Historically Thinking
Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it.
Episodes
May 13, 2024 • 73 mins
The Paris of the Belle Époque was a city divided by new and old conflicts–the tensions of modernity, and the schisms which had divided France since 1789. Modernity, which the city both exemplified and advanced, could be both celebrated and the source of anxiety–sometimes by the same person at more or less the same time, certainly by the same person at different times.
“The glories of the Belle Epoque were real enough,” writes my ...
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May 6, 2024 • 70 mins
At 2 PM on July 9, 1860, a mob attacked the Christian quarter of Damascus. For over a week, shops, churches, houses, and monasteries were attacked, looted, and burned. Men were killed, women raped and abducted, children taken from their families. Some 5000 Christians were ultimately killed, about half of them refugees who had fled to the city from Mount Lebanon during an earlier outbreak of violence there, the others all native Dam...
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April 29, 2024 • 71 mins
As you might have noticed, the world is awash in narratives. You hear people talk about “establishing the narrative”, or noting that “in the last 24 hours the narrative has changed.” We don’t talk about facts any more, we talk about narratives.
And more than that. Narratives are, many have decided, cause conflict. They enable genocide, and wars. They are also embedded into our biology–”hardwired”, to use a word popular with neurob...
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April 22, 2024 • 61 mins
"..Since ancient times, the idea that the climate exerts a determining influence on minds and bodies, health and well-being, customs and character, war and wealth has attracted a long line of committed followers.” Alarm over climate change brought about by anthropogenic global warming has renewed—or perhaps simply enhanced—an idea with a very long history. It was after all in 1748 when Montesquieu wrote that the “empire of climate ...
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April 15, 2024 • 67 mins
In 1177 BC a series of very unfortunate events culminated in the collapse of numerous kingdoms centered upon the western Mediterranean. The nature of those events, and how one played upon the other, was the topic of our conversation with Eric Cline way back in Episode 62, when we talked about his book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed.
Now Eric Cline is back on the podcast to answer one of the great questions, “and then wh...
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April 8, 2024
At a pivotal moment in Chapter 17 of Nathanael Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, two of his protagonists escape from haunted Salem, Massachusetts, and are whirled away from its power by the even greater power of steam:
“…Looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it had vanished...
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April 1, 2024 • 69 mins
In late July 2013, Vladimir Putin visited Kiev. There he celebrated the 1,025th anniversary of Christianity coming to the Kievan Rus. There he and Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych stood shoulder to shoulder and celebrated the unity of Russia and Ukraine. At that moment–my guest Michael Kimmage writes– Putin and Yanukovych, Russia and Ukraine, seemed to be “twin protagonists of the same story.” Seven months later things were ve...
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March 25, 2024 • 66 mins
On June 24, 1894, President of France Sadi Carnot was stabbed by an anarchist; on September 10, 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was stabbed by an anarchist; on July 29, 1900, King Umberto I of Italy was shot by an anarchist; on September 6, 1901, President of the United States William McKinley was shot by an anarchist. If you have ever wondered why people in the 1900s right up to the Great War, and beyond, all seem to have had a...
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March 14, 2024 • 51 mins
Today’s guest is Mark Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College. His academic speciality is modern American history and pedagogy. Among his many books are an edited volume, Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (Yale University Press, 1989). An interest in how history appears in things other than histories...
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March 11, 2024 • 69 mins
By the reign of Marcus Arelius, Rome seems to be unquestioned in its reach of its power, its wealth, and its cultural and intellectual sophistication. The Pax Romana stretched from Britain and Portugal to Syria and Egypt. Yet at the moment of its seemingly greatest achievements, Rome was struck by a disease that annihilated its legions and ravaged its cities. This was the Antonine plague, perhaps history's first pandemic. Its origi...
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March 4, 2024 • 69 mins
From the 1760s into the 1830s, waves of revolutions rolled up upon the shores of the Atlantic World, confusing or destroying entrenched political and social hierarchies, and ushering in a new era of democratic rule. These of course were headlined by the American and French Revolutions, but there were no less important ones that quickly followed: not only the Haitian revolution, but in the Andes, in Italy, and eventually throughout ...
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February 27, 2024 • 42 mins
Today’s guest in our series of conversations on intellectual humility and historical thinking is Leah Shopkow, Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is a historian of the Middle Ages, specifically of medieval France, and she began her career by studying the history written by medieval chroniclers, which led to her book History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. S...
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February 26, 2024 • 79 mins
Fallingwater, perched above Bear Run in southwestern Pennsylvania is Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, a house perhaps as recognizable as any other in the United States–and it's not even on the nickel. Less known is that it was designed and built at the end of decades of despair and seeming futility in the architect's life, a series of circumstances that would have broken nearly anyone else. Fallingwater is not only an instantiatio...
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February 19, 2024 • 72 mins
In the summer of 1918, hoping to somehow re engage the Russians in the First World War as the Allied offensive on the western front began, thousands of Allied troops began to land in ports in Russia’s far north, far east, and far south. It was the beginning of one of the most ambitious military ventures of the twentieth century. Following the armistice with Germany, Allied forces in Russian not only remained, but expanded. Eventual...
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February 2, 2024 • 29 mins
In our latest in the series of conversations on intellectual humility and historical thinking, my interlocutor is Suzanne Marchand. She is Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. Her interests are within the realm of European intellectual history, but she has ranged more widely than that.
Her books include Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton, UP, 1996); German Orientalism in the A...
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January 22, 2024 • 69 mins
Following the outbreak of the American Civil War, the abolitionist movement underwent an “astonishing transformation”, which would in time alter the direction of the war, the shape of the postwar settlement, and destroy the abolitionist movement itself. As the movement’s moral outsiders found themselves becoming interest group insiders, not only their approach but also their message and ultimately their goals changed. Ideological d...
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January 15, 2024 • 75 mins
Henry Wallace was an Iowan, an accomplished geneticist who hybridized corn; an entrepreneur who co-founded Pioneer Hi-Bred to produce seed, still an agricultural behemoth; the third-generation of editors of an influential American newspaper; a mystic who had a mysterious guru; and a “liberal philosopher”, according to no less an authority than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was also at various times Secretary of Agriculture, Secre...
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January 8, 2024 • 65 mins
Some animals—like beavers, nesting ants, bees, and humans—actively reshape their environments to make them more favorable for their own species. My guest today believes that the same is also true of nations. This, he argues, is the true meaning of Woodrow Wilson’s phrase “to make the world safe for democracy.”
But animals also change as they are adapting their own environment. John Owen argues that liberalism has evolved in way...
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December 21, 2023 • 24 mins
This is the first of my interviews with historians touching on questions of intellectual humility and historical thinking. Today conversation is with Jonathan Zimmerman. He is the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education and Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in 1993 from the Johns Hopkins University. His books have dealt with a variety of topics related to the history o...
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December 11, 2023 • 15 mins
We’re going to do something a little differently in today’s episode of Historically Thinking, in that it's not an episode of Historically Thinking.
Instead I wanted to share with you a teaser of a podcast that I think you’ll like. It’s hosted by Jason Pack, our guest on episode 337, and it’s called Disorder. It’s produced by GoalHanger podcasts, the UK's number 1 podcasting company, makers of The Rest is History, hosted by friends...
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