Episodes

The medieval warm period began in the mid-tenth century, around and about 950 AD. A warmer climate led to higher agricultural yields, and in an agricultural society that meant surplus profits. These were invested in building monasteries and cathedrals; they attracted the attention of larcenous Scandinavians, who became known as the Vikings. Benefiting from warmer temperatures, they traveled widely, built colonies from Greenland to Ireland to central Russia. Nor were they alone. Medieval people s...

From the beginning of the university in the middle ages, relations between town and gown–between students and citizens– began badly and got worse. Perhaps the lowest point was the St. Scholastica Riot in Oxford, beginning on February 12th, 1355, in which a tavern punchup led to an episode of urban warfare–which is no exaggeration in describing three days of street battles, and besieged colleges, with showers of arrows going back and forth that ultimately claimed the lives of somewhere between se...

If we believed in click bait, we would title this "one weird historical thinking trick to save your country." But it's not, so you get a boring but highly accurate title. For this is the first of special series of occasional episodes through the rest of 2023 that explore the connection between intellectual humility and historically thinking. Since the podcast began, we’ve made the claim that historical thinking “gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense; and that it cultivates not only int...

So, said an uncle to a student of mine, you’re getting a history degree, huh? When you graduate, you gonna get a job in a history store? The numbers show that the uncle’s jab is winning. As friend of the podcast Jon Lauck has demonstrated in a Fall 2022 editorial in the Middle West Review, the number of history majors in US colleges and universities has dropped by more than 50%. Departments have begun to shrink as a consequence of this, and that shrinkage shows no sign in many institutions of st...

Everything has a history, even breakfast cereal. And that history is involved with the history of grain–which means it is involved with both the history of agriculture and urbanism; how humans mark time during the day; meal customs, which means it’s also involved with the history of the family; nutrition and health, and all the ideas and fears involved with those terms, as well as the history of science and, believe it or not, the history of religion and of political progressivism; and, since th...

In August 1944, Fred Bailey jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, landing in a disused brickyard. Growing up he had been a sickly child with a heart condition, which led his family to move out of London for his health. But in 1941 at age 18 he had joined the British Army’s Royal Armored Corps, and served with the Desert Army. Bored after the fight for North Africa was over, he volunteered for special duties, and soon found himself in the Special Operat...

In October 1569, a captain of a French ship off the northern coast of Nova Scotia was summoned on deck. Alongside was a canoe, and in it were three Englishmen–David Ingram, Richard Browne, and Richard Twide. They claimed to be the survivors of a group of 100 men marooned on the Gulf coast of Mexico by an English slave-trading expedition. From that point, the three of them had walked north for 3,600 miles, making the journey in about a year. Thirteen years later, in August 1582, David Ingram was ...

In 1835, Oberlin College in Ohio determined that it would admit black students. A very few other colleges did at the time, but Oberlin was unique in that it chose to do so as an explicit matter of college policy. At Oberlin, and a few other places both before and after the Civil War, black and white students were allied first in the cause of emancipation, and then for civil rights. Yet following the end of Reconstruction, even once revolutionary campuses like Oberlin and Berea College in Kentuck...

“At the start of the twelfth century,” writes Rowan Dorin, “western European rulers almost never resorted to the collective expulsions of wrongdoers from their domains; ecclesiastical authorities evinced little concern about the Jewish communities living under Christian rule; and the church’s efforts to repress usury focused largely on clerics who engaged in money lending. By the late thirteenth century, expulsion had become a recurring tool of royal governance in both England and France; bishop...

On a January night in 1897, a crowded Episcopal church in Philadelphia was the stage for a curious ceremony. In the Church of the Evangelists, located in south Society Hill just ten or so blocks from Independence Hall, a gaggle of clerics unveiled a life-size painting of Charles I, King of England and–so far as the clerics were concerned–saint and martyr. Then Williams Stevens Perry, the Episcopal Bishop of Iowa, ascended to the pulpit to explain to the assembled multitude how Charles I, far fro...

On 11 October 1537, Henry VIII finally received the son for which he had been waiting for decades. The day before the future Edward VI was born, friars, priests, livery companies, and the mayor and aldermen of London all processed through the city streets, praying for the Queen’s safe delivery. With his birth te deums were sung in London’s churches, bells were rung, fires were lit in every street, and volleys of gunfire resounded from the walls of the Tower of London It was a classic Tudor event...

On May 11th, 1745, the British Army went into battle against the army of France near the village of Fontenoy, in what is now Belgium. 15,000 British soldiers marched forward bearing not only their muskets, but the reputation that they had gained in the continental campaigns of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. But Marlborough had by then been dead for nearly 25 years, and the British Army had not adapted or altered. The result was a humiliating defeat, with 6,000 of those 15,000 Bri...

Welcome to Episode 300 of Historically Thinking! Design theorists popularized the idea of “tame problems” and “wicked problems.” “Tame problems” are answers to questions like how to get to Chicago, or how to increase the battery life of a cell phone. As in mathematics and chess have clarity in their aims and their solutions. “Wicked problems” have neither clarity in their aims or in their solutions. But what about wild problems? By wild problems, my guest Russ Roberts refers to the problems of w...

What lover of American literature doesn’t remember these haunting lines: “Tell about the Midwest. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” Of course that was, as some of you quickly recognized, a deliberate mangling of a famous passage from William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom. It’s more than a little disconcerting, as I hope you noticed, to substitute Midwest for South. The South is haunted, and mysterious, and interesting. The Midwest…isn’t. ...

The Victorians didn’t actually travel to the moon. But they were the first people, observes my guest Iwan Morus, to think that travel to the Moon was not only possible, but that “their science already possessed – or would soon possess – the means of getting there.” This confidence was based on the cascades of “new technologies, new ways of making knowledge and new visions about the future came together during the nineteenth century to create a new kind of world.” In an important sense, then, it ...

If the Parthian Empire is known at all, it’s by students of Roman history who see it pop up from time to time, before disappearing once again. Marcus Licinius Crassus, a member of the first triumvirate– consisting of himself, Pompey, and Julius Caesar– died in battle against the Parthians. At the moment of his assasination, Caesar was preparing for a campaign against Parthia; and Mark Anthony, of the second triumvirate, was defeated by the Parthians when he attempted to realize Caesar’s dream. T...

I can't introduce Cathal Nolan's book Mercy: Humanity in War any better than he does himself, with these words: This is not a book about war. It is about mercy and humanity… Mercy happens in a microsecond, wrapped inside a surprise moment of mortal danger; it restrains baser instinct and reminds us about higher things. This book shows that mercy limits cruelty in ways laws and honor codes seldom do, because mercy is the highest personal and moral quality any of us achieves. It is above all other...

When the Massachusetts Historical Society was founded in 1791, its august members probably did not anticipate that one day its archives would contain not only family papers, but family dresses–as well as waistcoats, wigs, and at least two scarlet cloaks worn by fashionable men in the late eighteenth century. Kimberley Alexander (who is Director of Museum Studies and Lecturer at the University of New Hampshire) was last heard on the podcast talking about shoes, but more recently curated a 2018 ex...

On April 11, 1865, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd gathered outside the White House. He spoke not of recent victories, or those to come, but to the shape of the peace that would follow. Now that the Thirteenth Amendment had been passed by Congress, he urged that it be ratified. Moreover, it seemed to him, Lincoln said, that it was necessary for “the colored man” to have the right to vote. “I myself,” Lincoln told the crowd, “would prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and ...

At the end of the 19th century, Amsterdam was home to nearly seventy diamond factories, in which were 7,500 steam-powered polishing mills. The workers who cut and polished the diamonds, brought there from the mines of South Africa, were not all Jewish–but many of them were. Indeed, in the late 1890s Jews were about 10% of the population of Amsterdam, and half of them were economically reliant on what the Dutch called simply “the profession”. The Jewish community in Amsterdam were not the only Je...

It is perhaps the greatest scandal and sea-story of the first half of 19th Century America that nearly everyone has forgotten. It led to a court martial, endless headlines, a fistfight in a meeting of the President’s cabinet, and quite possibly to the foundation of the United States Naval Academy. And given that nearly everyone who went to see in the early American republic seemed to know one another, there was one degree of separation between this story and James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melvill...

In late November, 1864, David R. Snelling visited his uncle, who then lived in Baldwin County near Milledgeville, Georgia. As a boy, he had worked in his uncle’s fields alongside those his uncle enslaved. Now Snelling returned home as a Lieutenant in the Army of the United States, commanding Company I of the First Alabama Cavalry–though detached on temporary duty as commander of the headquarters escort for General William Tecumseh Sherman. The homecoming was not a happy one, at least for Snellin...

My guest today is Dr. Ben Jones, Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society and the South Dakota State Historian. Ben Jones served for 23 years in the United States Air Force, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. During his service he taught at the Air Force Academy. Subsequently he was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at South Dakota State University from 2013 to 2019, and Secretary of Education of South Dakota from January 2019 to December 2020. He is now the 9th direct...

For over a generation the history of the American West has been described by scholars as one of violence, including genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and settler colonialism. While it replaced an older history which spoke of “winning the West” and the triumph of civilization, curiously enough both the old and the now aging histories of the west focused on violence. After all, in the popular imagination, every Western town hosted a gunfight in its one street on a nearly daily basis. But what if amidst ...