Historically Thinking

It might seem obvious that the study of history ought to  improve the crafting of public policy. Surely if we understand the past, we should be able to make better decisions in the present—especially in the high-stakes worlds of statecraft and strategy. But that assumption raises deeper questions: How should history be used? What history should be used? How do we gain the kind of historical knowledge that truly shapes decisions? An...

In 1960 Yigael Yadin, formerly chief of the Israeli general staff and by that year a prize winning archaeologist, visited the home of Israel’s president David Ben-Gurion, and said to him “Mr. President, I have the honor to tell you that we have discovered 15 dispatches written or dictated by the last president of ancient Israel over 1800 years ago.” Yadin was announcing the discovery of a collection of scrolls written by Simon Bar-...

Amanda Roper is a public historian who has spent her career working to preserve historic places and share traditionally underrepresented stories from America's past. She has been Director of the Lee-Fendall House Museum and Sr. Manager of Public Programs & Interpretation at Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House, both in Alexandria, Virginia. In 2018, Amanda was recognized by the National Trust for Historic Preservation on their lis...

Join 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 sin...

In the past we’ve had entire conversations on Historically Thinking–indeed, many conversations, a whole series of conversations–on intellectual humility and historical thinking, often asking “how have you changed your mind?” Today’s guest makes me confront the fact that there is probably no person in the historical past about whom I have had a greater change of mind than Thomas Jefferson.

This somewhat uncomfortable reflection has b...

Hello: Autumn, 1949. Fortune editor Bill Furth, flinty-eyed gatekeeper, scans a manuscript from 30-year-old whiz kid Daniel Bell. Spots the word “charisma.” Snorts. Blue pencil meets page. Word dies swiftly, without much appeal. Fast forward ten years: charisma is everywhere. Eggheads bandy it, pundits quote it, preachers peddle it. Bell—vindicated. 

Since the 1950s, Americans have grown used to the word “charisma” being applied to ...

Shipwrecks as events are probably humanity’s most common form of disaster”, writes my guest James Delgado 

“As such, shipwrecks–aside from epidemics, warfare on land, or great natural disasters—have been the cause of the greatest number of human deaths throughout history. Thanks to ships and other watercraft, humanity did not just walk across the globe from its ancestral home in Africa. We made use of the ocean as a source of food a...

There is a U-boat in the middle of Chicago. It’s attached to the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park. Generations of Chicagolanders, and their cousins from far away, have walked through U-505, but they don’t always ask how in the world it got to Chicago.

A crucial moment in the journey of U-505 to its permanent berth was on June 4, 1944. On that day for the first time in the history of the US Navy  since, perhaps, October 7,...

The liturgy of the Christian church is often dismissed today as archaic, arcane—or dead. But as Cosima Clara Gillhammer shows in her new book Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy, these ritual forms were once the very heartbeat of Western culture and continue to shape not only our cultural memory but even contemporary cultural practice.

In this episode, we explore how liturgical practices shaped medieval life, art, and...

His friend the great scholar Desiderius Erasmus referred to Thomas More as “a Man for all seasons.” But which season? Or which Thomas More? Is he an advocate of conscience? A heroic defender of the Catholic faith? A saintly martyr? A fanatical zealot unwilling to listen to cool reason? An amateur inquisitor who lit the night with burning Lutherans and their books, and enjoyed little more than coming home after work for a torture se...

Joseph 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,...