Historically Thinking

The Declaration of Independence has had two simultaneous lives. One is the life of its ideas, the life that scholars pay the most attention to: a life of fits and starts, surprisingly forgotten in the first years after the Revolution, then returning with a vengeance amid sectional conflict in the 1830s, during the Progressive Era, and again during the Civil Rights Movement.

Its second life is as a material document. It is an engross...

American independence was not simply the writing of the Declaration of Independence, nor even the vote that approved it. It was the culmination of decades of argument, persuasion, and political innovation. The American founding emerged through a succession of speeches, petitions, resolutions, constitutions, and other documents in which Americans struggled to define liberty, self-government, and the proper limits of power. And the c...

On July 4, 1777, in Boston, the Reverend William Gordon gave one of the first July 4th orations in American history—certainly the first to become a pamphlet. For over a century these orations were a feature of the national festival, “an essential annual occasion for debating the present and future of American politics.” In the first century of American independence over one hundred thousand such speeches were deli...

The often extremely quotable Hannah Arendt once wrote that “the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.”

My guest Richard Bell emphatically disagrees. In The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Penguin, 2025), Bell argues that the Revolution was global fro...

“This is a book about a cruel and ruthless war—a war without mercy—in which those caught up in it believed they had nothing to lose by fighting without regard for the rules of so-called ‘civilized warfare.’ It was the War for American Independence. At its grimmest level, this was a confrontation in which military restraint was more the exception than the rule, a struggle in which combatants believed th...

At his first inauguration, George Washington made a very carefully calibrated political statement: he wore a brown suit. It was tailored from a weave of superfine wool made in Hartford, Connecticut, and was so far from being the crude homespun which was for some an emblem of a proud American—or, for British cartoonists, of crude Brother Jonathan—that some newspapers criticized Washington for wearing a suit of imported f...

My guest Peter C. Mancall’s new book is Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680. It is, now, the first volume in the Oxford History of the United States, an ongoing multi-volume narrative series—a series whose story is worth an episode in and of itself.

In Contested Continent, Mancall describes the foundation of that place which would eventually become the United States...

In the 1930s, five young men at Cambridge University became members of the Communist Party. This is not too surprising, in retrospect; many others were doing so as well. But these five men were recruited by the intelligence services of the Soviet Union, and for seventeen years they betrayed the secrets of Britain and the United States.

They are now often referred to as the Cambridge Five. They were Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Bu...

“It was a cold January afternoon when I first came to the ghetto. I got there much later than I’d hoped. I’d spent much of the day elsewhere and had just lost track of time. It was already beginning to get dark. The campo seemed deserted. Shutters were closed, and apart from the tinkling of water in the wells, there was hardly a sound. There were no streetlights, barely even the glimmer of a lamp. But in the branc...

The story of classical Greece is often told, rightly or wrongly, as the story of the alliance, competition, and eventual war between Athens and Sparta. Even in antiquity, each city fascinated the other. Athenians imagined Spartans as disciplined, laconic conquerors; Spartans regarded Athens with a mixture of admiration, suspicion, and alarm. Yet despite their differences, both cities shared fundamental Greek assumptions about honor...

On May 29, 1453, the city of Constantine—Constantinople—ceased to exist. For over a millennium it had stood as a center of Roman political power, Greek learning, and the Christian faith. Now its walls were breached, its emperor lay dead among the defenders, and its inhabitants were carried off into slavery.

Yet, as my guest Anthony Kaldellis argues, the city’s final resistance tells a different story from the one w...

For four years—from July 16, 1945, the date of the first atomic test, to August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device—the history of nuclear weapons might appear to be an exclusively American story. But even that is misleading.

From the earliest theorization of the chain reaction, nuclear development was international: a web of scientific collaboration, technological transfer, espionage, and ...

At the very beginning of his forthcoming book Europe: A New History, my guest Roderick Beaton asks a simple but disarming set of questions: Why a “new” history of Europe? Why might we need one? And what makes this history new?

His answer is not merely about newly discovered facts, or even reinterpretations of old ones. It is about events. “To study history,” he writes, “is to look for patterns to m...

“In the generation just before the Civil War, something like one-quarter of America’s enslaved people lived on large plantations with fifty or more forced laborers—in essence, work camps, where contact with whites might be limited and mostly utilitarian. Another quarter lived on plantations where twenty to fifty persons were held in slavery. The typical owner of, say, thirty captive Black workers knew his enslaved...

“Over the course of the sixteenth century,” writes my guest Catherine Fletcher, “the handgun made a transition from a novel and decisive military technology to become an everyday object, in use across society and carrying a new set of cultural associations that would persist through the coming centuries.”

This was the firearm revolution.

In this conversation, Fletcher explores how an evolving technology became...

The history of modern Syria is usually reduced to a story of autocracy, repression, and occasional revolt. And it is a short story, stretching back only to the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, or perhaps to the secret terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that divided the Near East between Britain and France. 

But my guest Daniel Neep has a different perspective. He believes that such narratives overlook “the pre-​coloni...

About a century before the birth of Jesus, during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, a remarkable man began a nearly unprecedented intellectual endeavor. Sima Qian, like his father before him, was an official in the imperial court. Working on a plan left behind by his father, Sima Qian began writing a history of China for the two thousand years before his own time. The scope of his labors, and the historiographical discipl...

In this short episode, Al introduces a new feature of the Historically Thinking podcast: the Historically Thinking Field Guides. Drawing on nearly 450 past episodes, these guides gather conversations around major historical themes—beginning with a first guide devoted to the Second World War—so listeners can explore topics through curated sets of episodes, questions, and commentary. Al also explains how th...

During the American Civil War an estimated 194,000 Union soldiers and 214,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners of war. No prior or subsequent American conflict has seen such numbers. During the Second World War, approximately 124,000 Americans were held captive, but the chance of being captured in that conflict was roughly one in one hundred; during the Civil War it was closer to one in five. Captivity was not a marginal exper...