThe Ramos Gin Fizz: A New Orleans Liquid History, with John Shelton ReedJoin Al Zambone and guest John Shelton Reed (author of The Ramos Gin Fizz, for the LSU Press series on iconic New Orleans cocktails) for a deep dive into the history, culture, and legend of the Ramos Gin Fizz—a cocktail that’s as much a symbol of New Orleans as it is a drink. From its 19th-century origins and the city’s cosmopolitan mix, to Prohibition, Huey Long, and the modern cocktail renaissance, this episode explores how a single drink can carry the weight of place and time.00:00 — Podcast intro00:23 — Welcome and guest introduction02:35 — The Ramos Gi...
2025-08-1323 minHistorically ThinkingThe Accidental Tyrant: Kim Il-Sung’s Rise to Power, and How He Kept It, with Fyodor TertitskiyIn September 1945, various factions within the Soviet state were determining how the new nation of North Korea would be ruled, and who would be its leader. In late September a list was generated of potential leaders, and passed to higher authorities. The name Kim Il-Sung was not on it. At the time the future dictator of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea was recently returned to Korea, where he had not been for years if not decades, and aspired to be the vice-Mayor of Pyongyang. But extraordinarily by late October, this obscure figure who had not had any rank hi...
2025-06-2531 minHistorically ThinkingJoseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, with John G. TurnerJoseph Smith was the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, known by those outside the church during his life and today as the Mormons. But Joseph Smith was many things besides: the child of a struggling family gradually moving westward in search of opportunity, a day laborer, visionary, seer; treasure hunter; translator; revelator; prophet; elder, banker, prisoner, wrestler, real estate speculator, polygamist, Lieutenant General, Master Mason, Mayor, and martyr.“America,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844, “is the country of the future…[a] country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs...
2025-06-1838 minHistorically ThinkingRevolution to Come“How we think about revolution,” writes my guest Dan Edelstein, “is ultimately conditioned by how we think about history.” Classical philosophers viewed history as chaotic and directionless, and sought to keep historical change—especially revolutions—at bay. “Revolutions,” so far as Greeks and Romans were concerned, “were more likely to bring about death and destruction than universal harmony.” This conception prevailed until the eighteenth century. It was then–and only then, Edelstein argues–that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of history as a form of progress and of revolution as its catalyst, completely inverting the ancient model of revolution. These...
2025-06-1131 min
LITERAPUC-SP#59- Divulga LCL: Conversas sobre publicações e eventos no mundo acadêmico | Um bate-papo com Milena Maia e Olívia ZamboneBem-vindas e bem-vindos ao LiteraPUC-SP, o podcast do programa de estudos pós-graduados em literatura e crítica literária da PUC São Paulo, idealizado e produzido por nossas pesquisadoras e pesquisadores.O podcast do Programa de Pós-graduação em Literatura e Crítica Literária está de volta para sua primeira temporada de 2025! No episódio de estreia, recebemos Milena Maia e Olívia Zambone para falar sobre o "Divulga LCL", um projeto dedicado a divulgar eventos e chamadas para periódicos acadêmicos na área de Literatura e Letras. Milena Maia é doutoranda em Li...
2025-03-0736 min
Historically ThinkingEpisode 397: Mutiny on the Black PrinceIn April 1769 a small British vessel sailing along the southern coast of Hispaniola discovered a shipwreck near the current border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. An investigation found no survivors aboard. But they also found a log which identified that ship as the Black Prince. And there the mystery might have ended. But over the next eight years, “ship’s crew members surfaced in unexpected places and recounted its demise.”
That demise is part of the story in James H. Sweet’s Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. But so t...
2025-02-241h 07Historically ThinkingEpisode 396: Obscure Important HistorianLists of important Roman historians would certainly include cerebral Polybius (who, to be fair, was also Greek); the friend of Augustus, Titus Livius; the austere Tacitus; and the gossipy Suetonius,. To one extent or another, all of them were participant observers–not simply historians, but actors in the drama of Roman life and politics.
Not usually included on this list of great Roman participant-historians is Cassius Dio. Like Polybius, he was Greek. But since he was born somewhere between 155 and 165 AD, and died in the 230s, the Mediterranean world had changed quite a bit since Polybius’ time, three centuries before. For C...
2025-02-1755 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 395: Summer of Fire and BloodIt was the greatest popular uprising in western Europe prior to the French Revolution. By spring 1525, across regions of what are now Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and France, armed bands of peasants marched to defeat their lords and to overturn the social and religious hierarchy that had existed for centuries. At least 100,000 people were involved, and likely many more. When it collapsed in the summer of 1525, perhaps 1% of the regions population were killed in just two months, making it a summer of fire and blood.
Which, as it happens, is the title of my guest’s new book. Lyndal Roper is th...
2025-02-101h 10Historically ThinkingEpisode 394: Greek RevolutionIf English speakers—or French speakers, or Spanish speakers, or really most any speaker of any language other than Greek…or Turkish—think about the Greek Revolution at all, then that’s amazing. If they do not, then they continue to ignore one of the most consequential collection of events in the 19th century, a series of imperial overlaps, social convulsions, massacres, sieges, expulsions, and sometimes battles that not only resulted in an independent Greece, but also changed forever the culture of the eastern Mediterranean, and birthed nationalism as a successful way of not only theorizing but of being.
My guest Yan...
2025-02-031h 14Historically ThinkingEpisode 393: Lawless RepublicMarcus Tullius Cicero lived from 106 BC to his murder in 43 BC. He was a writer, a philosopher, a traveller, a consul of the Roman Republic, and perhaps one of the last people to take the Roman Republic seriously–even when it was long past its shelf date. But most importantly, Cicero was a lawyer—and it was his practice of the law that was at the heart of his philosophy, politics, and devotion to the republic.
Josiah Osgood has written a biography of Cicero that is a biography of some of his most famous legal cases. Through this narrative, we see a...
2025-01-271h 10Historically ThinkingEpisode 392: Papa von RankeHe was and has been criticized as a “mere burrower into archives”; as a dry man without any ideas; as a painter of miniatures rather than of broad portraits; as a conservative by liberals, and insufficiently dogmatic by conservatives; as motivated by the Lutheran religion of his forebears, but also as a scholar set against teleology and mysticism.
This was Leopold von Ranke, born in 1795, dying in Berlin in 1886. Over his long life, he not only influenced the historical world by his writings, but by his students, and their students. Through his teaching and his examples, he altered not only the...
2025-01-1355 minHistorically Thinking391: Roman RoadsListeners to this podcast are certainly aware of the saying that “all roads lead to Rome”; and, given this audience, you might even be aware that this probably derived from the observation mīlle viae dūcunt hominēs per saecula Rōmam, made by the 12th century theologian and poet Alain de Lille. But what is the history of the Roman roads, or rather, what is the history of how people imagined and related to the Roman Roads? And how has that imaginary influenced the ways that we think of Rome, the classical world, roads, travel, and perhaps even the powe...
2025-01-0700 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 390: Atlantic Ocean“He was a bold man who first ate an oyster,” observed Jonathan Swift; and in fact the first human interaction with the Atlantic Ocean was probably eating shellfish, traces of which can be found along the Western Cape of South Africa dating back 160,000 years ago. When humans began to finally live in numbers along the ocean coast, their culture changed. They took their food from it, and from the shoreline, and their metals from the rocks and marshes along its coast. In time they built boats capable of venturing along those coasts, and then gradually farther and farther out. All of t...
2024-12-3000 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 389: Indian Religions“India has 2,000,000 million gods, and worships them all,” wrote Mark Twain, following his 1896 speaking tour of British India. “In religion other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.” Twain was exaggerating, but perhaps only a little. Consider that Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism all took form some 2,500 years ago in South Asia, that they and their offshoots are now practiced by hundreds of millions of people around the world, and you will see how that wealth has been spread about.
In his new book Religions of Early India: A Cultural History, Richard H. Davis explores how that wealth was accumulated, and how i...
2024-12-231h 06Historically ThinkingEpisode 388: Agent ZoIn the first months of 1939, before the world changed, Elzbieta Zawacka had an MA degree in Mathematics, and was an enthusiastic instructor in Poland’s “Women’s Military Training” organization, established to prepare women for service in a future war. When that war came, Elzbieta believed from the start that she was a soldier as much as any man. Under Nazi occupation she established espionage networks, and then served as a courier for the Polish Home Army. Sent to England, she there trained as a member of the Polish Special Operations Group known as the “Silent Unseen”; when she returned to Poland sh...
2024-12-161h 13Historically ThinkingEpisode 387: The StudyIn the sixteenth century wealthy men and women began to collect books. With these they began to furnish a new room in the house which they called the studiolo. In the “little study” one could read in happiness and contentment, safe from an external world beset by wars and plague. They could conduct conversations with their contemporaries by letter, and with the dead of past ages through their reading. The studiolo became an extension of their intellect, and of their personality.
But the studiolo was also a place from which those religious and political conflicts were conducted. And the studiolo was...
2024-12-091h 06Historically ThinkingEpisode 386: College SportsMany college professors like to remind each other that no other nation on earth has the system of collegiate sports that has developed in the United States, one in which the mishaps of a mediocre football team attract much more attention than what goes on in classrooms, labs, and libraries–and yes, I am thinking of the University of Virginia. These professors love to quote Cornell President Andrew Dickson White refusing to allow the Cornell football team to travel to a game with Michigan: “I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind...
2024-12-041h 08Historically ThinkingEpisode 385: Golden YearsWhen did old age in America first begin? That is, when did we first begin to conceive ideas about a stage of life in which older people no longer participated in the labor force, but nevertheless had a meaningful place in the world, deserving of respect, security, and dignity.
My guest James Chappel argues that this is an idea that became prominent in the American consciousness at a certain point in time–namely, the 1935 Social Security Act. It was, he believes, one of the key moments in the cultural transformations of how Americans think about old age, and how we trea...
2024-11-2555 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 384: Intent to DestroyMany were shocked in February 2022 by the Russian attempt to seize Kyiv and decapitate the Ukranian regime, thereby ending the war begun in 2014. But this was simply the latest in a long series of Russian attempts to “divide and oppress Ukraine.” Since the 19th century, dominating Ukraine has been a cornerstone of Russia’s national identity. To prevent Ukraine from choosing an alternative, Russian rulers of all ideological varieties have used not only history and cultural destruction as their methods, but executions, deportations, and famine. It is not very surprising, argues my guest Eugene Finkel, that these tools of oppression should...
2024-11-221h 12Historically ThinkingEpisode 383: Quaker FounderAs today’s guest writes in the introduction of her new book Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, “For more than two hundred years, John Dickinson has suffered from an image problem that no one in his day would have thought possible." In Signers’ Hall at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the statue of John Dickinson stands alone in a corner, hand pensively on chin, apart from the action of the Federal Convention…Alternatively, they might imagine him in the manner of the musical 1776, strutting across a stage, ever to the right, never to the left, with ruf...
2024-11-181h 12Historically ThinkingEpisode 382: Women and the ReformationsA forensic reconstruction of Saint Rose of Lima
From the early 16th century, and for over two hundred years after that, a series of convulsions within the Christian church of Western Europe led to its splintering, but also to an incredibly rapid movement of ideas and practices to the four corners of the earth. These convulsions—or reformations—were responsible not only for changes in the practice and beliefs of Christianity, but dramatic social and cultural changes everywhere they occurred.
Even though these changes have usually been told as the story of men, women were often at the heart of thes...
2024-11-081h 31Historically ThinkingEpisode 381: Philosophy to the PeopleHis lectures at the College de France were so popular that people arrived at the lecture hall at least an hour in advance. When he finally spoke, it was standing room only, with men literally climbing in the windows. During his first visit to New York, his presence on the Columbia University campus caused one of the earliest recorded traffic jams. And when the French government sought to encourage the United States to enter the war in 1917, they chose him as one of their principal emissaries, given his intellectual heft and worldwide celebrity.
This was the philosopher Henri Bergson, and...
2024-11-041h 20Historically ThinkingEpisode 380: MadridFor nearly five centuries Madrid has been the capital of Spain, and the focus of frequent contempt by foreign visitors, as well as the scorn and hatred of Spaniards. Prime Minister Manuel Azaña Díaz, born just 31 kilometers from Madrid, would write that in “Madrid there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to see. Madrid is a town without history. In Madrid, nothing has happened because in two centuries almost nothing has happened in Spain, and the little that has occurred has done so elsewhere.”
But as my guest Luke Steggeman writes, “Madrid is both heart and head [of...
2024-10-281h 16Historically ThinkingEpisode 379: PhiladelphiaIt is no longer the largest city in America, or the second largest, or even the fifth largest, but there are still those of us who love it. While modern American cities are all racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, it has always been so, from before it was even a city. Modern American cities, simply because of size, are also stages for a variety of conflicts, and this city has from its beginning enjoyed a good conflict. Modern American cities boil with debates over planning and land use, and such debates have always been a part of its history; as...
2024-10-141h 05Historically ThinkingEpisode 378: Old New WorldFor a few hundred years, the New World of the Americas was thought to be genuinely new. But in the course of the nineteenth century, Americans became increasingly uncertain about the ground beneath their feet. Canal building uncovered strange creatures like enormous crabs; seams of coal were determined to be fossilized forests. And while no living mammoths or mastodons were discovered in the lands west of the Mississippi, their bones were; and so were the bones of still stranger creatures, some of them just a few miles from Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
These and many other discoveries led to a s...
2024-10-071h 11Historically ThinkingEpisode 377: BIG HISTORY (From the Archives)This podcast originally dropped on December 17, 2015.
If we had the reverb and the talent, we'd introduce this week's podcast like one of those guys touting a monster truck event on "SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY." Because this week we're talking about Big History–and calling it Big is actually kind of an understatement.
That's because practitioners of Big History, like today's guest Craig Benjamin, begin a history survey not with Mesopotamia, or ancient China, or even homo sapiens squeaking past homo neanderthalis. No, they begin with the Big Bang...which happened quite some time before there were any humans around to enjoy the sho...
2024-09-3000 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 376: Venerable BedeGenerations of college students have probably imagined that his first name was Venerable, and his family name Bede. But Bede–that’s B-E-D-E–was his only name. He was a native of Northumbria, in the north of what we now think of as England. Apparently never going abroad, his life was spent within a few miles of his monastery, and probably just a few miles from where he was born. Yet this seemingly narrow and circumscribed life was full of intense intellectual activity. Bede authored dozens of works: teaching texts to be used for young boys entering the monastery, as he had...
2024-09-2459 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 375: Bible HistoryIt is the most influential book in the history of the world, a book that in many ways set the standard for what books would become, but it is also the book at the heart of a world spanning religion. It has never purported to be the words of God, but the result of a complex partnership between God and his creation, the result being a “divine words written by human hands.”
This book is of course the Bible. On the grounds of sales and publications alone, it has been astonishingly successful. Due to a Niagara of translations and editions, dati...
2024-09-1600 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 374: Serpent in EdenIn his long short story or very short novella entitled “The Man Without a Country,” Edward Everett Hale describes his protagonist Philip Nolan as a young man from the Mississippi Valley who “had grown up in the West of those days, in the midst of ‘Spanish plot’, ‘Orleans plot’, and all the rest. He had been educated on a plantation where the finest company was a Spanish officer or a French merchant from Orleans.” Nolan was, in other words, a young man who was used to foreign serpents in the western Eden. Little wonder, then, that in the story he participated in...
2024-09-041h 12Historically ThinkingEpisode 373: SpycrafteIn Early Modern Europe, spying was not really a profession but it certainly was a verb. At times it would seem, from the dark suspicious years at the end of Henry VII’s life, to Cromwell’s protectorate and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, that it was a game that everyone was playing. And in an era in which anyone with a modicum of political power was, figuratively speaking, always looking over their shoulders for rivals, they were literally driven to read each other’s mail.
But reading the mail has its difficulties. How to unseal and reseal a letter...
2024-08-301h 06Historically ThinkingEpisode 372: Glorious LessonsColonel John Trumbull, Artist
John Trumbull must be one of the only artists in the history of American art to insist upon being addressed by his military rank; he was Colonel Trumbull until he died. But it was not John Trumbull’s feats in battle or in managing administrative correspondence that won him fame among his contemporaries, but what he painted on canvas. Hanging in the rotunda of the US Capitol are four of the paintings in which he sought to preserve memories and paint a history of the American Revolution, but also teach something of the ethics appropriate to wa...
2024-08-261h 03Historically ThinkingEpisode 370: Enemies of All Maritime plundering, or piracy, has happened in nearly all regions of the world, in most ages of human history. Yet the image that we have of "a pirate" in our collective imagination comes from one period in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. So "why has that one relatively short moment come to stand for all sea raiding across time and space?"
That is the question with which Richard Blakemore begins his new book Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Piracy. To answer it he not only surveys decades of plundering and combat at...
2024-08-191h 19Historically ThinkingEpisode 371: Forming National CharacterHow can a new nation establish itself amidst the networks and intrigues of a very old part of the world, while at the same time trying to be different from everyone else? Are these inherently contradictory aims? And how can either–or none–of these objectives be achieved by civil servants who are engaging in, at best, on the job training?
These are some of the questions that are prompted by studying the First Barbary War, fought by the young United States from 1801 to 1805 along the coast of North Africa. Far from being a story simply of simple and straightforward naval...
2024-08-121h 13Historically ThinkingEpisode 369: HorseMore than any other creature, it has proven itself over millennia to be man’s best and most useful friend. At first it was just another prey animal, but eventually it became such a close companion and coworker that it seems impossible for many of us to imagine ever eating one–although probably a billion people around the world do so on a regular basis. For thousands of years it remade cultures and societies, even creating new languages. Then, at the moment of its greatest societal impact, it was quickly replaced by the internal combustion engine.
I am of course refer...
2024-07-2900 min
The Great AntidoteAlbert Zambone on Historical InquirySend us a textAlbert Zambone is the author of Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life. He is also the host of the podcast Historically Thinking, where he teaches listeners not only history but how to do it. Go check it out if you haven’t. He also has a doctorate in history from the University of Oxford. Today, we talk about what history is, why it’s so important, how to do it, and what it tells us. We touch on culture and narratives, and the education system as well. Support the showN...
2023-11-1055 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 334: Civic BargainIn 2016, Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk published a chilling essay based on extensive survey data in the Journal of Democracy. It discovered that there was a growing desire for non-democratic alternatives among both young Americans and Europeans. Indeed, the younger and richer you were, the more likely you were to believe it would be “good” for the army to take over. That essay was one of the many indicators and auguries of that and the preceding years something seemed just a touch off with the state of democratic institutions, and those who used to love them.
But my guests Brook Manvil...
2023-09-1855 min
Historically ThinkingEpisode 305: Degrading EqualityIn 1835, Oberlin College in Ohio determined that it would admit black students. A very few other colleges did at the time, but Oberlin was unique in that it chose to do so as an explicit matter of college policy. At Oberlin, and a few other places both before and after the Civil War, black and white students were allied first in the cause of emancipation, and then for civil rights. Yet following the end of Reconstruction, even once revolutionary campuses like Oberlin and Berea College in Kentucky began to have color lines drawn across them. As John Frederick Bell demonstrates i...
2023-02-271h 18Historically ThinkingEpisode 304: Mass Expulsion“At the start of the twelfth century,” writes Rowan Dorin, “western European rulers almost never resorted to the collective expulsions of wrongdoers from their domains; ecclesiastical authorities evinced little concern about the Jewish communities living under Christian rule; and the church’s efforts to repress usury focused largely on clerics who engaged in money lending. By the late thirteenth century, expulsion had become a recurring tool of royal governance in both England and France; bishops across Latin Christendom were advocating for harsh restrictions on Jewish life; and Popes, theologians, and canon lawyers had recast usury as menacing the whole of society…...
2023-02-201h 03Historically ThinkingEpisode 303: Victorian JacobitesOn a January night in 1897, a crowded Episcopal church in Philadelphia was the stage for a curious ceremony. In the Church of the Evangelists, located in south Society Hill just ten or so blocks from Independence Hall, a gaggle of clerics unveiled a life-size painting of Charles I, King of England and–so far as the clerics were concerned–saint and martyr. Then Williams Stevens Perry, the Episcopal Bishop of Iowa, ascended to the pulpit to explain to the assembled multitude how Charles I, far from being an absolutist and enemy of liberty, had laid the foundations of American political orde...
2023-02-1353 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 302: Tudor EnglandOn 11 October 1537, Henry VIII finally received the son for which he had been waiting for decades. The day before the future Edward VI was born, friars, priests, livery companies, and the mayor and aldermen of London all processed through the city streets, praying for the Queen’s safe delivery. With his birth te deums were sung in London’s churches, bells were rung, fires were lit in every street, and volleys of gunfire resounded from the walls of the Tower of London It was a classic Tudor event, combining as it did fears of a failed royal secession; civic drama; at ti...
2023-02-061h 02Historically ThinkingEpisode 300: Wild ProblemsWelcome to Episode 300 of Historically Thinking! Design theorists popularized the idea of “tame problems” and “wicked problems.” “Tame problems” are answers to questions like how to get to Chicago, or how to increase the battery life of a cell phone. As in mathematics and chess have clarity in their aims and their solutions. “Wicked problems” have neither clarity in their aims or in their solutions. But what about wild problems? By wild problems, my guest Russ Roberts refers to the problems of who to marry, whether to have children, where to move, how to forge a life well-lived. These are problems that can’t...
2023-01-091h 08Historically ThinkingEpisode 299: The Good CountryWhat lover of American literature doesn’t remember these haunting lines: “Tell about the Midwest. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” Of course that was, as some of you quickly recognized, a deliberate mangling of a famous passage from William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom. It’s more than a little disconcerting, as I hope you noticed, to substitute Midwest for South. The South is haunted, and mysterious, and interesting. The Midwest…isn’t. But the charge that Shreve McCannon laid upon Quentin Compson can be laid upon any histor...
2023-01-051h 07Historically ThinkingEpisode 298: How the Victorians Took Us to the MoonThe Victorians didn’t actually travel to the moon. But they were the first people, observes my guest Iwan Morus, to think that travel to the Moon was not only possible, but that “their science already possessed – or would soon possess – the means of getting there.” This confidence was based on the cascades of “new technologies, new ways of making knowledge and new visions about the future came together during the nineteenth century to create a new kind of world.” In an important sense, then, it was indeed the Victorians who took us to the moon. Iwan Rhys Morus is professor of h...
2022-12-191h 03Historically ThinkingEpisode 295: New England FashionWhen the Massachusetts Historical Society was founded in 1791, its august members probably did not anticipate that one day its archives would contain not only family papers, but family dresses–as well as waistcoats, wigs, and at least two scarlet cloaks worn by fashionable men in the late eighteenth century. Kimberley Alexander (who is Director of Museum Studies and Lecturer at the University of New Hampshire) was last heard on the podcast talking about shoes, but more recently curated a 2018 exhibition "Fashioning the New England Family." Our conversation is about the book that eventually accompanied that exhibition, also titled Fashioning the New...
2022-11-281h 27Historically ThinkingEpisode 294: Black SuffrageOn April 11, 1865, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd gathered outside the White House. He spoke not of recent victories, or those to come, but to the shape of the peace that would follow. Now that the Thirteenth Amendment had been passed by Congress, he urged that it be ratified. Moreover, it seemed to him, Lincoln said, that it was necessary for “the colored man” to have the right to vote. “I myself,” Lincoln told the crowd, “would prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” That might now seem like a timid sugge...
2022-11-2154 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 292: Mutiny!It is perhaps the greatest scandal and sea-story of the first half of 19th Century America that nearly everyone has forgotten. It led to a court martial, endless headlines, a fistfight in a meeting of the President’s cabinet, and quite possibly to the foundation of the United States Naval Academy. And given that nearly everyone who went to see in the early American republic seemed to know one another, there was one degree of separation between this story and James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, and future Confederate naval captain Raphael Semmes. It...
2022-11-071h 02Historically ThinkingEpisode 290: Oh, Dakota!My guest today is Dr. Ben Jones, Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society and the South Dakota State Historian. Ben Jones served for 23 years in the United States Air Force, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. During his service he taught at the Air Force Academy. Subsequently he was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at South Dakota State University from 2013 to 2019, and Secretary of Education of South Dakota from January 2019 to December 2020. He is now the 9th director in the 120-year history of the South Dakota State Historical Society. In 2016, he published Eisenhower's Guerrillas: The Jedb...
2022-10-2753 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 288: The American Revolution in Hapsburg LandsIn 1780, captured American naval officer Joshua Barney escaped from prison in Plymouth, made his way to London, and with the help of some English sympathizers to the American Revolution was able to take the ferry to Ostend, the principal port of the Austrian Netherlands. During his journey he struck up an acquaintance with an Italian noblewoman after curing her seasickness. Grateful, she insisted that he accompany her by carriage to Brussels, where in a “certain hotel” a porter ushered the two of them into the presence of the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II of Austria. As Barney remembered it decades late...
2022-10-201h 03Historically ThinkingEpisode 283: Two Houses, Two KingdomsFor centuries the Kingdom of England faced northeast, across the northern seas towards Scandinavia. Indeed, under King Canute, England was part of Scandinavia. But with the Norman invasion–even though the Normans were eponymously “North-men”–that changed dramatically. Within a few decades, the French and English royal trees began to intertwine, to graft branches to one another, to make love and war, sometimes at one and the same time. Catherine Hanley's new book Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100-1300 with these words: This is a book about people. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the personal co...
2022-09-291h 10Historically ThinkingEpisode 280: Thinking about Historically ThinkingWell, this is something new. After 279 podcasts, someone is asking Al Zambone questions about the podcast. Carol Adrienne, recently heard talking on Episode 278 about her book Healing a Divided Nation: How the Civil War Revolutionized Western Medicine insisted that it was a really good idea that she be allowed to record a podcast about this podcast. So she did. It turns out to be a pretty good introduction to the podcast, if you're new to the podcast, as many references are made to past episodes. Even if you've listened to most of those 279 episodes, you'll still learn something as Zambone...
2022-09-141h 06Historically ThinkingEpisode 279: Count the DeadStephen Berry begins his new book Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It with these two paragraphs: This is a book about death and data or, more specifically, about the dead as data. The dead and the formerly living are not the same. The formerly living built the Parthenon and the Brooklyn Bridge…[they] also made brutal wars and ghastly decisions we are still struggling to live down. Revered or reviled, however, the formerly living have always counted because we still talk about them. Loved or hated, they built our world. This is a boo...
2022-09-0859 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 276: The Secret SyllabusNew college students usually get lots of advice. “Go to office hours.” “Ask good questions.” “Declare a major as soon as you can.” “Take some time to figure out who you are.” “Get some research experience.” “Get good internships with real-life experience.” “Sit in the front row.” “Avoid procrastination.” Some of this advice is obvious, some of it is contradictory, and some of it is bad.. It almost never explains why, or even how. So the new college student is apt to ignore all of it. In their new book The Secret Syllabus: A Guide to the Unwritten Rules of College Success, Jay Phelan and T...
2022-08-221h 05Historically ThinkingEpisode 272: Germans without BordersWhen 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 someth...
2022-07-181h 03Historically ThinkingEpisode 267: African FoundersIn 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...
2022-06-0653 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 265: How to Win a Power StruggleYou 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 po...
2022-05-231h 01Historically ThinkingEpisode 264: The Persian VersionSome 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 cam...
2022-05-161h 14Historically ThinkingEpisode 263: The Man Who Understood Democracy (Part Two)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 t...
2022-05-091h 18Historically ThinkingEpisode 259: In Praise of Good BookstoresThe 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 t...
2022-04-111h 05Historically ThinkingEpisode 258: The Pursuit of PerfectionBritain 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...
2022-04-041h 09Historically ThinkingEpisode 257: Inventing a New World OrderIn 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 intern...
2022-03-2857 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 256: The War That Made the Roman EmpireOn 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...
2022-03-2154 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 254: Saving YellowstoneIn 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...
2022-03-071h 07Historically ThinkingEpisode 252: The Great War and Modern MedicineFrom 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...
2022-02-281h 07Historically ThinkingEpisode 251: The History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet“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...
2022-02-241h 11Historically ThinkingEpisode 250: Amber Waves of GrainGrain 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.
2022-02-211h 10Historically ThinkingBehind the Book: The Family That Lost AmericaThe 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 th...
2022-02-171h 21Historically ThinkingEpisode 249: Postcards from the Past“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 connecti...
2022-02-1444 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 248: AthensIn 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 a...
2022-02-1059 minHistorically ThinkingBehind the Book: Down the Road to the CedarsThis 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...
2022-01-2045 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 241: Doing the ResearchSo 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 que...
2022-01-1049 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 239: The Chicken and the Egg, or, What Keeps (Some) Historians Awake at NightThis 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 causali...
2021-12-2754 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 237: A Brave and Cunning Prince, or, Following the Evidence Where It LeadsAt 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 ye...
2021-12-131h 14Historically ThinkingEpisode 236: Let Me Put That Into ContextGreat 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...
2021-12-0753 minHistorically ThinkingBonus Episode: The Higher Ed Scene, with Mark SalisburySometimes, 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...
2021-12-0158 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 234: The Fall of Robespierre“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...
2021-11-1547 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 233: Generation MythEach 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 si...
2021-11-0855 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 230: What the Amish Can Do For UsWhen 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 Cent...
2021-10-251h 12Historically ThinkingEpisode 229: Mr. Jefferson and His UniversityAlumni 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...
2021-10-211h 03Historically ThinkingEpisode 224: DisruptionHistorians are always interested in how things change over time, and it helps for the survival of the profession that most things do. But there are certain moments in history when things don't just change, they change so radically that it feels like going over a waterfall in a kayak. How do these moments of change come about? How can an entire social order change in a decade or two? And how does radical change in the social order not only occur, but succeed? My guest David Potter untangles these questions in his new book Disruption: Why Things Change. David...
2021-09-201h 17Historically ThinkingEpisode 223: Climbing DenaliDenali, the mountain formerly sometimes known (but not by Alaskans) as Mt. McKinley, is one of the most impressive mountains in the entire world. It is not only the highest mountain in North America, it is the highest northern-most mountain. That means that the weather at its summit is ferocious and ever-changing. It's height is so great that when that weather clears away, it can be seen across an enormous swathe of Alaska. It is the kind of mountain that challenged Victorians to climb it. By 1913 several attempts had already been made to summit Alaska’s Denali, the highest mountain in...
2021-09-131h 05Historically ThinkingEpisode 222: The Chemistry of FearThe wrong food can kill you. The right kind of food can help you live longer. Additives are unnatural. Unnatural food is unhealthy food. These are assumptions that many or most of us have today about the things we eat. That we believe eating to be a matter of life or death is in part due to a man most of us have never heard of, Harvey Wiley. Head of the Division of Chemistry at the Department of Agriculture, and later employed by the magazine Good Housekeeping, Wiley became an advocate of "pure food", and got his ideas out through ma...
2021-09-091h 00Historically ThinkingEpisode 221: Prohibition Wasn't AmericanCarrie Nation was, of course, a prohibitionist. But so was Leo Tolstoy, Czar Nicholas II, and Vladimir Lenin; in fact, the first nation to prohibit the sale of alcohol was Russia. The first Socialist Prime Minister of Sweden was an advocate for temperance, and so was Tomas Masaryk, liberal founding-father of Czechoslovakia. As Mark Schrad writes in his new book Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, around the globe the “temperance-cum-prohibition movement harnessed the forces of organized religions into a broad-based progressive movement to capture the instruments of legislation and statecraft against powerful, established political actors.” We can o...
2021-09-061h 16
Historically ThinkingEpisode 220: From the Archive, The First Three Weeks of CollegeFor many colleges, this is the first week of class. And that means for both new teachers and new students, it's the beginning of one of three weeks that will influence the rest of their year, and their time in college. Believe us, it's science, as you'll hear in this conversation from long ago with our old friend Mark Salisbury.This is one of the many conversations about college that Historically Thinking has done that we think of as Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed. You can find numerous conversations there which will hopefully illuminate areas that...
2021-09-0147 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 210: Very Personal HistoryOne 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 Fa...
2021-06-171h 01Historically ThinkingEpisode 205: Can There Ever Be History for the Common Good?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 contrib...
2021-05-0554 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 202: Talking History, Podcasting, and the Age of Jackson, with Daniel N. GullottaToday'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 fea...
2021-03-3148 minHistorically ThinkingEpisode 200: Connecting, from an English Portrait to Galileo and Beyond, with J.L. HeilbronThis 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 e...
2021-03-1756 minHistorically ThinkingBonus: Comprehending Dante, with Guy RaffaThis 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...
2021-03-051h 01Historically ThinkingEpisode 197: An Independent Woman of the Eighteenth CenturyEliza 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...
2021-02-241h 08Historically ThinkingFrom the Archives: Episode 39: The Skills of Historical ThinkingWe'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 me...
2021-01-2936 min
Historically ThinkingEpisode 196: Comprehending What We Read (Historical Thinking Series)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 … Episode 196: Comprehending What We Read (Historical Thinking Series) Read More »
2021-01-271h 18Historically ThinkingEpisode 194: If This Be Treason, Make the Most of ItDuring 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 … Episode 194: If This Be Treason, Make the Most of It Read More »
2021-01-131h 192019-03-1707 min2019-02-2507 min2019-02-1908 minHistorically ThinkingCommonplace Book 26An Inventory of the Skills of Historical ThinkingThe Essential SkillComprehension: What do the documents say and mean? Accurately reconstructs the meaning of documents. No misreadings, serious misconceptions of authors’ meanings, or relevant documents ignored. The Six Core SkillsQuestion to Thesis: What questions make historical sense of these documents? Asks a good historical question, which is then answered in the form of a thesis that makes a significant claim.Connecting: How does a document fit into a bigger picture? Connects information from various sources: compares & contrasts, corroborates tes...
2019-02-1208 minHistorically ThinkingCommonplace Book 25This is is an artist's imagining of what Washington's second inaugural address was like, not of his only visit to the Senate; if GW had a sword with him on that occasion, he might have thought about using it.
2019-01-2811 min2019-01-2108 min2019-01-1507 min