Historically Thinking

On July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts—one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army, and the first raised in the North—led an assault on Fort Wagner, one of the fortifications defending Charleston, South Carolina.

Their attack was preceded by an eight-hour bombardment that did little damage to the fort’s walls or defenders. Moving through heavy Confederate small-arms fire, with their commander, Colonel Robe...

Content Warning: This episode contains frank discussions of rape, sexual assault, and physical violence and is not suitable for children.

On a winter morning in 1472, an investigator arrived at a poor widow’s home in the St. Nicholas district of the city of Dijon. He was there to interview a tenant, a pregnant woman named Jehanne, an immigrant from the county of Lorraine. She had reportedly been abducted and sexually assaulted...

Pericles of Athens was a complicated man, a man of twists and turns. Born into a lineage of Athenian aristocrats, he became a champion of democracy and indeed a masterful demagogue. A teenager by the end of the Persian Wars, he was one of the architects of an Athenian empire designed to ensure that Persia never again advanced westward. Possibly his earliest public act as an Athenian citizen was to sponsor four plays by Aeschylus, b...

At the beginning of the twentieth century many thinkers, activists, and politicians would have been astonished if you told them that at the end of that century the nation-state would be the prevalent form of government throughout the world. After all, the previous fifty years had seen a revival of empires, and by 1900 everyone was living in a world of empires. The nation-state was not an obvious next step.

But following 1945, argues...

Peter J. Ortiz was one of the most decorated United States Marines of the Second World War—and he served in the European Theater. In fact, his service was almost entirely within occupied France, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services as the manager of a resistance network and later as the leader of a (sort of) Jedburgh Team. 

The stories of his exploits are legendary, though admittedly legendary among a much...

Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,

hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls,

great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion feasts

for the dogs and birds,

and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,

Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

Those were of course the...

Even that overlooked yet essential little pinprick at the end of this sentence has a history. For once upon a time, there were no stops or periods. And therefore there were no sentences, at least as we conceive them now. “Changes in punctuation,” writes my guest Florence Hazrat, “like changes in language, are normal, but they’re also important reflections of our values.”

They are also, perhaps, indicati...

YEAR of meteors! brooding year!

I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds  

 and signs;

I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;.

I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair,  

 mounted the scaffold in Virginia;

(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I  

 watch'd;

I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, 

but trembli...

In early 1965, three executives boarded a plane in Japan, bound for the United States. “Unbeknownst to the U.S. Customs, they were carrying corporate secrets. Each man had carefully placed two vials of an isomerase enzyme into their pockets before the flight.” With it, they would change the world. For after two arduous years of nearly aerobic chemical engineering, their corporation produced what it called Isomerose 30. ...

Most Americans remember the Louisiana Purchase as a remarkably good bargain: fifteen million dollars for an enormous tract of land that doubled the size of the United States. But that familiar cliché hides a large story. It covers over a lot of things, and suggests a few more that just aren’t so.

In his new book The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, historian Alexander Mikaberidze places the Purc...

Running for about 177 miles along the Welsh-English border is the remains of an earthwork, a fortification over a hundred miles longer than Hadrian’s Wall. Built sometime in the eighth century, it is known as Offa’s Dyke, one of the few surviving reminder of one of the most formidable kings in English history.

“As a man,” writes my guest Roy Naismith, “Offa is effectively lost.” Winston Churchill ...

"There was a time when the Declaration of Independence was news. Most books written about the Declaration have pursued questions about its precedence and authorship as well as its legacy. In 1776, when the Declaration was news, it was part of an ever-changing and circulating amalgam of accurate and inaccurate information, gossip, military intelligence, speculation, and opinion. At approximately one thousand three hundred and twenty...

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...