Historically Thinking: Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it

Joseph Smith was the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, known by those outside the church during his life and today as the Mormons. But Joseph Smith was many things besides: the child of a struggling family gradually moving westward in search of opportunity, a day laborer, visionary, seer; treasure hunter; translator; revelator; prophet; elder, banker, prisoner, wrestler, real estate speculator, polygamist, Lieutenant General, Master Mason, Mayor, and martyr.“America,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844, “is the country of the future…[a] country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.” My guest John Turner observes that Joseph Smith might not have been what Emerson had in mind when he spoke of new beginnings and bold projects. But those were part of his life, in addition to vast designs and great expectations. Indeed, it is not too much to say that few nineteenth century Americans have an enduring legacy that can compare to Joseph Smith's.Yet John Turner's new book Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet also describes how this very untypical man was yet absolutely typical of his times. From his religious awakening among the religious revivalism of western New York, to his founding of utopian communities in the midwest, to his dietary concerns, and even to his experience of brutal mob violence that amounted to religious pogroms against his church, Smith's experiences–and those of his followers–were far from atypical. John G. Turner is professor of religious studies and history at George Mason University. His previous book was They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty, which we talked about in Episode 157.For Further Investigation In Episode 181, Sara Patterson and I discussed the practice of Mormon pilgrimage.For a conversation about a very different but equally charismatic and controversial 19th century American, see my conversation in Episode 198 with Bob Elder about John C. Calhoun, whom Elder describes as the "American heretic"; a nice pairing with an American prophet.The Joseph Smith Papers

In our conversation, Dan Edelstein traces the intellectual history of revolution as an idea—from its origins in classical antiquity to its dramatic transformation during the Enlightenment, to its seeming maturation in the 20th Century

This week's episode features not one but two conversations—with Aron and Strauss—which, while it may sound like a jazz-age songwriting duo, is in fact a pairing of two distinguished historians: Stephen Aron and Barry Strauss. They join our ongoing series of interviews exploring historians' early love of the past and the essential role of intellectual humility in historical thinking. First up is Stephen Aron, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA and President and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. The Autry is one of the nation's foremost museums dedicated to the art, history, and cultures of the American West. It weaves together scholarship, public exhibitions, and community engagement to tell stories that cross boundaries—geographic, temporal, and cultural. Aron is a pioneering historian of frontiers, borderlands, and Western American history. In Episode 289, we spoke about all three—while also discussing his long effort to bridge the gap between academic and public history. As both a professor and a museum leader, Aron has spent decades bringing historical thinking into the public square. My second guest this week is Barry Strauss, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies at Cornell University. A scholar of ancient Greece and Rome, Strauss is well known for combining academic rigor with public engagement, writing widely read books on classical antiquity, military history, and leadership. Strauss is no stranger to Historically Thinking—he's appeared on the podcast several times before, in Episodes 11, 45, and 256, where we've discussed the death of Caesar, the intellectual achievement of Thucydides, and the war that made the Roman Empire. He is also a recipient of the 2024 Bradley Prize, awarded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to American intellectual and civic life. The prize honors leaders whose work—whether in education, history, law, or public policy—strengthens the foundations of a free society.  

Sometime in the 800s, an anonymous monk in the abbey of Fulda–now in modern Germany–copied out a Latin history in one of the great inventions of the age, the handwriting known as Carolingian miniscule, which is more or less they system that we use today to print the English alphabet. Thanks to that monk, today we have the first part of the Annals of P. Cornelius Tacitus, arguably the greatest surviving history of imperial Rome. But who was Tacitus? Why is he important? How could such an opinionated historian proclaim that he was writing without “anger and partiality”? Was he a champion of Roman liberty, or simply a grumpy aristocrat? With me to discuss Tacitus is Dr. Eric Adler, Professor and Chair of Classics at the University of Maryland. His scholarly interests include Roman historiography, Latin prose, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of the humanities. This is his second time on the podcast. His last appearance was in Episode 195, which dropped on January 20, 2021, in which we discussed his then third book, The Battle for the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today.   For Further Investigation Eric Adler recommends "some scholarship" on Tacitus's Agricola: Clarke, Katherine. 2001. “An Island Nation: Re-Reading Tacitus' Agricola.” Journal of Roman Studies 91: 94-112. Liebeschuetz, W. 1966. “The Theme of Liberty in the Agricola of Tacitus.” Classical Quarterly n.s. 16.1: 126-139. Momigliano, Arnaldo. 2012 (1990). “Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition.”In Tacitus, edited by Rhiannon Ash. 411-433. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sailor, Dylan. 2004. “Becoming Tacitus: Significance and Inconsequentiality in the Prologue of Agricola.” Classical Antiquity 23.1: 139-177. Syme, Ronald. 1958. Tacitus, vols. 1-2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

While Islam has often been characterized as unitary and unchanging, by both Muslims and Westerners for their own particular reasons, that has never been the case–and today's world is no exception. Legalists and mystics debate, and radical groups exist at the same time as Muslim feminists who advocate new interpretations of the Koran.  This is the core argument of my guest John Tolan's new book Islam: A New History, from Muhammad to the Present. Ranging from new historical research on the first decades of the origins of the Muslim faith, he moves across centuries and millennia capturing the diversity and debate which characterized the history of the youngest of the three great monotheistic religions. Its diversity was fueled not just by religious debate, but by the great cultures which it assimilated, engaged, or had continual contact over the vast territory across which it spread.  John Tolan is professor emeritus of history at the University of Nantes. His books include England's Jews, Faces of Muhammad, Saint Francis and the Sultan, and Saracens.  

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the “scramble for Africa”, during which European powers imposed colonial regimes upon nearly the entire African continent. Yet the decades preceding that imperial feeding frenzy were times of revolutionary ferment and change, both politically and economically. In his new book The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century, Richard Reid examines those changes by focusing on a stretch of road in Tanzania, one of the most active commercial highways of its time, weaving the larger African and European context around characters and events on that road. Richard Reid is professor of African history at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Cross College. His books include Shallow Graves: A Memoir of the Ethiopia-Eritrea War; A History of Modern Uganda; and Warfare in African History.  

Robert Bruce Lockhart was at various times in his life a diplomat, a conspirator, an gatherer of intelligence, and a propagandist. He was always a maverick, a charmer, a bit of a cad with a touch of the bounder, and a devotee of the high life when he could afford it, and often when he could not.  In his busy life he ran a Malaya rubber plantation; served as a diplomat in Czarist Russia; and was first an interlocutor with and then a conspirator against the Bolshevik leaders of the early Soviet Union. After imprisonment and expulsion from the Soviet Union, he ricocheted about Europe as a journalist and memoirist, before ending up as head of the shadowy and creative Political Warfare Executive. Throughout his life he seemed to be an escapee from a John Buchan novel like The Thirty-Nine Steps, or Greemantle, albeit one with a much higher sex drive.  With me to talk about Robert Bruce Lockhart is James Crossland, Professor of International History at Liverpool John Moores University, where he is co-director of the Centre for Modern and Contemporary History. His interests are in—among other things—terrorism, propaganda, the International Red Cross and the history of international humanitarian law. He was last on the podcast in Episode 353 to talk about his book The Rise of the Devils: Fear and the Origins of Modern Terrorism. His newest book is Rogue Agent: From Secret Plots to Psychological Warfare, the Untold Story of Robert Bruce Lockhart. Some related podcasts in the archive are Jonathan Schneer on the Lockhart Plot; Anna Reid on the Russian Civil War; and–well, I mentioned it, oddly enough–Ben Jones on the Jedburghs.

Albert Einstein died in 1955, the most influential scientist of the 20th century. Yet even in the 21st-century his intellectual presence remains – seven of the noble prizes awarded since 2000 stemmed directly from the work which he did in 1905 and 1915. More even than Isaac Newton's bewigged and apple-pelted image, Einstein's pervades popular culture, from that photo with his tongue sticking out to coffee mugs to intellectual exercises for your toddler. He has become so ubiquitous that perhaps we have come to forget that he was a real person, whose life is interconnected with the most important political and intellectual movements of his life, from Zionism to Nazism, from pacifism to nuclear weapons. In their beautifully concise new  biography, Free Creations of the Human Mind: The World of Albert Einstein, Michael Gordin and Diana Kormos Buchwald present an Einstein who is embedded in his historical context, and who has a range of interests, passions, and ideas that are perhaps generally unappreciated. In the process they disentangle controversies, destroy myths, and provide a nuanced account of a remarkable life in turbulent times. Michael D. Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, where he also serves as Dean of the College. Diana Kormos Buchwald, who could not be with us for the recording,  is General Editor and director of the Albert Einstein Papers.

This week I wanted to give you two conversations recorded some time ago, which are part of our recurring series on intellectual humility and historical thinking. The first guest is Alex Mikaberidze, a native of Georgia, the other one, not the one with peaches. He's Professor of History and Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. Dr. Mika Reja specializes in 18th and 19th century Europe, particularly [00:04:00] the Napoleonic Wars. He has written or edited some two dozen titles, including the critically acclaimed The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History and most recently the critically acclaimed Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace, both of which we discussed on this podcast (in Episode 14 and again in Episode 155, and in Episode 284). He also talked about the skills of historical research in Episode 241, which means that as this is fifth appearance on the podcast,  I owe him a coffee mug.  My second guest is Scott Eric Nelson, Georgia Athletic Association Professor at the University of Georgia. Scott writes about the 19th century history, including the history of slavery, international finance, the history of science, and of global commodities. His first book was Steel Drivin' Man: The Untold Story of an American Legend, about the black folklore legend John Henry, and it won four national awards. More recently, he authored Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World, about the competition between the United States and the Russian Empire to Feed Europe between 1789 and 1918. It was featured on the BBC, CBS, NPR, and most importantly on Historically Thinking.    

My guest today is David Staley, associate professor in the Department of History at the Ohio State University, where he teaches courses in digital history and historical methods, and holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Design where he is taught courses in design history and design futures, and the Department of Educational Studies where he has led the forum on the university. This is his fifth appearance on Historically Thinking, which means I owe him a coffee mug. He has previously been on with co-author Dominic Endicott to talk about their book Knowledge Towns;  with Brent Orrell to talk about "The History of the Future"; explaining the beauties of historical context; and, in our very first conversation together, describing some potential Alternative Universities. This time we'll be talking about his book, Visionary Histories out for a few years now, available for free on Apple Books. In it David has written "twenty histories of the future"–originally essays in the Columbus Underground–which range from the future of artificial intelligence, to democracy, capitalism, education, and leisure. So this means that this will be at least the fourth time that David tries to convince me that historians have something to say about the future other than giving a shrug. [Art generated by MS Copilot; not an accurate representation of David Staley, or his dog.]

“For many educated Westerners,” writes today's guest, “ the idea that religion promotes violence and secularism ameliorates the problem is a settled certainty, a doxa, an unstated premise of right thinking. By no means do I deny that religious energies…can be turned toward destructive ends, especially by unscrupulous politicians in times of crisis and uncertainty… Nonetheless, concentration on or simply assuming religion's inclination toward violence insouciantly glides past a glaring reality of the twentieth century: namely, that regimes committed to secularism have not infrequently possessed just as much capacity for violence as, and often much more than, those tied to religious identity.” These are some of the observations with which Thomas Albert Howard begins his new book, Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History. It is a survey and a dissection of how certain types of secularism can lead to violence as furious as that of any religious fanatic.  Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard (Ph.D, University of Virginia) is professor of humanities and history and holds the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. His previous books include The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue (Yale University Press, 2021), which was the subject of our conversation in Episode 232 of this podcast. This is his third appearance on Historically Thinking; he also discussed the life and historical project of Jacob Burckhardt long, long ago in Episode 37. (The image is of two Tibetan Buddhists undergoing a "self-criticism session" in Lhasa sometime in 1966; from picryl.com)

In 1845 a water mold named Phytophthora Infestans which afflicts potato and tomato plants began to spread across Europe, killing potatoes from Sweden to Spain. “The potato blight caused crisis everywhere it appeared in Europe,” writes my guest Padraic X. Scanlan; “in Ireland, it caused an apocalypse.” In 1845, a third of the United Kingdom's population lived in Ireland; an 1841 census had counted a population of 8.2 million. In the next six years, 1 million of them would die from famine related causes; another 1.5 million had emigrated. The 1851 census totaled the Irish population at 6.5 million, and the population of Ireland would continue to decline for another 100 years. “Although the labouring poor ate potatoes throughout northern and western Europe, only Ireland experienced demographic collapse during and after the blight pandemic.” And the consequences of the famine were more than demographic. It frayed or destroyed communal and familial relationships, and must have led to long-lasting psychological trauma. Padraic X. Scanlan is an associate professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. The author of two previous books, his latest is Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, and it is the subject of our conversation today.

This is the 400th episode of Historically Thinking. And while it's a podcast that focuses on history, and how historians and everyone else think about the past, I do that each week through conversation. For a long time I have really wanted to believe something that Plato wrote, that “Truth, as human reality, comes about only in conversation.”  So it's fitting, I think, that we devote Episode 400 to having a conversation about conversation with Paula Marantz Cohen, author of Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation. In this stimulating book, Cohen travels over all the terrains of conversation, from familial conversations to the restaurants most conducive to good conversation; from gatherings of great conversationalists to surprisingly useful self-help books on conversations;  and to gossip, and those little keys that somehow unlock what Samuel Johnson termed “solid conversation”.  Paula Marantz Cohen is Dean Emerita of the Pennoni Honors College and Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University. Among her books are Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy and six novels, including Jane Austen in Boca, which is “Pride and Prejudice set in a Jewish retirement community in Boca Raton”; the literary mystery What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper; and Beatrice Bunson's Guide to Romeo and Juliet, a novel for young adults.

This is Episode 399 of Historically Thinking. And whenever the dial turns to 100, my thoughts turn towards what this podcast is about. So it seemed to me a good time to talk with Anton Howes. Anton Howes is official historian at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, a unique organization the subject his first book Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation, which we'll have to have a conversation about one of these days. His substack is Age of Invention, which I highly recommend. Our conversation focuses on three essays he wrote nearly two years ago: "Cort Case"; "Does History Have a Replication Crisis?"; and "Open History". 

During the age of the European Renaissance, a new people was discovered. Not the Aztecs, or the Maya, or the Inca, but a mysterious people with an intriguing language who had once dominated Europe itself. These were the Celts. And their discoverers were not conquistadores or maritime adventurers, but dusty scholars, learning their eighth or fourteenth language, rummaging through dusty manuscripts. Yet somehow, as my guest Ian Stewart describes in his new book The Celts: A Modern History, these dusty scholars birthed a craze for Celticness which has lasted into our own day. It also became linked to some of the most powerful forces in the modern world, nationalism and racialism. How this happened is the argument of Ian Stewart's book and the topic of our conversation today. Ian Stewart is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. The Celts is his first book.

In April 1769 a small British vessel sailing along the southern coast of Hispaniola discovered a shipwreck near the current border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. An investigation found no survivors aboard. But they also found a log which identified that ship as the Black Prince. And there the mystery might have ended. But over the next eight years, “ship's crew members surfaced in unexpected places and recounted its demise.” That demise is part of the story in James H. Sweet's Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. But so too is how the Black Prince came to be wrecked on the Hispaniolan reef; how its crew escaped; and how the owners of the ship, and the interest they represented, took their own revenge. Above all it is a story of how Atlantic slavery was linked not only to commerce, but nearly every other corner of the 18th century world. James H. Sweet is the Vilas-Jartz Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a past president of the American Historical Association. He has previously been the prize-winning author of Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 and Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World.   

Lists of important Roman historians would certainly include cerebral Polybius (who, to be fair, was also Greek); the friend of Augustus, Titus Livius; the austere Tacitus; and the gossipy Suetonius,. To one extent or another, all of them were participant observers–not simply historians, but actors in the drama of Roman life and politics.  Not usually included on this list of great Roman participant-historians is Cassius Dio. Like Polybius, he was Greek. But since he was born somewhere between 155 and 165 AD, and died in the 230s, the Mediterranean world had changed quite a bit since Polybius' time, three centuries before. For Cassius Dio was a Roman senator, and he served and wrote during a time of unprecedented tumult within the Roman Empire. He is often the only source for a variety of events, even ones which occurred centuries before his own lifetime. But was he simply a Tacitus wannabe? Or an important and influential historian in his own right? With me to talk about Cassius Dio is Colin Elliot, Professor of History at Indiana University. He hosts his own podcast, Pax Romana, where you can hear many verbal footnotes  to Cassius Dio, which helped inspire this discussion. Colin's last appearance on Historically Thinking was in Episode 351, when we talked about this book Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World.

It was the greatest popular uprising in western Europe prior to the French Revolution. By spring 1525, across regions of what are now Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and France, armed bands of peasants marched to defeat their lords and to overturn the social and religious hierarchy that had existed for centuries. At least 100,000 people were involved, and likely many more. When it collapsed in the summer of 1525, perhaps 1% of the regions population were killed in just two months, making it a summer of fire and blood. Which, as it happens, is the title of my guest's new book. Lyndal Roper is the Regius Professor of History at University of Oxford. Her most recent book Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasant's War.

If English speakers—or French speakers, or Spanish speakers, or really most any speaker of any language other than Greek…or Turkish—think about the Greek Revolution at all, then that's amazing. If they do not, then they continue to ignore one of the most consequential collection of events in the 19th century, a series of imperial overlaps, social convulsions, massacres, sieges, expulsions, and sometimes battles that not only resulted in an independent Greece, but also changed forever the culture of the eastern Mediterranean, and birthed nationalism as a successful way of not only theorizing but of being.  My guest Yanni Kotsonis is Professor of History at New York University, where he was founding director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. Raised in Athens, he was educated in Montreal, Copenhagen, London, and Moscow. His most recent book is The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism, which is the subject of our conversation today. 

Marcus Tullius Cicero lived from 106 BC to his murder in 43 BC. He was a writer, a philosopher, a traveller, a consul of the Roman Republic, and perhaps one of the last people to take the Roman Republic seriously–even when it was long past its shelf date. But most importantly, Cicero was a lawyer—and it was his practice of the law that was at the heart of his philosophy, politics, and devotion to the republic.  Josiah Osgood has written a biography of Cicero that is a biography of some of his most famous legal cases. Through this narrative, we see a gifted young lawyer literally take the stage in Rome, and over a career make impassioned speeches that will in time would undermine that same republic which he held so dear.  Josiah Osgood is professor of classics at Georgetown University. A winner of the Rome Prize, he is the author of six books on Roman history, the most recent of which is Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome.  

He was and has been criticized as a “mere burrower into archives”; as a dry man without any ideas; as a painter of miniatures rather than of broad portraits; as a conservative by liberals, and insufficiently dogmatic by conservatives; as motivated by the Lutheran religion of his forebears, but also as a scholar set against teleology and mysticism. This was Leopold von Ranke, born in 1795, dying in Berlin in 1886. Over his long life, he not only influenced the historical world by his writings, but by his students, and their students. Through his teaching and his examples, he altered not only the historical profession in Germany, but in the United States as well through the horde of Americans who passed through faculties of history whose members had been trained by Ranke, or by one of his students. He did  not invent the footnote or the insistence upon using primary sources, but arguably more than anyone else established them as part of the apparatus of history as a social science. With me to talk about Leopold von Ranke is Suzanne Marchand, Boyd Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University. This September, she was elected to the Presidency of the American Historical Association for 2026. This is her fourth appearance on Historically Thinking; she was last with us as part of our continuing series on intellectual humility and historical thinking.  

Listeners to this podcast are certainly aware of the saying that “all roads lead to Rome”; and, given this audience, you might even be aware that this probably derived from the observation mīlle viae dūcunt hominēs per saecula Rōmam, made by the 12th century theologian and poet Alain de Lille. But what is the history of the Roman roads, or rather, what is the history of how people imagined and related to the Roman Roads? And how has that imaginary influenced the ways that we think of Rome, the classical world, roads, travel, and perhaps even the powers of the state? That Roman roads actually have produced a social imaginary should perhaps be a little more mysterious to us. After all, as my guest writes:  Many roads do go without saying. They're not aesthetically exciting. They're functional and mundane. We notice roads when they have problems  –  a traffic jam or accident. When the journey is smooth they're not worthy of comment. (I noted, while researching, how rarely the word ‘road' is indexed.) And yet for centuries the Roman roads have been a source of fascination. Those were the words of Catherine Fletcher, Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author most recently of The Roads to Rome: A History of Imperial Expansion. This is her second appearance on Historically Thinking; she was last here in Episode 166 talking about her book The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West. 

“He was a bold man who first ate an oyster,” observed Jonathan Swift; and in fact the first human interaction with the Atlantic Ocean was probably eating shellfish, traces of which can be found along the Western Cape of South Africa dating back 160,000 years ago. When humans began to finally live in numbers along the ocean coast, their culture changed. They took their food from it, and from the shoreline, and their metals from the rocks and marshes along its coast. In time they built boats capable of venturing along those coasts, and then gradually farther and farther out. All of this, my guest John Haywood argues, was foundational for what was to come. He writes:  The history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic is…the where and when that Europeans served their apprenticeships in ocean navigation, commerce and colonialism, and that saw them formulate the ideologies they used to justify their territorial claims and their exploitation of colonized peoples. When Europeans finally broke out onto the world's oceans in the sixteenth century, they already had everything they needed to secure global domination. John Haywood is a historian of the Vikings, and of the early maritime history of the North Atlantic. The author of numerous books, his latest is Ocean: A History of the Atlantic before Columbus.  

“India has 2,000,000 million gods, and worships them all,” wrote Mark Twain, following his 1896 speaking tour of British India. “In religion other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.” Twain was exaggerating, but perhaps only a little. Consider that Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism all took form some 2,500 years ago in South Asia, that they and their offshoots are now practiced by hundreds of millions of people around the world, and you will see how that wealth has been spread about.  In his new book Religions of Early India: A Cultural History, Richard H. Davis explores how that wealth was accumulated, and how it began to be spent. Beginning from before the earliest written records–which are, for a Western historian, astonishingly early–he traces the story forward to thirteen hundred years before the present, in approximately 700 AD, just as the entire Afro-Eurasian world was about to be transformed by the advent of Islam.  Richard H. Davis is Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Religion at Bard College.  His primary research and teaching interests include classical and medieval Hinduism, Indian history, South Asian visual arts, and Sanskrit. He is author of, among numerous other books, The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography. Religions of Early India is his most recent, and is the subject of our conversation today.

In the first months of 1939, before the world changed, Elzbieta Zawacka had an MA degree in Mathematics, and was an enthusiastic instructor in Poland's “Women's Military Training” organization, established to prepare women for service in a future war. When that war came, Elzbieta believed from the start that she was a soldier as much as any man. Under Nazi occupation she established espionage networks, and then served as a courier for the Polish Home Army. Sent to England, she there trained as a member of the Polish Special Operations Group known as the “Silent Unseen”; when she returned to Poland she did so as the only woman to arrive during the war by parachute. Elzbieta fought in the Warsaw uprising, and survived its collapse. Following the Soviet takeover of Poland, she became a teacher. But in 1951 she was arrested and tortured by the Security Service, and spent four years in prison before her sentence was commuted. As a consequence her heroism and achievements were erased from national memory, until the fall of the Communist regime.  With me to discuss the life and achievements of this amazing woman is Clare Mulley, whose books have recovered the stories and experience of women who served during the First and Second World Wars. They have included a biography of the founder of Save the Children; the story of a Polish-born British special agent; and the stories of Nazi Germany's only two female test pilots. Her most recent book is Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter, which is the subject of our conversation today.  For Further Investigation Cichociemni–The Silent Unseen Silent Unseen: The Polish Special Forces of Audley End

In the sixteenth century wealthy men and women began to collect books. With these they began to furnish a new room in the house which they called the studiolo. In the “little study” one could read in happiness and contentment, safe from an external world beset by wars and plague. They could conduct conversations with their contemporaries by letter, and with the dead of past ages through their reading. The studiolo became an extension of their intellect, and of their personality. But the studiolo was also a place from which those religious and political conflicts were conducted. And the studiolo was, in the contemporary imagination, a place of potential madness. After all, it was reading in solitude that infected the brain of that noble gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha;  obsessive reading that undermined the power of Duke Prospero of Milan, and resulted in his exile on a far off island with his daughter Miranda; and reading that turned Dr. Faustus to seek power through a diabolical bargain.  With me to discuss the studiolo in history and literature is Andrew Hui, Associate Professor of the Humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His most recent book is The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, which is the focus of our conversation today.  

Many college professors like to remind each other that no other nation on earth has the system of collegiate sports that has developed in the United States, one in which the mishaps of a mediocre football team attract much more attention than what goes on in classrooms, labs, and libraries–and yes, I am thinking of the University of Virginia. These professors  love to quote Cornell President Andrew Dickson White refusing to allow the Cornell football team to travel to a game with Michigan: “I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.” They remember that the University of Chicago had a football team and even a stadium, until President Robert Hutchins killed the program, declaring it an “infernal nuisance.” But they're less likely to know that it was that same Andrew Dickson White who nourished Cornell intercollegiate athletics, financially supporting the Cornell crew team so that they could beat Harvard and Yale. And professors are even less likely to contemplate an awful historical truth, that college sports have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship to the university that hosts them, and that they have grown and changed in more or less the same way that the American university has grown and changed. Far from being a peripheral accident of history, college sports reveal important insights into American higher education. Such is the argument of my guests Eric A. Moyen and John Thelin. Eric A. Moyen is a professor of higher education leadership and the Assistant Vice President for Student Success at Mississippi State University. John R. Thelin is the University Research Professor Emeritus of the history of higher education and public policy at the University of Kentucky. Both of them have written numerous books on both American higher education and college sports. Now they have co-written College Sports: A History.   

When did old age in America first  begin? That is, when did we first begin to conceive ideas about a stage of life in which older people no longer participated in the labor force, but nevertheless had a meaningful place in the world, deserving of respect, security, and dignity.  My guest James Chappel argues that this is an idea that became prominent in the American consciousness at a certain point in time–namely, the 1935 Social Security Act. It was, he believes, one of the key moments in the cultural transformations of how Americans think about old age, and how we treat the aged. These ideas and moments were shaped by activists, practical politicians, medical advancements, and cultural models ranging from Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward to the TV show “The Golden Girls.” James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. The author of Catholic Modern, his interests are in the intellectual history of modern Europe and the United States, focusing on themes of religion, gender, and the family. He lives in Durham, North Carolina. His most recent book is The Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, and it is the subject of our conversation today. 

Many were shocked in February 2022 by the Russian attempt to seize Kyiv and decapitate the Ukranian regime, thereby ending the war begun in 2014. But this was simply the latest in a long series of Russian attempts to “divide and oppress Ukraine.” Since the 19th century, dominating Ukraine has been a cornerstone of Russia's national identity. To prevent Ukraine from choosing an alternative, Russian rulers of all ideological varieties have used not only history and cultural destruction as their methods, but executions, deportations, and famine. It is not very surprising, argues my guest Eugene Finkel, that these tools of oppression should be so readily picked up by yet another Russian autocrat. What makes this moment different is that for the first time in its history Ukraine has overcome its internal divisions and united in favor of independence from Russia.  Eugene Finkel is Kenneth H. Keller Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. The author or coauthor of three previous books, his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Affairs. He was born in Lviv, Ukraine, and lives in Bologna, Italy. His most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two Hundred Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine. For Further Investigation Eugene Finkel's previous books include Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017) This conversation is related in some way to a surprising number of previous podcasts. One with Chris Miller on the perennial Russian pivot to Asia that always fails; you can hear a little about the Russian wars against the Turks for Ukraine in Episode 284, when I discussed the career of Russia's greatest general with Alex Mikaberidze; something about Ukrainian grain in my conversation with Scott Nelson about his book Oceans of Grain; a long conversation about Josef Pilsudski, founder of modern Poland; and Episode 348, about the Russian Civil War. And of course my conversation with Michael Kimmage in Episode 354 about the immediate antecedents of the Ukrainian War. Listeners who believe in comparing arguments–and you should all believe in that–ought to listen to Kimmage immediately after digesting this podcast.

As today's guest writes in the introduction of her new book Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, “For more than two hundred years, John Dickinson has suffered from an image problem that no one in his day would have thought possible." In Signers' Hall at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the statue of John Dickinson stands alone in a corner, hand pensively on chin, apart from the action of the Federal Convention…Alternatively, they might imagine him in the manner of the musical 1776, strutting across a stage, ever to the right, never to the left, with ruffles aflutter, singing jubilantly about his conservatism. There he at least possesses the virtue of energy. Or they could imagine him as HBO's pale, sweaty, scowling disbeliever in the American cause, opposite a stalwart John Adams. But none of these images of him is accurate.” That is if we have any images of him in our heads at all–which, to be honest, is highly unlikely. This conversation aims to change that.  Jane E. Calvert is Founding Director and Chief Editor of the John Dickinson Writings Project, which under her guidance has produced three of a projected 13 volumes of Dickinson's prolific output. She is the authority on Quaker political thought, which she has delineated in Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson. Penman of the Founding is now the definitive biography of John Dickinson, and hopefully the basis for much more scholarly work.

His lectures at the College de France were so popular that people arrived at the lecture hall at least an hour in advance. When he finally spoke, it was standing room only, with men literally climbing in the windows. During his first visit to New York, his presence on the Columbia University campus caused one of the earliest recorded traffic jams. And when the French government sought to encourage the United States to enter the war in 1917, they chose him as one of their principal emissaries, given his intellectual heft and worldwide celebrity. This was the philosopher Henri Bergson, and if you are an English speaker you might be forgiven for not knowing about him, or having heard the name once or twice, but not being aware of why. He was in many ways emblematic of the Belle Epoque, and as that era was interred in hastily dug trenches during the autumn of 1914, Bergson's celebrity and influence seemed to be buried with it. But celebrity was not his goal; philosophy was, and his celebrity often obscured his ideas.  With me to discuss the life, ideas, and world of Henri Bergson is Emily Herring. She received her PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. The focus of our conversation today is her new book Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, which is the first English-language biography of Bergson.  For Further Investigation An earlier philosopher who once lived in Clermont Ferrand Zeno's paradoxes An essay explaining some of the mysteries of French higher education An introductory essay by Emily Herring to Henri Bergson I was ready and waiting for a book on Henri Bergson because of my conversation with Michael Rapport about Paris in Episode 360

A forensic reconstruction of Saint Rose of Lima From the early 16th century, and for over two hundred years after that, a series of convulsions within the Christian church of Western Europe led to its splintering, but also to an incredibly rapid movement of ideas and practices to the four corners of the earth. These convulsions—or reformations—were responsible not only for changes in the practice and beliefs of Christianity, but dramatic social and cultural changes everywhere they occurred. Even though these changes have usually been told as the story of men, women were often at the heart of these reformations. On every continent with the exception of Antarctica—which, to be fair, was undiscovered and therefore unpopulated—women drove forward the transformations of religious life. From royal thrones and the homes of prominent reformers, to the monasteries in Peru and the shores of the southernmost home island of Japan, the stories of how women participated in these reformations gives us not only a fuller picture of these extraordinary events, but a new way of thinking about them and defining them. My guest Merry Wiesner-Hanks is distinguished professor of history and women's and gender studies emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author or editor of thirty books, the most recent of which is Women and the Reformations: A Global History, which is the subject of our conversation today.   For Further Investigation Previous conversations somewhat related to this one are with Ron Rittgers on Luther's reformation; with Tara Nummedal on Anna Ziegelerin and the curious case of the Lion's blood; and with Michael Winship on "the warmer sort of Protestants" "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!" Herrnhut Jon Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World

For nearly five centuries Madrid has been the capital of Spain, and the focus of frequent contempt by foreign visitors, as well as the scorn and hatred of Spaniards. Prime Minister Manuel Azaña Díaz, born just 31 kilometers from Madrid, would write that in “Madrid there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to see. Madrid is a town without history. In Madrid, nothing has happened because in two centuries almost nothing has happened in Spain, and the little that has occurred has done so elsewhere.”  But as my guest Luke Steggeman writes, “Madrid is both heart and head [of Spain], as per the custom of medieval manuscripts where countries were sometimes drawn as bodies with heads and hearts and limbs.” Moreover, “The story of Madrid is the story of power: royal, military, religious, and secular, cultural and economic.” It is  also the story  of power gained, power lost, power regained, power seized, and occasionally power unused. Luke Stegeman is a writer and cultural historian. Unlike any previous guest on this podcast, he is not only a self-described rural Australian, but a boxing referee. His most recent book is Madrid: A Biography, which is the subject of our conversation today.   For Further Investigation San Lorenzo de El Escorial Museo Nacional del Prado Captain Alatriste: I don't often link to Wikipedia, but you should read the section "Adaptations", about why Pérez-Reverte wrote this series of historical novels. Benito Pérez Galdós  

It is no longer the largest city in America, or the second largest, or even the fifth largest, but there are still those of us who love it. While modern American cities are all racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, it has always been so, from before it was even a city. Modern American cities, simply because of size, are also stages for a variety of conflicts, and this city has from its beginning enjoyed a good conflict. Modern American cities boil with debates over planning and land use, and such debates have always been a part of its history; as has been a perennial American suspicion towards the very existence of cities. Modern American cities are also places where the past is paved over, and oddly enough, given the depth of its history, this city has also made a habit of forgetting its past. This city is Philadelphia. From before the founding of the city by William Penn, the region that would become Philadelphia was diverse, and also in conflict. Penn famously designed it to be a “green country town”, but that design has gone through many alterations and changes. And while Philadelphia hosts some of the most significant spots in American history, it has also been good at eliminating and forgetting its own history. With me to discuss the history of the city of Philadelphia, what makes it like other American cities, and what makes it different from them, is Paul Kahan. A historian and graduate of Temple University–the most Philadelphian of educational institutions–Paul Kahan is author most recently of Philadelphia: A Narrative History. It is his seventh book.

For a few hundred years, the New World of the Americas was thought to be genuinely new. But in the course of the nineteenth century, Americans became increasingly uncertain about the ground beneath their feet. Canal building uncovered strange creatures like enormous crabs; seams of coal were determined to be fossilized forests. And while no living mammoths or mastodons were discovered in the lands west of the Mississippi, their bones were; and so were the bones of still stranger creatures, some of them just a few miles from Independence Hall in Philadelphia.  These and many other discoveries led to a still greater discovery, not simply of dinosaurs, or geological ages, or even of evolutionary biology, but a concept that lies beneath all of them, what the writer John McPhee has called “Deep Time.” In her new book How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution, Caroline Winterer roams about the continent, from Haddonfield, New Jersey, to Yosemite, uncovering how Americans began to realize that their continent and world was very, very old indeed.  Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas, political thought, and the history of science. Her previous books include American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason.    For Further Investigation I note with pleasure that How the New World Became Old has blurbs from past HT guests Marcia Bjornerud, Suzanne L. Marchand, and Adrienne Mayor Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983; repr. 2003). Martin Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (1992). Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (1998). Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (1987)

This podcast originally dropped on December 17, 2015.  If we had the reverb and the talent, we'd introduce this week's podcast like one of those guys touting a monster truck event on "SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY." Because this week we're talking about Big History–and calling it Big is actually kind of an understatement. That's because practitioners of Big History, like today's guest Craig Benjamin, begin a history survey not with Mesopotamia, or ancient China, or even homo sapiens squeaking past homo neanderthalis. No, they begin with the Big Bang...which happened quite some time before there were any humans around to enjoy the show. Big History says that, to understand human history--and humanity--it's first necessary to begin appreciating the size and complexity of the entire universe. In doing that, the argument goes, we will begin to improve ourselves morally and spiritually; or, failing that, we'll have a really fantastic general education course. Please note that these are two very different outcomes. With us to talk about these outcomes, and to give a lightning fast overview of Big History "from the Big Bang to you" is Craig Benjamin. He is associate professor of history at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan Craig is president (for just one-and-a-half more weeks, he tells me) of the World History Society; he's also a charter member of the International Big History Association. In fact, he's probably the second person ever to teach a course on Big History. As you'll hear, he's a great person to have a chat with; hope you enjoy it as much as we did. For Further Investigation The Big History Project: if you take the tests, you'll get a sticker. David Christian presents the history of the world in 18 minutes A definitive Big History Course, taught by Dr. David Christian Or how about these for a Christmas gift or two? Big History: Between Nothing and Everything      

Generations of college students have probably imagined that his first name was Venerable, and his family name Bede. But Bede–that's B-E-D-E–was his only name. He was a native of Northumbria, in the north of what we now think of as England. Apparently never going abroad, his life was spent within a few miles of his monastery, and probably just a few miles from where he was born. Yet this seemingly narrow and circumscribed life was full of intense intellectual activity. Bede authored dozens of works: teaching texts to be used for young boys entering the monastery, as he had done; biblical commentaries; arithmetical works; sermons and homilies; and lives of Northumbrian saints. Yet when he is remembered by historians, it is for his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, An Ecclesiastical History of the English People.  With me to discuss Bede as historian is Rory Naismith, Professor of Early Medieval History and Fellow of Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. This is his third appearance on the podcast; he was last on Historically Thinking in Episode 343 discussing whether we should talk about the Anglo-Saxons.   For Further Investigation This is one of our occasional podcasts on important historians. For others, see this one on Polybius, and this on another medieval historian, Princess Anna Komnene The remnants of the monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow The historical site formerly known as "Bede's World": now Jarrow Hall Anglo-Saxon Farm Village and Bede Museum, reopened after a short closure. FYI, in contemporary Britain it's probably true that Jarrow is best known for the "Jarrow Crusade" rather than for Bede A good companion to Bede is, amazingly enough, J. Robert Wright, A Companion to Bede: A Reader's Commentary on The Ecclesiastical History of the English People Rory Naismith also suggests: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People/Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: "This is available in very many translations, including those of Bertram Colgrave and D. H. Farmer. A scholarly edition, with facing-page Latin and English, is available from Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors." J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 1–48 G. Hardin Brown, A Companion to Bede (Woodbridge, 2009) P. Hunter-Blair, The World of Bede (Cambridge, 1970) H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (London, 1991) R. Shaw, The Gregorian Mission to Kent in Bede's Ecclesiastical History: Methodology and Sources (London, 2018) A. Thacker, ‘Bede and History', in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. S. DeGregorio (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 170–89 A. Thacker, ‘Bede's Ideal of Reform', in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. P. Wormald et al. (Oxford, 1983), pp. 130–53

It is the most influential book in the history of the world, a book that in many ways set the standard for what books would become, but it is also the book at the heart of a world spanning religion. It has never purported to be the words of God, but the result of a complex partnership between God and his creation, the result being a “divine words written by human hands.” This book is of course the Bible. On the grounds of sales and publications alone, it has been astonishingly successful. Due to a Niagara of translations and editions, dating back to the first centuries of the Christian religion, it has been a remarkably adaptive host for the ideas and emotions contained within it. My guest Bruce Gordon has written a biography of the Bible that focuses on its flow from the eastern Mediterranean into the farthest corners of the world, writing what he calls “the story of humanity's grasp for the impossible: the perfect Bible.” A native of Canada, Bruce Gordon is the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School. Among his many publications are biographies of the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli, and of the Genevan reformer John Calvin, as well as a “biography” of the life of Calvin's most important production, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. His most recent book is The Bible: A Global History, which is the subject of our conversation today.

In his long short story or very short novella entitled “The Man Without a Country,” Edward Everett Hale describes his protagonist Philip Nolan as a young man from the Mississippi Valley who “had grown up in the West of those days, in the midst of ‘Spanish plot', ‘Orleans plot', and all the rest. He had been educated on a plantation where the finest company was a Spanish officer or a French merchant from Orleans.” Nolan was, in other words, a young man who was used to foreign serpents in the western Eden. Little wonder, then, that in the story he participated in a conspiracy against a United States that he barely knew. In his new book Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison's America,  Tyson Reeder shows the reality behind a story published in 1863. For over forty years, James Madison was near the heart of American politics, perhaps entitled to be called the chief architect of both the Constitutional system and then of the party system that he had just a few years before decried. Intimately linked with both of these innovations were the influences of Spain, Great Britain and France, all eager to direct the young republic in ways that would benefit their interests in the Americas.  Tyson Reeder is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He was previously  an editor of the Papers of James Madison at the University of Virginia, and author of Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (2019). For Further Investigation This episode is connected to a great many other episodes in the last year, in one way or another. See Episode 366 with Andrew Burstein; Episode 352, on Tecumseh as a great American strategist; and Episode 344, on America's founding scoundrels

In Early Modern Europe, spying was not really a profession but it certainly was a verb. At times it would seem, from the dark suspicious years at the end of Henry VII's life, to Cromwell's protectorate and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, that it was a game that everyone was playing. And in an era in which anyone with a modicum of political power was, figuratively speaking, always looking over their shoulders for rivals, they were literally driven to read each other's mail. But reading the mail has its difficulties. How to unseal and reseal a letter so that no one knows that you have opened it? And when you discover the letter is encoded, how to decipher it? And so the game of spy vs. spy went on in the seventeenth century, pretty much as it does now, save for a few technological developments.  With me to discuss the world of early modern spycraft, mostly in Britain, are Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman, coauthors of Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration. Nadine Akkerman is professor of early modern literature and culture at Leiden University,  and author of the acclaimed Invisible Agents. Pete Langman is an Oxford English Dictionary bibliographer, author of Killing Beauties, and a cricketer. For Further Investigation For more on early modern espionage, but conducted on highly professional basis, see my conversation with Ioanna Iordanou in Episode 142 Letterlocking How to open a locked letter without opening it How to hide a message in an egg "Making a wax seal, how hard can it be?" Cryptiana: Articles on Historical Cryptography      

Colonel John Trumbull, Artist John Trumbull must be one of the only artists in the history of American art to insist upon being addressed by his military rank; he was Colonel Trumbull until he died. But it was not John Trumbull's feats in battle or in managing administrative correspondence that won him fame among his contemporaries, but what he painted on canvas. Hanging in the rotunda of the US Capitol are four of the paintings in which he sought to preserve memories and paint a history of the American Revolution, but also teach something of the ethics appropriate to war; of democratic and republican virtue; of political  power flowing from a sovereign people; and of the need to relinquish that power when called to do so. To this day some of the most recognizable images of the Revolution are almost certainly something painted by Trumbull–most likely either The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, or the painting known simply as The Declaration of Independence. If occupying space rent-free in posterity's imagination is ever the ambition of an artist, then Trumbull succeeded, and then some.  With me today to discuss the life, art, and civic teaching of John Trumbull is Richard Brookhiser. Beginning with his 1997 book Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, Richard Brookhiser has written a shelf of books on the American founders, the most recent of which is Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution.  For Further Investigation Highly recommended: "Let This Be a Lesson: Heroes, Heroines, and Narrative in Paintings at Yale," a brilliant series of lectures on history painting by John Walsh, from which I've learned a lot. See particularly Lecture 7, on Benjamin West, and Lecture 8, on John Trumbull, focusing on his painting of the Battle of Bunker Hill. There are many HT episodes on related issues. You might be interested in Episode 163, on Joseph Warren, the first martyr of the American Revolution, whose death is the focus of Trumbull's first history painting; or Episode 176, which focuses heavily on the images of revolutionary victors created by Trumbull and his contemporaries (some of whom were his friends and acquaintances)

 Maritime plundering, or piracy, has happened in nearly all regions of the world, in most ages of human history. Yet the image that we have of "a pirate" in our collective imagination comes from one period in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. So "why has that one relatively short moment come to stand for all sea raiding across time and space?" That is the question with which Richard Blakemore begins his new book Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Piracy.  To answer it he not only surveys decades of plundering and combat at sea and on land, but also interprets court cases, parliamentary legislation, imperial administration or the lack of it, and the slave trade. For the “golden age of piracy”, like a conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, at times seems to be connected to pretty much everything else going on at the same time. Except that in the case of piracy from 1650 to 1722, it actually was. Richard Blakemore is Associate Professor of Social and Maritime History at the University of Reading. Enemies of All is his second book. For Further Investigation  We've talked about pirates of the "golden age" with Steve Hahn in Episode 87; and they came up again in, of all places, in the history told by trees in Episode 156 Probably the previous single best book about pirates in the "golden age", both factual and fictional, was David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (Random House, 1995) Marcus Rediker provides a view of pirates as proto-Bolsheviks in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age; Peter T. Leeson describes them as highly rational market actors in The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates And for more on one of the most curious episodes we talked about, see Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates–a great book There are a lot of bad editions of Charles Johnson, General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, but this is the best one until we can convince Richard Blakemore to produce an edited and annotated version.

How can a new nation establish itself amidst the networks and intrigues of a very old part of the world, while at the same time trying to be different from everyone else? Are these inherently contradictory aims? And how can either–or none–of these objectives be achieved by civil servants who are engaging in, at best, on the job training?  These are some of the questions that are prompted by studying the First Barbary War, fought by the young United States from 1801 to 1805 along the coast of North Africa. Far from being a story simply of simple and straightforward naval derring-do, it is one of strategic ambiguity, diplomatic finesse, and the ideological aspirations of a new nation set against the backdrop of world war and millennia old customs.  With me to discuss the First Barbary War is Abby Mullen, Assistant Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy. She is also the impresario of not one but two podcasts: Consultation Prize, a limited run series about US diplomacy from the ground-eye viewpoint of American consuls, and Big If True, a podcast for kids which is co-hosted with her daughter. But today we are (mostly) talking about her new book To Fix a National Character: The United States in the First Barbary War, 1800–1805. For Further Information William Eaton is the subject of the portrait above; for a little something about the "Burr Conspiracy", in which Eaton may have participated and against which he then gave evidence, see Episode 344  As mentioned in the podcast, Daniel Herschenzohn in Episode 95 explained the complex economy in the Mediterranean that centered on the redemption of prisoners. But the only time that consuls have shown up was very recently, in Episode 359.  Here's a link to Abby Mullen's Consolation Prize, a limited series podcast "about the history of the United States in the world through the eyes of its consuls." And one to Big If True,  "a podcast for kids exploring the truth about big things" co-hosted with her daughter, but which is now alas lapsed into a podcast doze. For on the American wars on the Barbary coast, see Frank Lambert's The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World; for a now very old book full of swashbuckling derring-do, and not very many strategic complications, see Fletcher Pratt, Preble's Boys: Commodore Preble and the Birth of American Sea Power. 

More than any other creature, it has proven itself over millennia to be man's best and most useful  friend. At first it was just another prey animal, but eventually it became such a close companion and coworker that it seems impossible for many of us to imagine ever eating one–although probably a billion people around the world do so on a regular basis. For thousands of years it remade cultures and societies, even creating new languages. Then, at the moment of its greatest societal impact, it was quickly replaced by the internal combustion engine. I am of course referring to the horse. And with me to talk about the immense importance of the horse in human history is Timothy Winegard, heard last week explaining the horrible effects of the mosquito in human history. He is Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, where as a Canadian expat he is by Colorado law also required to coach the college hockey team–which he does. More importantly for our purposes today he is author of The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity.   

It is without question the most lethal predator in the history of the planet.  It has killed more humans than any other single cause of death—something around 52 billion over the course of 200,000 years of human history. In 2022 alone, it probably killed 680,000 people—a number much reduced from the carnage it has caused in past centuries. This super-predator is the mosquito, which has since the time of the dinosaurs carried diseases in its tiny body that have destroyed nations and cultures, and altered the destinies of those who survived. With me to describe the immense historical impact of the mosquito is Timothy C. Winegard.  He is Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, and author of the 2019 bestselling book The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. For Further Investigation A review of The Mosquito in Emerging Infectious Diseases The CDC Guide to Mosquitoes One of the earliest works of animation: How a Mosquito Operates, from 1912 Two videos related to William Crawford Gorgas: one, from the Gorgas House Museum in Alabama, highlights his contribution to the building of the Panama Canal; the other is a one minute clip of a silent movie of Gorgas traveling on a train through the Canal Zone.    

Just before 10 AM on Tuesday, June 9th, 1964, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, hundreds of people were gathered in First African Baptist, prepared to march to the new Tuscaloosa County Courthouse where they planned to drink from water fountains and use restroom facilities that were supposed to be only used by whites. Around the church were gathered hundreds of police, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and other deputized whites. At 10:15 AM, after the arrest of Reverend T.Y. Rogers, the pastor of First African Baptist, the police attacked the church. They beat those who attempted to leave with clubs and cattle prods. Then, the door being closed and locked, they brought up a fire truck, and blasted away the stained glass windows, filling the sanctuary in some places ankle-deep with water. Then they fired tear gas canisters through the windows, driving those within outside, where they were beaten, and over a hundred were hauled off to jail.  This was Bloody Tuesday, now a nearly forgotten inflection point in the Civil Rights struggle, overshadowed by the concurrent campaign then ongoing in St. Augustine, by national events in the weeks to come, and by the violence of Selma in 1965. John M. Giggie had preserved the memories of Bloody Tuesday, and complex struggle of justice in Tuscaloosa in his new book Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa.  John M. Giggie is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. He is creator of "History of Us," the first Black history class taught daily in a public school in Alabama. Giggie is also director of the Alabama Memory Project, which seeks to recapture and memorialize the over 650 lives lost to lynching in Alabama, and a founding member of the Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History and Reconciliation Foundation.   For Further Investigation Three short essays on Bloody Tuesday by John Giggie: “How Tuscaloosa's Bloody Tuesday Changed the Course of History,” Time.com, June 7, 2024 Remembering Bloody Tuesday, Alabama Heritage, June 2024 The Tuscaloosa Campaign and Bloody Tuesday, Encyclopedia of Alabama Books on the Civil Rights movement on Tuscaloosa, related to subjects in the podcast, or mentioned in the podcast: Clark, E. Culpepper. The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at The University of Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Hollars, B.J. Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013. Wendt, Simon. The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2007. Cobb, Charles E. Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Marsh, Charles. God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Chappell, David L. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Does knowing a lot of facts about the historical past – say, of early America – make us feel closer to it? Or is something else required? How can we–as my guest puts it, “appreciate a bit better what it felt like to be alive then. Naturally,” he continues  “we can't teach emotions to any who weren't alive to experience them how Pearl Harbor felt in real time – let alone Fort Sumter or Lincoln‘s assassination – is not transmissible. The historian can only do so much.“ But how to convey not merely the intellectual weight but the emotional burdens that humans once carried–and that we might no longer understand? My guest Andrew Burstein has done what he can to credibly bring early America closer to us in his new book Longing for Connection: Entangled Memories, and Emotional Loss in Early America. It is a work of history that is intricately plotted, connecting personalities and themes in a sort of great circular panopticon of early America, in which the reader sits at the orbital center of continual swirl and movement.   Andrew Burstein is the Charles Phelps Manship Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at Louisiana State University. Longing for Connection is the latest member of a large-and hopefully happy- family of books.   For Further Investigation You really should read some Alexander Pope. Find more about him, and some of his poems here. Poor Edward Everett. No one ever reads his Gettysburg address.  Some of the more closely related members of the Burstein family of books, many of them mentioned in the conversation, listed in order of publication: The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist; Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image; The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving; and Lincoln Dreamt He Died: The Midnight Visions of Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud For an intro to cultural history, you should listen to Episode 32 Past episodes with a connection to this one are Episode 163: The First Martyr of the American Revolution; and Episode 344: Founding Scoundrels

In 1978, along the shoreline of the Potomac River in Westmoreland County, Virginia, people began to see…something…out in the water. Whatever it was, it seemed snakelike. But then all such sightings ended–until, over a period of years in the early 1980s, sightings proliferated around Kent Island, situated in the very middle of the Chesapeake, the eastern end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The “monster” was soon named “Chessie”, and perhaps because of the cute name was characterized as being a friendly monster; and while no biological traces of it were ever discovered, “Chessie” became an icon of the environmental movement to save the bay.  But what was the context for Chessie's sightings?  What might suburbanization and taking recreation as seriously as labor have to do with seeing monsters in the water? And why did so many (including, as best as I can remember, myself) need to believe that Chessie was real?  With me to discuss Chessie, and her life and times is Eric Cheezum, an independent historian, a resident of Maryland's eastern shore, and the author of Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster, which is–not surprisingly–the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation David Halperin, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing Hal Rothman, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West WBAL-TV: "The legend of 'Chessie' is alive and well 35 years later" The Chesapeake Conservation Partnership on the sightings and importance of  "Chessie: The Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster"

From 987 to 1328, the Capetian family ruled France without interruption. Except that they weren't really called the Capetians, and France was not yet really…France. And therein lies a story. Through the ingredients of ruthless high mindedness; enlightened guile; excellent marriages and often lots of them;  and sheer dumb luck, this one family created out of very uncertain beginnings the most powerful kingdom in Christendom. In the process they created institutions that lasted to the French Revolution, and sometimes beyond; instituted symbols and styles that epitomize Medieval Europe to subsequent generations; turned  a small town at a river crossing into one of the most fabled cities in human history; and in the process created France. With me to discuss the Capetians is Justine Firnhaber-Baker, most recently author of House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made France. Justine Firnhaber-Baker is Professor of History at the University of St. Andrew's. She was last on the podcast in Episode 227, when she described and explained the Jacquerie, the French peasant's revolt of 1358–which remains one of the most popular episodes of this podcast. For Further Information Speaking of medieval queens, we've talked with Catherine Hanley about Matilda, arguably the one woman to rule England in her own right before Elizabeth I; and with Katherine Pangonis about the Queens of the Kingdom of Jerusalem And for the other half of the story, including more on Louis VII and Blanche of Castile, see my conversation with Catherine Hanley on the intertwining of the English and French dynasties The expulsion of the Jews was mentioned, so that means I should link to my conversation with Rowan Dorin on expulsion as a matter of medieval policy  

On June 24th, 1947, a private pilot and fire suppression equipment manufacturer named Kenneth Arnold was flying south of Mount Rainier, bound for Yakima, Washington. At about 3 PM he saw a flash of light in the air to the north of the mountain, and subsequently he saw a long chain of flying objects passing in front of the mountain. He described them as having convex shapes, and this was soon changed to the term “flying saucer". Arnold's was in fact not the first UFO sighting following the Second World War; nor was it even part of the first wave of sightings of strange things in the sky. Yet something unprecedented did happen after 1947, not only in the United States, but around the world–not necessarily involving aliens, but very much involving humans. As Greg Egighian observes in his new book After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon, UFO sightings “have made people wonder, fret, question, probe, and argue. In that regard, they have revealed more about human beings than about alien worlds. And that is a story worth investigating.” Greg Eghigian is a Professor of History and Bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth Century Germany and the editor of The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, among other works. For Further Investigation Greg Egighian suggests the following books for your UFO history reading list: Matthew Bowman, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill David Clarke, How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth D.W. Pasulka, American Cosmic Sarah Scoles, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here – and Out There Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs From the HT archives, if you haven't heard them, then give a listen to somewhat related episodes: Iwan Rhys Morus on "How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon," and Tom Misa on the "History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet" D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? Peter Berger on Secularism and Relativism; and a full-length video of the same lecture

Sometime around two and half millennia ago, a cluster of cities and states around the northeastern Mediterranean began to do amazing things. For some reason they began to spread out, establishing towns and outposts around the fringe of both the Mediterranean and the Black Seas. And as they sailed and traded in the outer world, they also began to explore with ever-increasing rigor their inner world, with a series of big questions which remain important to us even to this day. All the while, they competed feverishly with one another: in athletics, in war, in trade, in sex, in the arts, and in all the varieties of social life. These were the people we call the Greeks. But how did such a diversity of people gain a common title, or come to represent a common culture? Amongst their commonalities, what were their differences? And despite their often uncanny ability to think and act in ways that still make us feel a deep connection to them, how were they very different from us, and very similar to others of their own world? With me to survey the unities and diversities of the ancient Greeks is Jennifer Roberts, Professor of classics and history at the City College of New York and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her many books include The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece and Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction, both of which were the subject of previous conversations on this podcast. Her most recent book is Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Jennifer Roberts previous episodes were on the Peloponnesian War, and on the historian Herodotus. We've done a lot of episodes on Ancient Greece, enough for a mini-curriculum. Here is Paul Cartledge on Thebes; Andrew Bayliss on Sparta; and Bruce Clark on Athens (though admittedly little of that conversation was about ancient Athens). Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color I referred to my two conversations with Tom Holland, the first one concerning his book Dominion, and the second and most recent conversation about his book PAX. Hunter Rawlings, classicist and expert on Thucydides