Episodes

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, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of meeting-houses se...

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 very different indeed. This was because of what my guest Michael Ki...

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 anarchists on the brain, those are four of the reasons. But these ...

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 led him to edit Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies,...

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 origins and its diagnosis remain a mystery. But my guest Colin Elliott...

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 the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas. It was a peri...

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. Since then she has also edited one of those historical texts, Will...

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 instantiation of Wright’s developing philosophy of architecture, but of his n...

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. Eventually 180,000 troops from fifteen different countries would particip...

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 Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship (Cambridge UP, 2009...

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 differences became ideological conflicts, and personal animosities...

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, Secretary of Commerce, Vice President of the United States, and a third-...

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 ways that are no longer conducive to its own survival; and meanwhile aut...

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 of education, including sex and alcohol education, history and rel...

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 of this podcast Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Disorder is ho...

“Founders” is a term that we typically use to refer to just a few men–usually the first four Presidents of the United States, plus Ben Franklin and–nowadays–Alexander Hamilton. We think of them as typical representatives of their age, which produced civic saints of wisdom and service to the new nation. We don’t usually think about the other Founders, all those men and women who created the institutions, the politics, and the culture of the new republic–from Richard Allen to Judith Sargent Murray...

In his Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755, Samuel Johnson did not define the words Saxon, Angle, or Anglo-Saxon. But Noah Webster in his 1828 American Dictionary defines Anglo-Saxon as "adjective. Pertaining to the Saxons, who settled in England, or English Saxons." Something had happened in between the two, and not just the American Revolution, and Johnson's and Webster's different views of that event–but that probably did contribute to the difference. And when Webster ...

From its opening in 1822, the Fulton Market was an essential part of life in old New York, selling vegetables grown on Long Island, fruit harvested in Cuba, lobsters taken from the waters of Maine, chickens raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and oysters–and fish–hauled forth from New York harbor itself. Over the decades Fulton Market became known as Fulton Fish Market, dominated by wholesale dealers in fish that came not only from New York Harbor, but from all over the world. What Chicago...

Beginning in 1940 a group of Polish diplomats based in Bern, Switzerland, orchestrated a program of forging passports and identity documents from Latin American countries. These were then smuggled into Nazi-occupied countries, where they were used to save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. When the Ładoś Group–named after its leader, Aleksander Ładoś, the Polish ambassador to Switzerland–ended its activities in 1943 it had saved possibly as many as 10,000 people from extermination, making it ...

“We live in a world that feels as though it is in the grip of rapid and capricious change. To rescue ourselves from the distress and dismay that change can induce, we tell ourselves that flux is the signature of contemporary life and sets us apart from the simpler worlds in which those before us lived... Yet we really have little ground to be so confident that present flux is outdoing past, for there have been times when the very conditions of survival were stripped from our predecessors, denyin...

The plays of William Shakespeare contain within them a whole world of human action and purpose. They are, said Samuel Johnson, "a faithful mirror of manners and of life." We seem to watch over Shakespeare’s shoulder as he turns that mirror this way and that, from medieval England, to the coast of Bohemia, to republican Rome, to a desert island beset with the spirits of the air. And from time to time, as the mirror turns, we see our faces there as well. In those moments we sometimes come to reali...

“The scientific community is by any measure a very strange kind of community”, writes my guest. “For starters, no one knows who exactly belongs to it... Its members are a miscellany of individuals but also of disparate institutions…Nor does it have a fixed location. …the village conjured up by the term “scientific community” is scattered all over the globe and its inhabitants meet only occasionally, if at all. Far from living in neighborly harmony or even collegial mutual tolerance, the members ...

"Today’s international system is like a ship adrift during a pandemic. With the captain lost to the virus, and the most capable and conscientious members of the crew self-isolating in their cabins, the deck is now teeming with contagious megalomaniacs. Rather than collaborate, each thinks he knows how to steer the ship better than the admirals.” That is the cheerful first paragraph of Jason Pack’s book Libya and the Enduring Global Disorder. Jason Pack is also a NATO Foundation Senior Analyst, c...

In 1785, Jane Welborn Spurgin of Abbots Creek in Rowan County, North Carolina petititioned the North Carolina Legislature, attesting her right to 704 acres of land so that she might provide for her family of 12 children. Her husband, William Spurgeon, had been a leading Loyalist combatant during the Revolution. Now Jane sought to reclaim some of the property that had been taken from them by the rebel government of North Carolina. The Revolution had split their family, upended hierarchies, and no...