FINALLY A TEXTBOOK THAT SHARES THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE WONDERFUL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION I've long said the worst thing to happen to the United States was Howard Zinn's patently Anti-American textbook. Now we've got a completely different sort of textbook called A History of the Western Tradition by highly regarded historians Allen Guelzo and James Hankins. Read this summary:
THE GOLDEN THREAD contends that Western civilization has, in our lifetimes, been simultaneously challenged by secular totalitarianisms and yet remarkably successful in laying the foundations for material prosperity around the globe. These contradictions will present to the reader the most significant problems facing Western civilization today. Guelzo and Hankins, above all, wish for their readers to “understand just how fragile our tradition is and how many times in the three-thousand-year-long history of the West the golden thread that ties us to our past and enriches us beyond measure has come close to snapping.”
Perfect timing for this sort of pro-Western Civilization revival that is desperately needed before people willingly march themselves towards totalitarianism. Allen Guelzo joins me at 2:30 to discuss it. Find out more about Golden Thread Academics here. Guelzo has written some really incredible books on Lincoln and the Civil War that you can find out more about here.
THE GOLDEN THREAD contends that Western civilization has, in our lifetimes, been simultaneously challenged by secular totalitarianisms and yet remarkably successful in laying the foundations for material prosperity around the globe. These contradictions will present to the reader the most significant problems facing Western civilization today. Guelzo and Hankins, above all, wish for their readers to “understand just how fragile our tradition is and how many times in the three-thousand-year-long history of the West the golden thread that ties us to our past and enriches us beyond measure has come close to snapping.”
Perfect timing for this sort of pro-Western Civilization revival that is desperately needed before people willingly march themselves towards totalitarianism. Allen Guelzo joins me at 2:30 to discuss it. Find out more about Golden Thread Academics here. Guelzo has written some really incredible books on Lincoln and the Civil War that you can find out more about here.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm now going to take this last segment to make
us all a wee bit smarter because we are talking
to a noted historian and an author of so many
great books about Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War. Alan Gultso,
is you're kind of a historical rock star in the
sense that I feel like you're probably one of the
most accessible history writers. When you write your books, I
(00:21):
feel like you're writing for people like me, not other historians.
Is that accurate? Is that how you approach it.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I don't know if that's conscious on my part, but
I do want to communicate with people, and I want
people across the board is whether they are professional history
people like myself, or whether they're just ordinary folks who
are interested in certain questions at certain times and certain people,
I want to be able to communicate with them and
give them a sense where have we come from? How
has our past shaped our present?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Well, you have just dived right in to Western civilization
with a new couple of textbooks, a companion textbooks called
The Golden Thread, a history of the Western Tradition. And
I want to start by referencing a man that I
don't care for and I think has done so much
considerable damage to the country, and that is Howard Zen's
(01:13):
The People's History of the United States. I think it's
anti American. It focus on everything negative. And you were
just sharing with me off the air that it's been
widely spread and widely used because someone's paying to spread it.
But is the Golden Thread sort of the counterbalance to that,
because it seems as if from what I read this
morning that these textbooks focus on not just the bad
(01:37):
parts but also the brilliant parts of Western civilization, of
which I think there are many.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Well, I don't know if these books are in some
way a direct response to Howard Zen. For one thing,
Zen's work was really about strictly about American history, whereas
the Golden Thread that I've gone into writing in conjunction
with my friend into many decades, Jim Hankins, this is
a history of Western civilization, which is much broader. American
(02:06):
history has a role to play, especially in volume two,
but it's not about American history per se. So it's
doing something I think different from what the Zen Education
Project does about American history. But in general, the Zen
Education Project can be very negative, whereas what Hankins and
(02:26):
I want to do is to say there is negative,
but there's also positive. Let's not forget the positive, Let's
take them both, because we're remembering the human beings are
a mixture of what.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Is positive and negative.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
The great Alexander Soljian Needson once said that good and
evil run through every human heart. And what we have
tried to do in The Golden Thread is to show,
I think, in a large measure, the truth of that,
in century after century of this thing that we call
Western civilization, or as our titles said, is the Western tradition.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
So let's start with the things that are What is
the thread? Is there a single thread that is pulled
through Western civilization that has kept us on a relatively
not a straight line path, of course, but a path
that has always seemed to lean towards self determination? I
guess not until the United States? Really what makes well?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I think that yes, there is a golden thread, and
a golden thread that Hankins and I start with the
Battled Marathon at the very beginning of volume one, and
which we take through these two volumes all the way
to nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
We took nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
As our cutoff date because well, we're writing history, not
current events. There may be I don't know what, There
may be, perhaps ten years down the line, a new
edition of Volume two that will take things a little
bit further beyond that. But the golden thread that runs
through both volumes is really built around several elements that
we think.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Are unique to the Western tradition.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
First of all, there's the centrality of the written word.
The Western tradition has really depended upon writing. It's not
an oral tradition, it's not a not a tribal collection.
It is the written word, and the authority of writing.
The influence of writing and reading has been extremely important
and I think is unique to what we do in
(04:24):
the West.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Also, we in.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
The West have tremendous respect for the pursuit of truth
in science and knowledge and the accumulation of knowledge in education.
We have a profound respect for government and the rule
of law, and within that impulse for freedom in speaking,
freedom and commerce, freedom in association. There's also in this
(04:50):
Western tradition a beautiful strain of art and music, because
there's a profound belief that beauty is ennobling, that beauty
is kin to truth. And along with that there's a
great pursuit of faith and spirituality based on monotheism in
(05:12):
the Western tradition.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Above all, there's resilience.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
The Western tradition has a tremendous capacity for self criticism.
It can be home to what we sometimes like to
call the argument for the sake of heaven. And it's
that capacity for self criticism that has helped us at
times when the Western tradition has involved people doing serious
transgressions of what is right and turning things to what
(05:39):
is wrong, we've had the capacity for self criticizing and
turning it back. And one of the greatest examples that
I tried to develop in the second volume is the
turn against slavery to a large degree. For centuries, people
simply accepted slavery as a normal condition, and then there
comes a point where we examine ourselves and we say, no,
(06:01):
this is wrong. It is not right for people to
own other people, to own their labor, to steal the
fruit of their labor. That capacity for self criticism and
renewal is one of the most remarkable examples of resilience
that you can find, and I think is a remarkable
attribute of the Western tradition. So those are the things
(06:23):
that make up what we call this golden thread.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Where have we lost our way in Western civilization? What
are some of the touch points? Slavery obviously is a
great one. We lost our way by allowing it, but
then we righted the ship. Where are other examples of
where we have lost our way and made our way back?
And I asked that for a specific reason that I'll
talk to with my listeners later about current events.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
We've lost our way or almost completely lost our way
to a number of points. We almost completely lost the
way of the Western tradition after the fall of Rome,
when it was overrun by the barbarians, and all the
riches of Greek and Roman literature, much of.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
It was lost.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Now, some of it was recovered in later times, but
some of it never was. So there was a moment
there when we only got by, as the great Kenneth
Clark once said, by the skin of our teeth. Another
moment like this, when it appeared like we were going
to lose everything. Was in the wake of the Great
Plague of the fourteenth century, when the population of Europe
(07:31):
was as much as a third of the entire population
of Europe died as a result of the Bubonic plague.
We could have lost civilization there as well, and we
could have lost it at the end of the Thirty
Years War of the seventeenth century. These were all of
them great catastrophes, and yet at each moment, while there
(07:55):
were whales of despair over what was going to happen,
at each moment, the Western tradition learned its lessons and
stood up again.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
And I think we would like to.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
See the Golden Thread as part of a similar moment
in our own times.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
And that's what the title means.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
It's about finding that golden thread and finding it back
to the light.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
The reason I asked that specifically is obviously we're having
a period of tremendous turmoil in the United States of
America right now. We're very polarized, and I always I
get concerned alan that we've gone too far and that
we can't pull ourselves back from the edge. What was it,
or what is it about the people participating in the
Western tradition that they have or believe in, or is
(08:42):
there one single thing that makes us able to pull
ourselves out when perhaps others have not been able to
If that makes.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Sense, well, the crisis that we face right now really
comes from a couple of sources. One is a kind
of indifference, not so much hostility, but an indifference because
we know, now, given the speed of world communication, we
know how big the world is, and we feel that
we should accommodate it. We should do other parts of
(09:11):
the world, other civilizations justice. Sometimes, though, the indifference to
civilization is also because and this is particularly true of
certain political convictions, there's the idea that civilization is really
just superstructure, it's just false consciousness. All real movement is
about economics or about the acquisition of power. And then
(09:35):
there are some people who really are openly hostile to
the Western tradition because they blame it for a host
of evils, whether it's genocide, whether it's colonialism, whether it's racism.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
And this is not to say that these have not
been there. They have.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
But on the other hand, it's also not to say
that they're not present in other places. They certainly have been.
Is in the West, however, that we have developed this
extraordinary degree of consciousness of reflecting on what we are doing,
whether it lines up with the core elements of this
(10:13):
Western tradition that I described before, and then correcting them
that's self correcting mechanism in the Western tradition is one
of its great strengths, and I am confident that it
will manifest itself even in the midst of the crisis
and the questions that we ask ourselves today.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
What can a student And I asked Alan this off
the air, about what age range we're looking for the
golden thread? These new commit two cookbooks, two text books
that Alan and his colleague have put together. What would
a kid expect? We'll start with the first volume. What
would you cover? What do you cover in the first volume,
and then we'll cover what's covered in the second as well.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Well.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Let me at list say, yes, they are in a
sense cookbooks because they are a recipe for recovery.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
More than that, they're the recipe for.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
A really good meal of ideas of art, because these
books contain tremendous collections of reproductions of great art, of music,
of culture.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Yes, in a sense that was a correct slip up.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
They are cookbooks, but they're cookbooks for a feast that
covers all these great aspects of the Western tradition.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Now, who can benefit from it most?
Speaker 2 (11:33):
The target that we have in view is very largely
upper division high school advanced placement courses, for instance, and
those could be eleventh grade, twelfth grade, but also for
first year college surveys. And these two books can be
used in conjunction, for instance, a two semester survey that
(11:54):
you might see for first year students at the college level,
or they can be adopted for freestanding use. So if
someone wants to do, let's say, a senior high school
course devoted to ancient civilizations, Volume one will serve that
very nicely. If someone wants to do a course for
(12:14):
high school seniors about the modern West, Volume two will
meet that need quite adequately as well.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
So the reason I asked that in and by the way,
I got an email from a listener who said, I'm
so excited I ordered a copy of the books for myself.
So you've sold two right there, right there, Alan. The
book is The Golden Thread, a History of Western tradition,
And it's my hope that you know, want I want
kids to learn the good, the bad, and the ugly,
(12:45):
because I think that we need a complete sort of
viewing of our Western traditions and of the history that
goes along with that. And I just feel like we've
swung the pendulum to when I was a child and
we learned that George Washington could not tell he chopped
down a cherry tree, and by gosh, we were going
to believe it to now we're the great oppressors and
(13:05):
everything that's wrong in the world is our fault.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
So I feel like this.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Would be a nice way to swing the pendulum back
to the center where we can talk about why Western
civilization has been so successful. Do you guys get into
the sort of creative aspects of the Western tradition and
Western civilization and how they.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Have pulled the rest of the world forward.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
With the advancements and things that have come out of
Western civilization.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
All through these books, all through them. Jim Hankins in
volume one is going to introduce you to how the
Greeks built a civilization there in the eastern Mediterranean and
the principles of law of democracy that they used in
constructing the Golden Age of Athens. He'll take you through
(13:54):
the Roman Republic and the empire that succeeded it, through
Christendom all the way up to about the year fifteen hundred.
The second volume, the volume I am largely responsible for.
We'll pick up all of this discussion at about the
year fifteen hundred, and then we'll move forward to the
present and all through both of these volumes we're going
(14:15):
to examine, and we're going to examine fairly all of
these great developments, whether they are developments and economics, whether
they developments in art, whether the developments in religion and philosophy,
and we will critique some aspects of these, and at
the same time we will also point out, here are
the great strengths, Here are the gifts that we inherit
(14:37):
from these things, because in a way, like our parents
when we're little, when we're small, we think our parents
can do no wrong. Then we get to be teenagers
and we think that our parents can do nothing right. Yeah, well,
in some respects we're something in the adolescence right now
in terms of culture. But what happens when we bec
(15:00):
adults ourselves Then we realized that our parents were actually
a lot wiser than we thought. And that doesn't wipe
away the mistakes that they might have made, but it
also makes us appreciate that wisdom. I think that is
the spirit in which the Golden Thread, both volumes of it,
both of them have been written.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Alan well So is my guest. Not only has he
written some I think some of the best books on
Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War available period. I just
think they're outstanding. They're not boring, that they're history books
that are not boring, And if you're one of those
people's like I don't want to read history, he makes
it interesting. And the new textbook is called The Golden Thread,
a History of the Western Tradition. I hope that this
(15:39):
makes its way into those ap classes, in those college
classes as quickly as possible. Alan has been a joy
talking to you today. Thank you so much for me,
thank you, thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Thank you, Alan,
I'm now going to take this last segment to make
us all a wee bit smarter because we are talking
to a noted historian and an author of so many
great books about Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War. Alan Gultso,
is you're kind of a historical rock star in the
sense that I feel like you're probably one of the
most accessible history writers. When you write your books, I
(00:21):
feel like you're writing for people like me, not other historians.
Is that accurate? Is that how you approach it.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I don't know if that's conscious on my part, but
I do want to communicate with people, and I want
people across the board is whether they are professional history
people like myself, or whether they're just ordinary folks who
are interested in certain questions at certain times and certain people,
I want to be able to communicate with them and
give them a sense where have we come from? How
has our past shaped our present?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Well, you have just dived right in to Western civilization
with a new couple of textbooks, a companion textbooks called
The Golden Thread, a history of the Western Tradition. And
I want to start by referencing a man that I
don't care for and I think has done so much
considerable damage to the country, and that is Howard Zen's
(01:13):
The People's History of the United States. I think it's
anti American. It focus on everything negative. And you were
just sharing with me off the air that it's been
widely spread and widely used because someone's paying to spread it.
But is the Golden Thread sort of the counterbalance to that,
because it seems as if from what I read this
morning that these textbooks focus on not just the bad
(01:37):
parts but also the brilliant parts of Western civilization, of
which I think there are many.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Well, I don't know if these books are in some
way a direct response to Howard Zen. For one thing,
Zen's work was really about strictly about American history, whereas
the Golden Thread that I've gone into writing in conjunction
with my friend into many decades, Jim Hankins, this is
a history of Western civilization, which is much broader. American
(02:06):
history has a role to play, especially in volume two,
but it's not about American history per se. So it's
doing something I think different from what the Zen Education
Project does about American history. But in general, the Zen
Education Project can be very negative, whereas what Hankins and
(02:26):
I want to do is to say there is negative,
but there's also positive. Let's not forget the positive, Let's
take them both, because we're remembering the human beings are
a mixture of what.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Is positive and negative.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
The great Alexander Soljian Needson once said that good and
evil run through every human heart. And what we have
tried to do in The Golden Thread is to show,
I think, in a large measure, the truth of that,
in century after century of this thing that we call
Western civilization, or as our titles said, is the Western tradition.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
So let's start with the things that are What is
the thread? Is there a single thread that is pulled
through Western civilization that has kept us on a relatively
not a straight line path, of course, but a path
that has always seemed to lean towards self determination? I
guess not until the United States? Really what makes well?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I think that yes, there is a golden thread, and
a golden thread that Hankins and I start with the
Battled Marathon at the very beginning of volume one, and
which we take through these two volumes all the way
to nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
We took nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
As our cutoff date because well, we're writing history, not
current events. There may be I don't know what, There
may be, perhaps ten years down the line, a new
edition of Volume two that will take things a little
bit further beyond that. But the golden thread that runs
through both volumes is really built around several elements that
we think.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Are unique to the Western tradition.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
First of all, there's the centrality of the written word.
The Western tradition has really depended upon writing. It's not
an oral tradition, it's not a not a tribal collection.
It is the written word, and the authority of writing.
The influence of writing and reading has been extremely important
and I think is unique to what we do in
(04:24):
the West.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Also, we in.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
The West have tremendous respect for the pursuit of truth
in science and knowledge and the accumulation of knowledge in education.
We have a profound respect for government and the rule
of law, and within that impulse for freedom in speaking,
freedom and commerce, freedom in association. There's also in this
(04:50):
Western tradition a beautiful strain of art and music, because
there's a profound belief that beauty is ennobling, that beauty
is kin to truth. And along with that there's a
great pursuit of faith and spirituality based on monotheism in
(05:12):
the Western tradition.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Above all, there's resilience.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
The Western tradition has a tremendous capacity for self criticism.
It can be home to what we sometimes like to
call the argument for the sake of heaven. And it's
that capacity for self criticism that has helped us at
times when the Western tradition has involved people doing serious
transgressions of what is right and turning things to what
(05:39):
is wrong, we've had the capacity for self criticizing and
turning it back. And one of the greatest examples that
I tried to develop in the second volume is the
turn against slavery to a large degree. For centuries, people
simply accepted slavery as a normal condition, and then there
comes a point where we examine ourselves and we say, no,
(06:01):
this is wrong. It is not right for people to
own other people, to own their labor, to steal the
fruit of their labor. That capacity for self criticism and
renewal is one of the most remarkable examples of resilience
that you can find, and I think is a remarkable
attribute of the Western tradition. So those are the things
(06:23):
that make up what we call this golden thread.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Where have we lost our way in Western civilization? What
are some of the touch points? Slavery obviously is a
great one. We lost our way by allowing it, but
then we righted the ship. Where are other examples of
where we have lost our way and made our way back?
And I asked that for a specific reason that I'll
talk to with my listeners later about current events.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
We've lost our way or almost completely lost our way
to a number of points. We almost completely lost the
way of the Western tradition after the fall of Rome,
when it was overrun by the barbarians, and all the
riches of Greek and Roman literature, much of.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
It was lost.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Now, some of it was recovered in later times, but
some of it never was. So there was a moment
there when we only got by, as the great Kenneth
Clark once said, by the skin of our teeth. Another
moment like this, when it appeared like we were going
to lose everything. Was in the wake of the Great
Plague of the fourteenth century, when the population of Europe
(07:31):
was as much as a third of the entire population
of Europe died as a result of the Bubonic plague.
We could have lost civilization there as well, and we
could have lost it at the end of the Thirty
Years War of the seventeenth century. These were all of
them great catastrophes, and yet at each moment, while there
(07:55):
were whales of despair over what was going to happen,
at each moment, the Western tradition learned its lessons and
stood up again.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
And I think we would like to.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
See the Golden Thread as part of a similar moment
in our own times.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
And that's what the title means.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
It's about finding that golden thread and finding it back
to the light.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
The reason I asked that specifically is obviously we're having
a period of tremendous turmoil in the United States of
America right now. We're very polarized, and I always I
get concerned alan that we've gone too far and that
we can't pull ourselves back from the edge. What was it,
or what is it about the people participating in the
Western tradition that they have or believe in, or is
(08:42):
there one single thing that makes us able to pull
ourselves out when perhaps others have not been able to
If that makes.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Sense, well, the crisis that we face right now really
comes from a couple of sources. One is a kind
of indifference, not so much hostility, but an indifference because
we know, now, given the speed of world communication, we
know how big the world is, and we feel that
we should accommodate it. We should do other parts of
(09:11):
the world, other civilizations justice. Sometimes, though, the indifference to
civilization is also because and this is particularly true of
certain political convictions, there's the idea that civilization is really
just superstructure, it's just false consciousness. All real movement is
about economics or about the acquisition of power. And then
(09:35):
there are some people who really are openly hostile to
the Western tradition because they blame it for a host
of evils, whether it's genocide, whether it's colonialism, whether it's racism.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
And this is not to say that these have not
been there. They have.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
But on the other hand, it's also not to say
that they're not present in other places. They certainly have been.
Is in the West, however, that we have developed this
extraordinary degree of consciousness of reflecting on what we are doing,
whether it lines up with the core elements of this
(10:13):
Western tradition that I described before, and then correcting them
that's self correcting mechanism in the Western tradition is one
of its great strengths, and I am confident that it
will manifest itself even in the midst of the crisis
and the questions that we ask ourselves today.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
What can a student And I asked Alan this off
the air, about what age range we're looking for the
golden thread? These new commit two cookbooks, two text books
that Alan and his colleague have put together. What would
a kid expect? We'll start with the first volume. What
would you cover? What do you cover in the first volume,
and then we'll cover what's covered in the second as well.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Well.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Let me at list say, yes, they are in a
sense cookbooks because they are a recipe for recovery.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
More than that, they're the recipe for.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
A really good meal of ideas of art, because these
books contain tremendous collections of reproductions of great art, of music,
of culture.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Yes, in a sense that was a correct slip up.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
They are cookbooks, but they're cookbooks for a feast that
covers all these great aspects of the Western tradition.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Now, who can benefit from it most?
Speaker 2 (11:33):
The target that we have in view is very largely
upper division high school advanced placement courses, for instance, and
those could be eleventh grade, twelfth grade, but also for
first year college surveys. And these two books can be
used in conjunction, for instance, a two semester survey that
(11:54):
you might see for first year students at the college level,
or they can be adopted for freestanding use. So if
someone wants to do, let's say, a senior high school
course devoted to ancient civilizations, Volume one will serve that
very nicely. If someone wants to do a course for
(12:14):
high school seniors about the modern West, Volume two will
meet that need quite adequately as well.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
So the reason I asked that in and by the way,
I got an email from a listener who said, I'm
so excited I ordered a copy of the books for myself.
So you've sold two right there, right there, Alan. The
book is The Golden Thread, a History of Western tradition,
And it's my hope that you know, want I want
kids to learn the good, the bad, and the ugly,
(12:45):
because I think that we need a complete sort of
viewing of our Western traditions and of the history that
goes along with that. And I just feel like we've
swung the pendulum to when I was a child and
we learned that George Washington could not tell he chopped
down a cherry tree, and by gosh, we were going
to believe it to now we're the great oppressors and
(13:05):
everything that's wrong in the world is our fault.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
So I feel like this.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Would be a nice way to swing the pendulum back
to the center where we can talk about why Western
civilization has been so successful. Do you guys get into
the sort of creative aspects of the Western tradition and
Western civilization and how they.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Have pulled the rest of the world forward.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
With the advancements and things that have come out of
Western civilization.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
All through these books, all through them. Jim Hankins in
volume one is going to introduce you to how the
Greeks built a civilization there in the eastern Mediterranean and
the principles of law of democracy that they used in
constructing the Golden Age of Athens. He'll take you through
(13:54):
the Roman Republic and the empire that succeeded it, through
Christendom all the way up to about the year fifteen hundred.
The second volume, the volume I am largely responsible for.
We'll pick up all of this discussion at about the
year fifteen hundred, and then we'll move forward to the
present and all through both of these volumes we're going
(14:15):
to examine, and we're going to examine fairly all of
these great developments, whether they are developments and economics, whether
they developments in art, whether the developments in religion and philosophy,
and we will critique some aspects of these, and at
the same time we will also point out, here are
the great strengths, Here are the gifts that we inherit
(14:37):
from these things, because in a way, like our parents
when we're little, when we're small, we think our parents
can do no wrong. Then we get to be teenagers
and we think that our parents can do nothing right. Yeah, well,
in some respects we're something in the adolescence right now
in terms of culture. But what happens when we bec
(15:00):
adults ourselves Then we realized that our parents were actually
a lot wiser than we thought. And that doesn't wipe
away the mistakes that they might have made, but it
also makes us appreciate that wisdom. I think that is
the spirit in which the Golden Thread, both volumes of it,
both of them have been written.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Alan well So is my guest. Not only has he
written some I think some of the best books on
Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War available period. I just
think they're outstanding. They're not boring, that they're history books
that are not boring, And if you're one of those
people's like I don't want to read history, he makes
it interesting. And the new textbook is called The Golden Thread,
a History of the Western Tradition. I hope that this
(15:39):
makes its way into those ap classes, in those college
classes as quickly as possible. Alan has been a joy
talking to you today. Thank you so much for me,
thank you, thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Thank you, Alan,
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