Historically Thinking

Historically Thinking

We believe that when people think historically, they are engaging in a disciplined way of thinking about the world and its past. We believe it gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense; and that it cultivates not only intellectual curiosity and rigor, but also intellectual humility. Join Al Zambone, author of Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, as he talks with historians and other professionals who cultivate the craft of historical thinking.

Episodes

October 8, 2025 27 mins

In online debates, it’s almost inevitable that sooner or later someone invokes Hitler or the Nazis. That tendency, known as Godwin’s Law, has proven itself on social media thousands of times a day. But the persistence of this comparison points to something deeper than just the cheapening of argument. It reflects how much Hitler and the struggle against Nazism have become the ultimate reference point in our culture’s moral imaginati...

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In this episode of Historically Thinking, host Al Zambone speaks with historian Peter Fritzsche about his book "1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe." The conversation explores how 1942 marked the transformation of regional conflicts into a truly global war, examining the unprecedented scale and movement of the conflict, the suffering and displacement of millions, and the ideological forces at play in every one of the warring...

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Mount Fuji is at once instantly familiar and seemingly immutable, yet it always remains strange and changeable. Its postcard-perfect peak is known around the world as a wonder of nature and a symbol of Japan. But behind that outline lies a far more complicated history.

Over the centuries, Fuji’s eruptions devastated farmland and terrified villagers. Revered as a sacred presence, its divine inhabitants changed with shifts in belief a...

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We reach for the Cold War as if it were a really good pocket tool: compact, familiar, ready to deal with any problem in today’s world. U.S.–China rivalry? “Cold War 2.0.” Russia and the West? “Cold War redux.” The appeal is obvious: the Cold War offers a story we already know how to tell—great-power tension, nuclear standoff, ideological blocs, and finally, a tidy ending.

But as Francis J. Gavin argues, analogies always smuggle in a...

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September 10, 2025 38 mins
Introduction

Each year millions of tourists visit the Czech capital, awed by its blend of architectural styles and dramatic landscape. St. Vitus’s Gothic cathedral towers above the Charles Bridge and the Vltava River, while winding alleys lead to elegant squares lined with Renaissance palaces, Baroque statues, and modern glass structures. Yet this beauty obscures centuries of conflict — ethnic, religious, political, and more typical...

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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...

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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-...

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August 20, 2025 30 mins

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...

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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In 1945, Kim Il-Sung was a minor figure with no political power in Korea. Within months, he was elevated by Soviet authorities to lead North Korea. Historian Fyodor Tertitskiy joins us to discuss The Accidental Tyrant, his new biography of Kim, and explains how this obscure guerrilla commander became one of the most durable dictators of the 20th century—and the founder of a regime that still rules today long after the Cold War ende...
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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,...

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In our conversation, Dan Edelstein traces the intellectual history of revolution as an idea—from its origins in classical antiquity to its dramatic transformation during the Enlightenment, to its seeming maturation in the 20th Century
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This week’s episode features not one but two conversations—with Aron and Strauss—which, while it may sound like a jazz-age songwriting duo, is in fact a pairing of two distinguished historians: Stephen Aron and Barry Strauss. They join our ongoing series of interviews exploring historians’ early love of the past and the essential role of intellectual humility in historical thinking. First up is Stephen Aron, Professor Emeritus of H...
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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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