Historically Thinking
Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it.
Episodes
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...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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.”
...
Mark as Played
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 ...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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 ...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
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 ...
Mark as Played
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...
Mark as Played
December 4, 2024 • 68 mins
Many college professors like to remind each other that no other nation on earth has the system of collegiate sports that has developed in the United States, one in which the mishaps of a mediocre football team attract much more attention than what goes on in classrooms, labs, and libraries–and yes, I am thinking of the University of Virginia. These professors love to quote Cornell President Andrew Dickson White refusing to allow t...
Mark as Played
November 25, 2024 • 55 mins
When did old age in America first begin? That is, when did we first begin to conceive ideas about a stage of life in which older people no longer participated in the labor force, but nevertheless had a meaningful place in the world, deserving of respect, security, and dignity.
My guest James Chappel argues that this is an idea that became prominent in the American consciousness at a certain point in time–namely, the 1935 Social ...
Mark as Played
November 22, 2024 • 72 mins
Many were shocked in February 2022 by the Russian attempt to seize Kyiv and decapitate the Ukranian regime, thereby ending the war begun in 2014. But this was simply the latest in a long series of Russian attempts to “divide and oppress Ukraine.” Since the 19th century, dominating Ukraine has been a cornerstone of Russia’s national identity. To prevent Ukraine from choosing an alternative, Russian rulers of all ideological varietie...
Mark as Played
November 18, 2024 • 72 mins
As today’s guest writes in the introduction of her new book Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, “For more than two hundred years, John Dickinson has suffered from an image problem that no one in his day would have thought possible." In Signers’ Hall at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the statue of John Dickinson stands alone in a corner, hand pensively on chin, apart from the action of the Feder...
Mark as Played
November 8, 2024 • 91 mins
A forensic reconstruction of Saint Rose of Lima
From the early 16th century, and for over two hundred years after that, a series of convulsions within the Christian church of Western Europe led to its splintering, but also to an incredibly rapid movement of ideas and practices to the four corners of the earth. These convulsions—or reformations—were responsible not only for changes in the practice and beliefs of Christianity, but d...
Mark as Played
November 4, 2024 • 80 mins
His lectures at the College de France were so popular that people arrived at the lecture hall at least an hour in advance. When he finally spoke, it was standing room only, with men literally climbing in the windows. During his first visit to New York, his presence on the Columbia University campus caused one of the earliest recorded traffic jams. And when the French government sought to encourage the United States to enter the war...
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
How do the smartest marketers and business entrepreneurs cut through the noise? And how do they manage to do it again and again? It's a combination of math—the strategy and analytics—and magic, the creative spark. Join iHeartMedia Chairman and CEO Bob Pittman as he analyzes the Math and Magic of marketing—sitting down with today's most gifted disruptors and compelling storytellers.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.