Historically Thinking

Published November 11, 2026 | Episode 484 Strategy has become a word with nearly all its meaning extracted from it. As my guest Eliot Cohen observes, “every village lost to Russian advances in Ukraine has had the adjective ‘strategic’ attached to it by journalists who merely mean to say ‘important’; every tactical scheme to cross a river or seize a town is a ‘strategy.’” In typical day-to-day usage, he writes, the word “strategy…is more or less equivalent to the word ‘plan.’” This is in many w

The disease cholera first arrived in North America in 1832, at the ports of Quebec and Montreal. From there it spread along the waterways of the continent, reaching great cities, small towns, and isolated farms. It killed more quickly than any disease Americans had yet endured, and it killed horrifically. Its victims vomited, suffered from explosive diarrhea and terrible spasms, turned blue, and finally entered the coma that preceded death. A healthy man at breakfast could be a corpse at midnigh

At his death on December 24, 1873, the Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins left $7 million. which established both a hospital and the first American research university bearing his name. From its beginning Johns Hopkins pursued a distinctive and often eccentric course, moving from early dominance and innovation to decline and then renewal, all amidst recurring debates over what direction the university should take. Those debates concerned questions that remain unsettled. Should a university emphas

Since the invention of the printing press, printers have published books. And ever since books have been published, they have been sold. Yet today’s guest observes that, remarkably enough, there is a “paucity of literature on the history of the buying and selling of books.” While there have been plenty of studies of publishing and reading, “the commercial transactions that allowed books to pass from the producer to the reader are seldom explored.” In his new book, The Bookshop: A History of Boo

Published October 21, 2026 (Episode 480) During the era of the American Revolution, food and drink had political meanings and could express what Americans thought their government should be. Protests over tea—and the brewing of tea alternatives—mammoth cheeses delivered to Thomas Jefferson and mammoth cakes baked for Election Day; from planting gardens to setting tables: all of these could be statements of political purpose. And these were activities and practices engaged in not only by white m

Apologies for neglecting to drop this episode last week; on the bright side, you'll get this week's episode just a few hours from now. To always get an episode, and much else besides, subscribe to the Historically Thinking Substack. The story of the Emperor Charles the Great, or Charlemagne, and his wider family is often told as one of glorious triumph followed by unfortunate decline. Emerging in more or less the 750s in what is now France, the Carolingians were part of a religious, political,