Episodes

Way back in April, I dropped the first two podcasts in what are intended to be a series on historical thinking and intellectual humility. They were designed to introduce the concept to an audience who had never really heard of "intellectual humility." The first was with philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch, on epistemology in the age of information, and the challenges of intellectual humility when confronting the “internet of us”. That was followed by a podcast with Igor Grossman, a social psycholo...

‘If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus…The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abus...

In 2016, Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk published a chilling essay based on extensive survey data in the Journal of Democracy. It discovered that there was a growing desire for non-democratic alternatives among both young Americans and Europeans. Indeed, the younger and richer you were, the more likely you were to believe it would be “good” for the army to take over. That essay was one of the many indicators and auguries of that and the preceding years something seemed just a touch off with the st...

An Ambassador from the Kingdom of the Kongo to the Papal Court On July 20, 817, Pope Paschal began a project to transform the Church of Santa Prassede, the resting place of the sisters and martyrs, Pudenziana and Prassede, executed in the second century, legendarily believed to be daughters of the Roman senator Pudens, the first or one of the first converts of St. Peter himself. To accompany them in their rebuilt church, Paschal removed 2,300 bodies from the catacombs and interred them in walls ...

A Sassanid cataphract in Oxford–fortunately a re-enactor From the Ionian revolt of the 490s, through the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, the vastAchaemenid Persian Empire was pitted against the pitifully small Greek states on its western periphery, until the astonishing successes of Alexander of Macedon decapitated it, placing him and his companions atop that imperial trunk. But Alexander’s death, and the wars of his successors, gave an opportunity for a new power to rise...

From 1941 to 1945, a platoon of Anglo-American reporters (and one or two Australians and Canadians) were housed in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. They were there to report on the defense of the Soviet Union against the Nazi invasion, and many of them were not disposed to tell anything other than the most positive imaginable stories. Yet the regime of Josef Stalin treated them with the greatest possible suspicion, keeping them safely under watchful eyes in the Metropol, carefully controlling what they ...

Hello, at 2:09 in the morning on October 5th, 1930, the British airship R-101 crashed some 90 miles northwest of Paris. It was just a few hours into a journey that was supposed to take it to Karachi, then a premier city of the British Empire of India. Impacting the ground at approximately 13 mph, the 5.5 million cubic feet of hydrogen gas that gave the airship its buoyancy immediately caught fire. Forty-eight of the fifty-four on board died, including Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson, a Labour ...

On two separate trips, he traveled throughout the southeastern corner of the North American continent. He collected plants, and seeds, which he sent to interested amateur plantsmen and gardeners, as well as some of the foremost naturalists of the age. But he also collected animals and birds, and spent his time making drawings of birds. Eventually he would even read a scientific paper before the Royal Society in London that was the first to describe the migration of birds. This pioneering natural...

In the early 11th century, an English monk wrote an imaginary conversation between two men haggling over the price of a book. After finally agreeing to a price, they then “needed to establish what means of payment would be used, and the buyer reeled off a daunting list of thirteen possible ways of settling the transaction, ranging from gold and silver to beans, clothing, and goats.” But in the end the seller wants to be paid in coin for, he says, “he who has coins or silver can get everything he...

For more than two centuries, the American South has fascinated Americans–and increasingly those outside North America. Its economy, politics, religion, race relations, literature, and food have influenced all the commensurate parts of national life. Now A New History of the American South draws together the talents of several historians to create a new narrative of southern history, from the distant past of prehistory to the present. Drawing on old and new scholarship, the New History considers ...

John Singer Sargent, Henry Cabot Lodge At the 1920 Republican Convention the journalist and H.L. Mencken observed with great amusement and interest the behavior of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the chair of the convention. “Lodge’s keynote speech, of course, was bosh,” wrote Mencken, “but it was bosh delivered with an air…Lodge got away with it because he was Lodge—because there was behind it his unescapable confidence in himself, his disarming disdain of discontent below, his unapologetic superior...

On a wall outside the reading room of the Museo Correr hangs a map of the world. It is not just any map. The oceans are painted cerulean blue, and on their waves travel ships of every nation. On land, the constructions of every culture are shown: cities and towns, castles and arches, mosques and cathedrals, tombs and towers. Moreover it is a map filled with words, the words written in Veneziano, the Italian dialect of Venice, with beautiful multicolored penmanship. The map was created in 1459 by...

It’s no secret that historians love to create periods and errors, and then physically argue about them. We love to talk about the long 18th century, the short 18th century, the long 19th century, the short 19th century, the short 20th century — and God knows what will say about the 21st, but we will have something to say about it, of that you can be sure. But often by breaking things into discrete periods such as antebellum, Civil War, and reconstruction, we miss commonalities between periods of...

"The Three-Story Head" When the Republican convention reconvened on the morning of June 8, 1880, Congressman James A. Garfield of Ohio had precisely two nominations to be the Republican candidate for President. But by the early hours of the next day, on the 36th ballot, following a day unlike that of any political convention in American history, James Garfield was the party’s nominee for the Presidency. Late nineteenth century politicians acquired a bad name in their own day, and subsequently ha...

Caravaggio, David and Goliath: a dangling self-portrait My guest Scott Samuelson didn’t visit Rome until he was in his mid 30s. Since then, with COVID exceptions, he has gone to Rome every summer. These trips, and his thoughtfulness and wonder at what he has seen there has resulted in a wonderful and idiosyncratic book. He describes it as “an exploration of both the city and the visions of life inspired by it, an eclectic guide that blends history, art, literature, religion, and philosophy. My a...

When on April 9, 1865, Ulysses S Grant received the surrender of Robert E Lee, one of the staff officers who accompanied him was Ely S. Parker. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Union Army, an engineer, and a friend of Grants from Galena, Illinois. But he was also a member of the Wolf Clan of the Seneca, one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee. And not only was he a member, but indeed the Sachem of the Six Nations. So it was that a man who was not actually a citizen of the Unite...

As the President of the United States prepared to travel to Morocco for a wartime conference, his closest aide and advisor wrote down just why he was going to make the arduous trip. Franklin Roosevelt, wrote Harry Hopkins, “was going to Casablanca ‘because he wanted to make a trip. He was tired of having other people, particularly myself, speak for him around the world. He wanted to see our troops, he was sick of people telling him that it was dangerous to ride in airplanes. He liked the drama o...

Alice Lloyd: A serious woman In 1951 the Southern Association of Colleges, an accrediting agency, sent a committee to assess a small two-year institution in the mountains of eastern Kentucky named Caney Creek College. Their final report makes for interesting reading, which you can’t always say about accreditation reports. “This institution charges no tuition,” they reported. “...The understanding is that students will offer to work in the mountain area, and 90% have done so. There are amazing ex...

East of Philadelphia and west of Atlantic City is the city of Vineland, situated in more or less the geographical center of South Jersey. Since the late 19th century, it had been the center of a dispersed community of Jewish farmers. Following the Second World War, a few thousand survivors of the Holocaust decided not to settle in American cities, but like earlier Jewish immigrants became farmers in South Jersey. Seth Sten’s grandparents were two of these refugees. In his new book Speaking Yiddi...

The village of Oberstdorf lies in the midst of the Allgauer Alps, not that far from the Austrian border. While other Alpine towns like Garmisch-Partenkirchen, to the east in Oberbayern, or Andermatt in Switzerland benefited from proximity to mountain passes and the trade routes that crossed them, and other towns like Berchtesgaden grew rich from proximity to natural resources, or the development of a unique craft economy, Obertsdorf had none of those things. It was where the road literally ended...

William Hunter was a radical advocate for American democracy. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was the founder of the second newspaper west of the Alleghenies, and the first newspaper editor to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts. Arguably a Jacksonian Democrat before Andrew Jackson first ran for president, Hunter served the Jackson Administration, and as a civil servant seven successive administrations. Yet that brief biography obscures his very interesting origins. For William Hunter had ...

Since the Middle Ages, food has always been sold on the streets of London. Women and men, boys and girls, have seemingly sold everything that can be eaten, from shellfish and fried fish, to baked potatoes and baked pies, to handfuls of fruit and cups of milk. They were far from being the most respectable members of London’s society, either in the late sixteenth century, the late nineteenth century, or any of the periods in between. Yet they were absolutely an absolutely vital link in feeding the...

In the early sixteenth century there emerged upon the world stage a cast of royal characters that could almost persuade the most hardened social historian to read Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In Europe were Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England, and Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. In Russia ruled Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible; in India Babur and Akbar, founders of the Moghul Dynasty; and in Persia the Savafid rulers Shah Is...

This is the second of our continuing series on intellectual humility and historical thinking. Today I'm interested in exploring the social science of intellectual humility. Igor Grossman is a social psychologist, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “Most of our work,” he writes, describing his lab, “either focuses on how people make sense of the world around them—their expectations, lay theories, meta-cognitions, forecasts—or it concerns how larger cultu...