Historically Thinking
Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it.
Episodes
May 5, 2025 • 78 mins
Robert Bruce Lockhart was at various times in his life a diplomat, a conspirator, an gatherer of intelligence, and a propagandist. He was always a maverick, a charmer, a bit of a cad with a touch of the bounder, and a devotee of the high life when he could afford it, and often when he could not.
In his busy life he ran a Malaya rubber plantation; served as a diplomat in Czarist Russia; and was first an interlocutor with and then ...
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April 28, 2025 • 62 mins
Albert Einstein died in 1955, the most influential scientist of the 20th century. Yet even in the 21st-century his intellectual presence remains – seven of the noble prizes awarded since 2000 stemmed directly from the work which he did in 1905 and 1915. More even than Isaac Newton’s bewigged and apple-pelted image, Einstein’s pervades popular culture, from that photo with his tongue sticking out to coffee mugs to intellectual exerc...
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April 21, 2025 • 58 mins
This week I wanted to give you two conversations recorded some time ago, which are part of our recurring series on intellectual humility and historical thinking.
The first guest is Alex Mikaberidze, a native of Georgia, the other one, not the one with peaches. He's Professor of History and Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. Dr. Mika Reja specializes in 18th and 19th century Europe, particu...
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April 14, 2025 • 69 mins
My guest today is David Staley, associate professor in the Department of History at the Ohio State University, where he teaches courses in digital history and historical methods, and holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Design where he is taught courses in design history and design futures, and the Department of Educational Studies where he has led the forum on the university.
This is his fifth appearance on Historica...
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March 31, 2025 • 56 mins
“For many educated Westerners,” writes today’s guest, “ the idea that religion promotes violence and secularism ameliorates the problem is a settled certainty, a doxa, an unstated premise of right thinking. By no means do I deny that religious energies…can be turned toward destructive ends, especially by unscrupulous politicians in times of crisis and uncertainty… Nonetheless, concentration on or simply assuming religion’s inclinat...
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March 23, 2025 • 69 mins
In 1845 a water mold named Phytophthora Infestans which afflicts potato and tomato plants began to spread across Europe, killing potatoes from Sweden to Spain. “The potato blight caused crisis everywhere it appeared in Europe,” writes my guest Padraic X. Scanlan; “in Ireland, it caused an apocalypse.” In 1845, a third of the United Kingdom’s population lived in Ireland; an 1841 census had counted a population of 8.2 million. In the...
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March 16, 2025 • 64 mins
This is the 400th episode of Historically Thinking. And while it’s a podcast that focuses on history, and how historians and everyone else think about the past, I do that each week through conversation. For a long time I have really wanted to believe something that Plato wrote, that “Truth, as human reality, comes about only in conversation.”
So it’s fitting, I think, that we devote Episode 400 to having a conversation about conv...
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March 10, 2025 • 63 mins
This is Episode 399 of Historically Thinking. And whenever the dial turns to 100, my thoughts turn towards what this podcast is about. So it seemed to me a good time to talk with Anton Howes.
Anton Howes is official historian at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, a unique organization the subject his first book Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation, which we’ll hav...
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March 3, 2025 • 61 mins
During the age of the European Renaissance, a new people was discovered. Not the Aztecs, or the Maya, or the Inca, but a mysterious people with an intriguing language who had once dominated Europe itself. These were the Celts. And their discoverers were not conquistadores or maritime adventurers, but dusty scholars, learning their eighth or fourteenth language, rummaging through dusty manuscripts. Yet somehow, as my guest Ian Stewa...
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February 24, 2025 • 67 mins
In 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.”
...
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February 17, 2025 • 55 mins
Lists 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 ...
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February 10, 2025 • 70 mins
It 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 r...
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February 3, 2025 • 74 mins
If 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 result...
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January 27, 2025 • 70 mins
Marcus 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 w...
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January 13, 2025 • 55 mins
He 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 lif...
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January 7, 2025
Listeners 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 ha...
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December 30, 2024
“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 ...
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December 23, 2024 • 66 mins
“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 arou...
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December 16, 2024 • 73 mins
In 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 ...
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December 9, 2024 • 66 mins
In 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 extensi...
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