Historically Thinking

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 strategic im...

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 make sense of the things that happen...

“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 people individual...

“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 a transformative one—no...

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-​colonial foundati...

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 the podcast is evolving on Su...

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...

Lutherans are a strange denomination in American religious history and culture. For Catholics they are certainly Protestants. For Protestants they are crypto-Catholics. While they have been around since the Swedes established their short-lived colony on the Delaware River, they have typically received as much attention in the American imagination as the short-lived Swedish colony on the Delaware River. 

But my guest Timothy D. Grund...

The two hundred and eighty years between the death of the philosopher Confucius and the reign of the first Emperor of China saw one of the most profound revolutions in human history. Not only did it end with the creation of an imperial rule that persisted through successive dynasties for 2,132 years, but it also saw the creation of “new traditions of thought and practice…great monuments of art, literature, and philosophy…that still...

This is the first ever Historically Thinking Roundtable. Given that it's 2026, it’s appropriate that this roundtable focus on the 250th anniversary of the United States, and how historians can be involved in its commemoration. 

Difficulties in doing this can arise from at least two reasons. One is that historians, like most academics, represent a relatively small slice of the political pie. And indeed, in these very partisan times, ...

He was at various times in his life known as Gaius Octavius Thurinus; Gaius Julius Caesar; and Caesar Augustus. He called himself Princeps, the first man in Rome; the Roman Senate would eventually call him pater patriae, the father of his country. Heir to his great-uncle Julius Caesar, this 19 year old was dropped into the tumult of Roman political violence, and emerged from it the sole and undisputed victor after decades of civil ...

For a very long time humans have been getting sick. Sometimes we have gotten sick more easily than at other times. From time to time we get sick from things a human body has never before encountered. Sickness is always present with us. And while injury we can understand–like breaking a leg, or having a rock hit your head–sickness can be as mysterious to people in 2026 who trust the science as it was to our ancestors 4,000 years ag...

On November 1, 1755, the city of Lisbon was devastated by a terrible earthquake, and a new era of urban planning began. The reconstruction of Lisbon was, more or less, the first time that modern planners had the opportunity to transform an urban landscape and bring it into line with their vision of what the future should look like. What shifting tectonic plates did to Lisbon would, in the future, be the job of bulldozers and wrecki...

In this episode of Historically Thinking, we begin not with a historian’s voice, but with the voice of a seventeenth-century woman.

Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley—born in England, twice widowed, and married in 1670 to Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia—speaks from the midst of crisis. Jamestown has burned. Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion has fractured the colony’s political order. Her husband has been recalled to England to answ...

According to Chinese Communist official Xi Zhongxun, his first revolutionary act was an attempt to poison one of his school’s administrators when he was 14. He was faithful to the revolution, and the Chinese Communist Party, until his death at age 88 in 2002. In between those ages was a remarkable life. He fought Nationalists and Japanese. He was a right-hand man to both Zhou Enlai in the 1950s, and Hu Yaobang in the 1980s. As the ...

The red flowered plant that shows up everywhere at this time of year–I saw a forest of them in Wegman’s this morning– is called in Mexico the cuetlaxochitl, or the noche buena; but Americans know it by as the namesake of man who introduced it to the United States: poinsettia. Yet Joel Roberts Poinsett was a more interesting organism than that plant given his name. 

He was a South Carolinian who spent years away from the state, and w...

The Greek philosopher Plato is famous for writing his teachings in the form of dialogues. But there are additionally a series of seven letters attributed to Plato. Over the centuries much ink has been spilt in arguments over their authenticity. My guest today argues that these letters are actually epistolary philosophical novel which are if nothing else a “ripping great yarn”.

“In the pages of Plato’s letters,” writes Ariel Helfer, ...

On October 16, 1843, William Rowan Hamilton was taking a walk with his wife Helen. He was on his way to preside over a meeting of the Royal Irish Academy. As Hamilton came to Broome Bridge, over the Royal Canal, the solution to a vexing problem finally emerged in front of him. He was so excited, and perhaps so afraid that he might forget, that he pulled out his penknife and carved the equation he had so suddenly conceived on the st...