Episodes

We've just begun a unique experiment, creating a year long series devoted to explain what historical thinking is, why it's important, and how to do it. The series kicked off this week with a conversation I had with Daniel Willingham about "comprehension", the first necessary skill for historical thinking–without understanding what we read, it's very hard to think about the past. When we're done, there will be twelve monthly conversations, eleven devoted solely to one skill. (The twelfth, in case...

When I used to grade historical essays, I would provide students with a rubric that I stole from Lendol Calder, and which allowed them to understand how they were being evaluated, and for what. The very first item on the rubric reads as follows: Comprehension: What do the documents say/mean? Accurately reconstructs the meaning of documents. No misreadings, serious misconceptions of authors’ meanings, or relevant documents ignored. Comprehension is not something I had ever given a lot of thought ...

On December 2, 2020, the University of Vermont announced that it would be eliminating the geology, religion, and classics departments, and also eliminating majors in Asian Studies, German, and Italian as part of cuts to programs in the College of Arts and Sciences with less than 25 or fewer students enrolled, or fewer than five graduates per year. The Academic Socal Internet (or at least its humanities sector) predictably exploded, along lines which are pretty familiar by now to those who follow...

During the American Revolution just about everyone in the thirteen colonies—or, after July 2, 1776, the new United States—could be justly termed a traitor. For rebellious colonists prior to 1776, it was Parliament who had betrayed the English constitution. For royal officials, resistance and then rebellion was treason to the monarch. After independence, those who Americans identified numerous traitors in their midst—not only those who remained loyal to the old order of things, but even those who...

Here's a little lagniappe, a conversation with frequent guest Mark Salisbury of TuitionFit on higher ed headlines of December 2020, and some speculation about the year in higher ed to come. Also contains news you can use!

In the spring of 1918, a young Scottish diplomat began to put together a plot that was intended to change the entire direction of the Great War, and save the Allies from defeat. As Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart began making his plans, Germany’s Operation Michael was threatening to break the western front open before American troops arrived in full strength. Lockhart thought that he could bring Russia back into the war that it had abandoned the year before. He would do this by killing Vladimir L...

Anyone who has been in a classroom in the last 25 years has heard someone—perhaps themselves—worry about the effects of “digital distraction” on students’ attention span–perhaps even on their minds. In the 90's there were arguments about whether professors should allow laptops for note-taking, which now seems very quaint. Now we’re wondering if Zoom turns us into Zombies. (Or should that be Zoombies?) My guest Jim Lang has written a book that takes that fretful conversation in a different direct...

In 1775 Johannes Papunhunk died in a Moravian village in Ohio. He was not a Moravian, or any other kind of European, but a member of the Munsee tribe who had been born some seventy years before. In his long life he had been a prophet, preacher, reformer, and diplomat, dedicated to finding a home where his people could live in peace. As Richard Pointer observes, Papunhunk bewilders us because he breaks apart our categories. He was a prophet who inspired peacemaking not war; a nativist reformer wh...

In 1709, one of the great European technological achievements of the 18th century was realized—the reverse engineering of a formula for porcelain that the Chinese had used for almost two millennia. That this recipe was recreated in Saxony, in the heart of middle Europe, meant that porcelain would have a special place not merely in the technology, business, industry, and culture of the German states, but at the center of their political economy and in their relation to an ever-globalizing capital...

Beginning in the Middle Ages, western culture became increasingly interested in regulating society through the precise, accurate measurement of time. “By the late fourteenth century,” writes my guest Ken Mondschein in his new book On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping, “mechanical clocks controlled the bells in medieval towns…These regular bells arguably produced a change in time consciousness at a general level: a device for measuring abstract time began to be used to regulate both personal...

In 2008 when Jonathan Zimmerman received a teaching award, his dean introduced him by telling the assembled audience what he books and scholarly articles he had written. He writes, “I don’t begrudge her for that, at all. What else could she go on, really? She had never been to one of my classes. And even if she had, how would a single visit—or two—help her say anything meaningful or important about my instruction? What other evidence could she invoke? What did she know about me as a teacher, rea...

Hello, in 1951 a young historian of science named Derek Price was examining a medieval manuscript in the library of Peterhouse College in Cambridge. When the pages of parchment were unbound from their 19th century binding, to his delight he saw the name “Chaucer”. But this was not a manuscript copy of the Canterbury Tales, or even a letter, but an instruction manual for a scientific instrument. In the end, as my guest Sebastian Falk explains, the manuscript turns out to have been authored not by...