POPULARITY
3 episodes with Frederick Jackson Turner
3 episodes with Frederick Jackson Turner
3 episodes with Frederick Jackson Turner
2 episodes with Frederick Jackson Turner
2 episodes with Frederick Jackson Turner
2 episodes with Frederick Jackson Turner
2 episodes with Frederick Jackson Turner
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.liveIs it possible to move up in this world? Are Americans stuck? Our guest today is Yoni Appelbaum, an American historian and staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. His new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, explores the various ways the American dream has been stymied — by the consolidation of property and wealth, the abuse of environmental regulations, the legacy of redlining, among other factors. But the book is not a diatribe; it offers a hopeful program for how we can make America better. Samuel Kimbriel and Damir Marusic engage in a lively conversation with Yoni that will leave you looking at America in a different, more hopeful way.Yoni's book is personal in its inspiration: he found himself living in a working-class neighborhood — a so-called “zone of emergence,” where underprivileged immigrants once gained a foothold on the American dream — that was no longer affordable to middle-class families. But it is also a political book. Yoni got the sense that something had gone profoundly wrong in America: “This was a contrarian thought in the Obama era. Now it is conventional wisdom.”What can be done to help the American dream become real again? Is mobility a “central American value”? Do policies that help communities stay alive and stable actually worsen inequality and class stratification? Should the Democratic Party become a party of economic growth, rather than regulation or even “degrowth”? These are the questions that Damir and Sam invite Yoni to wrestle with in a lively and deeply informed episode.In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Yoni discusses how to harness market power in a way that “centers mobility”; the three talk about the gap between intent and impact in environmental regulations; Yoni explains why technocrats will always be needed but will never be enough; and Yoni speculates as to why Americans long for a strong leader — for better or worse.Required Reading and Listening:* Yoni Appelbaum, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity (Amazon). * Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Amazon).* Reihan Salam, “Want Abundance in Housing? Acknowledge that Greed Is Good” (City Journal). * Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (Project Gutenberg). * Jeffersonian democracy (CrashCourse).* Podcast with Martha Nussbaum (WoC). This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Governance and Markets.Free preview video:Full video for paid subscribers below:
This week Megan Kate Nelson and Kate Carpenter drop in to talk about Kevin Costner's new American epic, Horizon. Our reviews (and our drinks) are mixed but this is such a fun episode as we talk not only about where Horizon succeeds and fails but also about what Costner's career has to say about The West in general. This one is fun.About our guests:Megan Kate Nelson is a writer, historian, road cyclist, and cocktail enthusiast.And starting in September, she will be the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. While she is there, she will be finishing her new book, “The Westerners: The Creation of America's Most Iconic Region.” She is the author of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which was a Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History.Her most recent book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America was published by Scribner on March 1, 2022, the 150th anniversary of the Yellowstone Act, which created the first national park in the world. Saving Yellowstone has won the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction, and is one of Smithsonian Magazine‘s Top Ten Books in History for 2022. She is an expert in the history of the American Civil War, the U.S. West, and popular culture, and have written articles about these topics for The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, Slate, and Smithsonian Magazine.Kate Carpenter is a PhD candidate in History of Science at Princeton University whose research focuses on the intersection of environmental history and history of science. Her dissertation is a social and scientific history of storm chasing in the United States since the 1950s. It draws on archival sources, scientific publications, photographs and videos created by storm chasers, popular culture, and oral histories to examine how both professional meteorologists and weather enthusiasts created a community that became central both to our understanding of severe storms and to the cultural identity of the Great Plains.Kate holds a 2023-2024 Charlotte Elizabeth Proctor Honorific Fellowship from Princeton University. From 2022-2023, her work was supported by the Graduate Fellowship in the History of Science from the American Meteorological Society, and in 2021-2022 she held the Taylor-Wei Dissertation Research Fellowship in the History of Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma History of Science. She has also been awarded travel fellowships including the Andrew W. Mellon Travel Fellowship from the University of Oklahoma, the Summer Dissertation Grant from the Princeton American Studies program, and two awards with outstanding merit from the University of Missouri-Kansas City Women's Council Graduate Assistance Fund.
Clay Newcomb and the crew speak with the artist and retired Missouri Game Warden, Kyle Carroll, about his career in the American wilderness. They discuss the wilderness myth, Clay's fourth verse of the song "Ironic," pragmatism, Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier thesis, and the wimpification of America. Josh “Landbridge” Spielmaker, Dr. Misty Newcomb, Bear John Newcomb, and Brent Reaves join the show. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Découvrez l'abonnement "Au Coeur de l'Histoire +" et accédez à des heures de programmes, des archives inédites, des épisodes en avant-première et une sélection d'épisodes sur des grandes thématiques. Profitez de cette offre sur Apple Podcasts dès aujourd'hui ! L'histoire des États-Unis d'Amérique commence sur la côte Est, où ont été établies les treize colonies pionnières qui deviennent les premiers États en 1776. Pourtant, l'Ouest et sa conquête occupent une place à part dans l'imaginaire américain. Pour comprendre ce qui fait la spécificité de l'Ouest américain dans la construction de l'identité américaine, Virginie Girod reçoit Annick Foucrier, professeure émérite d'histoire de l'Amérique du Nord à l'université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Lors de l'indépendance, acquise en 1783, les États-Unis n'ont rien du géant géographique d'aujourd'hui. Coincé entre l'Atlantique et la chaîne des Appalaches, le pays se tourne vers l'Ouest pour s'étendre. À la manœuvre se trouve Thomas Jefferson, troisième président des États-Unis. Expansionniste, il négocie l'achat de la Louisiane à la France et organise plusieurs voyages pour connaître les territoires au-delà du Mississippi. La plus célèbre d'entre elles reste l'expédition Lewis et Clark. Partis en 1804, les quarante membres parviennent à atteindre le Pacifique et revenir. À l'époque, l'Ouest est un territoire méconnu. "On pensait qu'il devait y avoir une énorme montagne de sel et des mammouths" s'amuse Annick Foucrier. Dans le sillage de ces expéditions essentiellement scientifiques, les États-Unis étendent leur territoire au fil des annexions. En 1853, "l'achat Gadsen" achève l'expansion américaine vers l'Ouest. Après avoir agrandi le territoire, il faut désormais le peupler et l'occuper. "C'est d'abord le chemin de fer. Ce sont de très grandes distances, le rail est essentiel pour les communications" rappelle Annick Foucrier. "L'Ouest américain c'est aussi des paysages spectaculaires : Yosemite, Yellowstone... considérés par les Américains comme l'équivalent des cathédrales en Europe". En 1893, l'historien Frederick Jackson Turner fait du processus de conquête de l'Ouest, qui s'achève alors, la matrice de l'identité américaine. Selon lui, "c'est justement dans ces espaces sauvages que ces hommes et ces femmes, en repoussant la frontière, ont transformé leurs origines européennes pour devenir des américains" explique l'historienne. Vivement critiquée, car elle efface la dimension violente de l'expansion et occulte le rôle des minorités, l'histoire de Turner sert néanmoins de base aux américains pour construire le mythe de leur jeune nation. "Hollywood a repris tout cela pour en faire une attraction, il y a toute une re-création du passé de l'Ouest" résume Annick Foucrier. Thèmes abordés : conquête de l'Ouest, États-Unis, cow-boy, Hollywood "Au cœur de l'histoire" est un podcast Europe 1 Studio- Présentation : Virginie Girod - Production : Nathan Laporte et Caroline Garnier- Réalisation : Julien Tharaud- Composition de la musique originale : Julien Tharaud - Rédaction et Diffusion : Nathan Laporte- Communication : Kelly Decroix- Visuel : Sidonie Mangin
This episode continues a review of some of the thoughts of Frederick Jackson Turner on the significance of history and introduces another late 19th Century and early 20th Century historian - Lucy Maynard Salmon - whose thoughts on history are still relavant today. The Texas History Lessons Theme song, Walking Through History, was written and recorded by Derrick McClendon. Twitter: @dmclendonmusic If you are enjoying Texas History Lessons, consider buying me a cup of coffee by clicking here! Help make Texas History Lessons by supporting it on Patreon. And a special thanks to everyone that already does. Website: texashistorylessons.com email: texashistorylessons@gmail.com Twitter: @TexasHistoryL Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After George Floyd's police murder and the Black Lives Matter movement explosion in 2020, the field of international relations rushed to engage the topic of race after ignoring it for half a century. When they did, they largely acted as if early generations of international-relations scholars hadn't engaged with or theorized the topic. But they had. In this episode, Van sits down with Robbie Shilliam, a multidisciplinary IR scholar and postcolonial theorist, to talk about:What made Hans Morgenthau a theorist of race relations, not just international relations;Why the field of IR has a racial blind spot in the first place;Why IR's leading journals, editors, and scholars re-engaged racial questions after 2020 but without drawing on what the discipline's own canonical thinkers had to say about race;Why the Gen Z and Millennial generation of scholars are possibly built differently when it comes to racial issues and historical IR;How the concept of “frontier” unites Republicanism and imperialism in some of the early thinkers of IR like Frederick Jackson Turner, William Allen, and Merze Tate.I was sick as a dog when we recorded this, but it was one of the most generative conversations I've ever had on the pod and Robbie is one soulful human being. Hope you enjoy this one!Subscribe to the Un-Diplomatic Newsletter: https://www.un-diplomatic.comRobbie Shilliam, “Republicanism and Imperialism at the Frontier: A Post-Black Lives Matter Archeology of International Relations,” https://robbieshilliam.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/frontier-2.0.pdf.Epeli Hau'ofa, WE ARE THE OCEAN: SELECTED WORKS (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008).
漫步在城市内的公园，稍加留意，我们会发现干旱的土地会被悉心灌溉，栽种的植物种类会刻意选择，分叉的树木需要定期进行修剪。尽管作为一种自然环境，这里却处处遍布着人工的痕迹。公园是人工和天然的美好结合，它是窥见城市和自然相互依存关系的一扇窗口。我们渴望接触野生自然，但不得不承认的是，城市仍然是我们主要的生活之地。但日益肮脏的空气、拥挤的环境、喧嚣的噪音，让我们逐步认识到城市演化过程中的生态悖论，只有自然环境的美好才能使得城市成为更宜居之地。那么，城市和自然之间究竟存在什么样的关系？而当有了自然的视角去打量城市之后，我们对城市的理解会有何不同？在前几期节目里，我们探索了城市里的动物、植物、动物园和在城市内田园生活的可能性，而作为“自然自在”系列播客的收尾，本期我们将视野放在更“硬核”的学术层面。我们邀请了北京大学历史学系教授侯深老师，从环境史、城市史的角度探讨城市和自然的关系、城市公园的演变过程以及如何使我们的城市成为一个更美好的地方。【本期嘉宾】主播 | 丘濂，《三联生活周刊》主笔嘉宾 | 侯深，北京大学历史学系教授，专注于城市环境史研究，著有《无墙之城：美国历史上的城市与自然》【时间轴】00:01:37 什么是“环境史”？00:06:55 “城市环境史”究竟在研究什么？00:16:25 为什么美国文化里，非常强调对“荒野”的保留？00:30:08 纽约中央公园营建史00:39:22 在城市公园中，有哪些值得关注的内容？00:44:12 “无墙之城”，何以成为美国城市的特色？00:52:27 现代城市与传统城市的区别在哪里？00:59:37 灾难、气味、下水道……城市环境史领域，还有哪些值得探究的话题？01:10:37 从中国的传统文化里，可以生发出自然探索与环境保护的意识吗？01:19:10 经过疫情的洗礼，城市居民对自然的渴望是否变得更强烈了？【节目中提到的一些名词】唐纳德·沃斯特（Donald Worster）：美国环境史学家，环境史学的创始人与领军先锋，美国堪萨斯大学霍尔荣誉教授（荣休），美国人文与科学学院院士。主要著作有《自然的经济体系》《尘暴》《帝国之河》等。曾获美国历史学奖班克罗夫特奖、苏格兰文学奖、英语语言联盟传记奖，并多次获普利策奖提名。《尘暴：20世纪30年代美国南部大平原》：该书以环境史的视角，描绘了上世纪三十年代美国大平原地区持续发生的大尘暴。书中不但宏观性地描述了尘暴发生的气候、土壤、政治、经济等诸多原因，还细致讲述了尘暴发生时所有的细节，包括对人们生活、生产、交通以及对人精神状态的影响。贯穿全书的一个观点是，大尘暴的发生与资本主义文化有关。1979年该书正式出版，次年便获得美国历史学界最高奖——班克罗夫特奖。《自然的大都市》(Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West)：该书是美国历史学家威廉·克罗农（William Cronon）的著作，最早出版于1991年。在该书中，作者提供了一个关于19世纪美国历史的环境视角，主要分析了芝加哥成为美国最具有活力的城市的生态和经济原因，从生态系统的角度阐述了大都市芝加哥与其乡村腹地之间的联系。《园与森林》（Garden and Forest）杂志：出版于1888~1897 年，是美国第一本致力于园艺、植物学、景观设计和保护、国家和城市公园发展的杂志。该杂志由哈佛大学阿诺德植物园的创始董事查尔斯·斯普拉格·萨金特（Charles Sprague Sargent）创办。总共发行了十卷，包含大约8400页，包括1000多幅插图和2000页的广告。每期的文章既有文学性，也有学术性和科学性。《山峦晦暗，山峦辉煌》（Mountain Gloomy， Mountain Glory）：美国文学学者玛乔丽·霍普·尼克森（Marjorie Hope Nicolson）的著作，出版于1959年。该书追踪了17~19世纪不同作家对于“山”概念理解的变化过程：从17世纪将山看作是影响自然美的丑陋“凸起”到19世纪转而赞美山的辉煌和神圣。弗雷德里克·杰克逊·特纳( Frederick Jackson Turner）：20世纪初的美国历史学家，在威斯康星大学、哈佛大学工作。著作包括《美国历史中边疆的意义》等。他主要以“边疆理论”（frontier thesis）而闻名。《边疆在美国历史上的重要性》：特纳“边疆理论”（frontier thesis）的集大成之作，其中提出了关于美国的边疆理念如何在19世纪90年代塑造了美国的历史和民族性格。通过反思过去，特纳指出人们对边疆的迷恋以及向美国西部的扩张运动改变了美国人对文化的看法。这一系列观点对历史学界产生了重大的影响。弗雷德里克·劳·奥姆斯特德(Frederick Law Olmsted)：美国景观建筑师、记者、社会评论家和公共管理者。他被认为是美国的景观建筑之父。奥姆斯特德因与他的伙伴卡尔弗特·沃克斯（Calvert Vaux）共同设计了许多著名的城市公园而闻名，其中最著名的包括纽约的中央公园。中央公园的设计树立了一个卓越的标准，影响着美国的景观建筑设计。《无墙之城：美国历史上的城市与自然》：中国人民大学历史学院教授、环境史学者侯深的著作，出版于2021年。该书梳理了城市环境史将自然与城市在历史背景下进行结合的详细过程，选取了匹兹堡、波士顿、拉斯维加斯、堪萨斯、旧金山等城市讨论美国城市演化的生态悖论，总结了“无墙之城”为核心意象的美国城市的形成与发展、困境与使命。《中国之灾：1931长江大洪水》（The Nature of Disaster in China：The 1931 Yangzi River Flood）：美国社会和环境史学家克里斯·考特尼（Chris Courtney）的首部著作，于2018年出版。该书描述了1931年洪水造成的生态与经济影响如何导致了大范围的饥荒与瘟疫。这一开创性的研究为世人提供了对1931年洪水的深入分析，并理清了困扰中国最久环境问题之一的来龙去脉。《味嗅觉侦探：19世纪现代美国嗅觉史》（Smell Detectives：An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America）：美国历史学家梅拉妮·基埃赫勒（Melanie Kiechle）的著作，于2017年出版。该书主要讲述了十九世纪美国快速城市化时期，空气变得恶臭，人们对气味的恐惧和焦虑已经渗透到各个方面。与此同时，城市居民用他们的嗅觉来理解城市和工业的快速发展所带来的卫生挑战。伊懋可（Hark Elvin）：英国历史学家，汉学史专家。曾在格拉斯哥大学、牛津大学、巴黎高师和海德堡大学任教，在哈佛大学做过访问研究员。主要著作有：《中国历史的模式》、《另一种历史：从一个欧洲人的视角论中国》、《华人世界变化多端的故事》等。《大象的退却：一部中国环境史》：伊懋可的代表作，被誉为西方学者撰写中国环境史的奠基之作。书中对中国农业史、社会史等多个领域进行了研究，通过大象从华北到西南的长长退却之路，讲述了中国的经济、社会、政治制度与所在自然环境之间既互利共生又竞争冲突的漫长历史故事，给出了解读环境史的一种全新方式。侯文蕙：环境史教授，长期从事美国史、美国环境史教学与研究，被誉为我国“环境史的拓荒者”。曾翻译《尘暴：1930年代美国南部大平原》、《沙乡年鉴》、《封闭的循环》等经典著作，代表作品有《征服的挽歌：美国环境意识的变迁》与论文《美国环境史观的演变》。《沙乡年鉴》：美国作家奥尔多·利奥波德创作的自然随笔和哲学论文集，首次出版于1949年。该书记录了奥尔多·利奥波德在美国威斯康星州一个农场进行生态修复的经历，从哲学、伦理学、美学及文化传统的角度深刻阐述了人与自然应该具备的关系。该书被称为美国环境保护运动的“圣经”，是当代环境保护运动的思想基石。【收听方式】你可以通过三联中读、小宇宙、喜马拉雅、苹果播客、网易云音乐、荔枝FM关注收听。【福利】点击链接加读书小助手，领三联自制【女性主义流派知识图谱】https://t.yiwise.com/qoI8u
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner's frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (U Nebraska Press, 2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner's frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (U Nebraska Press, 2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner's frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (U Nebraska Press, 2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner's frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (U Nebraska Press, 2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner's frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (U Nebraska Press, 2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner's frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (U Nebraska Press, 2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west
Charles C. Mann is the author of three of my favorite history books: 1491. 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. We discuss:why Native American civilizations collapsed and why they failed to make more technological progresswhy he disagrees with Will MacAskill about longtermismwhy there aren't any successful slave revoltshow geoengineering can help us solve climate changewhy Bitcoin is like the Chinese Silver Tradeand much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Some really cool guests coming up, subscribe to find out about future episodes!Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy my interviews of Will MacAskill (about longtermism), Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection), and David Deutsch (about AI and the problems with America's constitution).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group-chats, and throw it up on any relevant subreddits & forums you follow. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.Timestamps(0:00:00) -Epidemically Alternate Realities(0:00:25) -Weak Points in Empires(0:03:28) -Slave Revolts(0:08:43) -Slavery Ban(0:12:46) - Contingency & The Pyramids(0:18:13) - Teotihuacan(0:20:02) - New Book Thesis(0:25:20) - Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley(0:31:15) - Technological Stupidity in the New World(0:41:24) - Religious Demoralization(0:44:00) - Critiques of Civilization Collapse Theories(0:49:05) - Virginia Company + Hubris(0:53:30) - China's Silver Trade(1:03:03) - Wizards vs. Prophets(1:07:55) - In Defense of Regulatory Delays(0:12:26) -Geoengineering(0:16:51) -Finding New Wizards(0:18:46) -Agroforestry is Underrated(1:18:46) -Longtermism & Free MarketsTranscriptDwarkesh Patel Okay! Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Mann, who is the author of three of my favorite books, including 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.Charles C. Mann It's a pleasure to be here.Epidemically Alternate RealitiesDwarkesh Patel My first question is: How much of the New World was basically baked into the cake? So at some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the New World, bringing their diseases. Considering disparities and where they would survive, if the Acemoglu theory that you cited is correct, then some of these places were bound to have good institutions and some of them were bound to have bad institutions. Plus, because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of all this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it, then maybe 50 years down the line, would someone from Italy have done it? What is the contingency here?Charles C. Mann Well, I think that some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that at some point, people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? There was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres––largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia and the Eastern hemisphere. This leads almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases: diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. Most of the great killers in human history are zoonotic diseases. When people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere meet, there are going to be those kinds of diseases. But if you wanted to, it's possible to imagine alternative histories. There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that, in fact, does just that. It's a great alternative history book. He imagines that some of the Vikings came and extended further into North America, bringing all these diseases, and by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. So when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went and conquered Europe. It's far-fetched, but it does say that this encounter would've happened and that the diseases would've happened, but it didn't have to happen in exactly the way that it did. It's also perfectly possible to imagine that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began about whether or not slavery was a good idea. There were a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy asking the Pope “Is it okay that we do this?” You could imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. So, I think some of it was bound to happen, but how exactly it happened was really up to chance, contingency, and human agency,Weak Points in EmpiresDwarkesh Patel When the Spanish first arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, were the Incas and the Aztecs at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent? Or was this just how well you should have expected this civilization to be functioning at any given time period?Charles C. Mann Well, typically, empires are much more jumbly and fragile entities than we imagine. There's always fighting at the top. What Hernán Cortés was able to do, for instance, with the Aztecs––who are better called The Triple Alliance (the term “Aztec” is an invention from the 19th century). The Triple Alliance was comprised of three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tenochtitlan. The other two guys really resented them and so what Cortes was able to do was foment a civil war within the Aztec empire: taking some enemies of the Aztec, some members of the Aztec empire, and creating an entirely new order. There's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really emerged into the popular consciousness. I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it; everything was largely from Spanish and Mexican scholars about the conquest within the conquest. The allies of the Spaniards actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. So there's a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published 1491. However, the conquest wasn't as complete as we think. I talk a bit about this in 1493 but what happens is Cortes moves in and he marries his lieutenants to these indigenous people, creating this hybrid nobility that then extended on to the Incas. The Incas were a very powerful but unstable empire and Pizarro had the luck to walk in right after a civil war. When he did that right after a civil war and massive epidemic, he got them at a very vulnerable point. Without that, it all would have been impossible. Pizarro cleverly allied with the losing side (or the apparently losing side in this in the Civil War), and was able to create a new rallying point and then attack the winning side. So yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points because of fratricidal stuff going on in the leadership.Dwarkesh Patel It does also remind me of the East India Trading Company.Charles C. Mann And the Mughal empire, yeah. Some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his people in. In fact, I was struck by this. I had just been reading this book, maybe you've heard of it: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.Dwarkesh Patel I've started reading it, yeah but I haven't made much progress.Charles C. Mann It's an amazing book! It's so oddly similar to what happened. There was this fratricidal stuff going on in the Mughal empire, and one side thought, “Oh, we'll get these foreigners to come in, and we'll use them.” That turned out to be a big mistake.Dwarkesh Patel Yes. What's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy. Niall Ferguson has a good book on the British Empire and one thing he points out is that in India, the ratio between an actual English civil servant and the Indian population was about 1: 3,000,000 at the peak of the ratio. Which obviously is only possible if you have the cooperation of at least the elites, right? So it sounds similar to what you were saying about Cortes marrying his underlings to the nobility. Charles C. Mann Something that isn't stressed enough in history is how often the elites recognize each other. They join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below. It's exactly what happened with the East India Company, and it's exactly what happened with Spain. It's not so much that there was this amazing efficiency, but rather, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement for Xcalack, which is now a Mexican state. It had its rights, and the people kept their integrity, but they weren't really a part of the Spanish Empire. They also weren't really wasn't part of Mexico until around 1857. It was a good deal for them. The same thing was true for the Bengalis, especially the elites who made out like bandits from the British Empire.Slave Revolts Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, that's super interesting. Why was there only one successful slave revolt in the new world in Haiti? In many of these cases, the ratios between slaves and the owners are just huge. So why weren't more of them successful?Charles C. Mann Well, you would first have to define ‘successful'. Haiti wasn't successful if you meant ‘creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time.' Haiti was and is (to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations) in terrible shape. Whereas in the case of Paul Maurice, you had people who were self-governing for more than 100 years.. Eventually, they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil. There's a great Brazilian classic that's equivalent to what Moby Dick or Huck Finn is to us called Os Sertões by a guy named Cunha. And it's good! It's been translated into this amazing translation in English called Rebellion in the Backlands. It's set in the 1880s, and it's about the creation of a hybrid state of runaway slaves, and so forth, and how they had essentially kept their independence and lack of supervision informally, from the time of colonialism. Now the new Brazilian state is trying to take control, and they fight them to the last person. So you have these effectively independent areas in de facto, if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. There are some in the US, too, in the great dismal swamp, and you hear about those marooned communities in North Carolina, in Mexico, where everybody just agreed “these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything.” If they don't mess with us too much, we won't mess with them too much. Is that successful or not? I don't know.Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, but it seems like these are temporary successes..Charles C. Mann I mean, how long did nations last? Like Genghis Khan! How long did the Khan age last? But basically, they had overwhelming odds against them. There's an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence. Similar to the reasons that rebellions in South Asia were suppressed with incredible brutality–– these were seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire colonial order that people exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile.Dwarkesh Patel Right. It reminds me of James Scott's Against the Grain. He pointed out that if you look at the history of agriculture, there're many examples where people choose to run away as foragers in the forest, and then the state tries to bring them back into the fold.Charles C. Mann Right. And so this is exactly part of that dynamic. I mean, who wants to be a slave, right? So as many people as possible ended up leaving. It's easier in some places than others.. it's very easy in Brazil. There are 20 million people in the Brazilian Amazon and the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery. They're still Brazilians and so forth, but, you know, they ended up not being slaves.Slavery BanDwarkesh Patel Yeah, that's super fascinating. What is the explanation for why slavery went from being historically ever-present to ending at a particular time when it was at its peak in terms of value and usefulness? What's the explanation for why, when Britain banned the slave trade, within 100 or 200 years, there ended up being basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world?Charles C. Mann This is a really good question and the real answer is that historians have been arguing about this forever. I mean, not forever, but you know, for decades, and there's a bunch of different explanations. I think the reason it's so hard to pin down is… kind of amazing. I mean, if you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and put red in countries in which slavery was illegal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet. It's the most ancient human institution that there is. The Code of Hammurabi is still the oldest complete legal code that we have, and about a third of it is about rules for when you can buy slaves, when you can sell slaves, how you can mistreat them, and how you can't–– all that stuff. About a third of it is about buying, selling, and working other human beings. So this has been going on for a very, very long time. And then in a century and a half, it suddenly changes. So there's some explanation, and it's that machinery gets better. But the reason to have people is that you have these intelligent autonomous workers, who are like the world's best robots. From the point of view of the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and when they're caught, you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you. So if you have a chance to replace them with machinery, or to create a wage where you can run wage people, pay wage workers who are kept in bad conditions but somewhat have more legal rights, then maybe that's a better deal for you. Another one is that industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable, and slavery was typically associated with the agricultural laborer. So as agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery become less and less important and it became easier to get rid of them. Another one has to do with the beginning of the collapse of the colonial order. Part of it has to do with.. (at least in the West, I don't know enough about the East) the rise of a serious abolition movement with people like Wilberforce and various Darwins and so forth. And they're incredibly influential, so to some extent, I think people started saying, “Wow, this is really bad.” I suspect that if you looked at South Asia and Africa, you might see similar things having to do with a social moment, but I just don't know enough about that. I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti-caste movement in which we're all tangled up in South Asia, but I just don't know enough about it to say anything intelligent.Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, the social aspect of it is really interesting. The things you mentioned about automation, industrialization, and ending slavery… Obviously, with time, that might have actually been why it expanded, but its original inception in Britain happened before the Industrial Revolution took off. So that was purely them just taking a huge loss because this movement took hold. Charles C. Mann And the same thing is true for Bartolome de Las Casas. I mean, Las Casas, you know, in the 1540s just comes out of nowhere and starts saying, “Hey! This is bad.” He is the predecessor of the modern human rights movement. He's an absolutely extraordinary figure, and he has huge amounts of influence. He causes Spain's king in the 1540s to pass what they call The New Laws which says no more slavery, which is a devastating blow enacted to the colonial economy in Spain because they depended on having slaves to work in the silver mines in the northern half of Mexico and in Bolivia, which was the most important part of not only the Spanish colonial economy but the entire Spanish empire. It was all slave labor. And they actually tried to ban it. Now, you can say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned. But it's still… this actually happened in the 1540s. Largely because people like Las Casas said, “This is bad! you're going to hell doing this.”Contingency & The Pyramids Dwarkesh Patel Right. I'm super interested in getting into The Wizard and the Prophet section with you. Discussing how movements like environmentalism, for example, have been hugely effective. Again, even though it probably goes against the naked self-interest of many countries. So I'm very interested in discussing that point about why these movements have been so influential!But let me continue asking you about globalization in the world. I'm really interested in how you think about contingency in history, especially given that you have these two groups of people that have been independently evolving and separated for tens of thousands of years. What things turn out to be contingent? What I find really interesting from the book was how both of them developed pyramids–– who would have thought that structure would be within our extended phenotype or something?Charles C. Mann It's also geometry! I mean, there's only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks in a stable way. And pyramids are certainly one of them. It's harder to have a very long-lasting monument that's a cylinder. Pyramids are also easier to build: if you get a cylinder, you have to have scaffolding around it and it gets harder and harder.With pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one, on and on, and so forth. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me. Now the material you make them up of is going to be partly determined by what there is. In Cahokia and in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a lot of stone. So people are going to make these earthen pyramids and if you want them to stay on for a long time, there's going to be certain things you have to do for the structure which people figured out. For some pyramids, you had all this marble around them so you could make these giant slabs of marble, which seems, from today's perspective, incredibly wasteful. So you're going to have some things that are universal like that, along with the apparently universal, or near-universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated. Dwarkesh Patel Yes, I visited Mexico City recently.Charles C. Mann Beautiful city!TeotihuacanDwarkesh Patel Yeah, the pyramids there… I think I was reading your book at the time or already had read your book. What struck me was that if I remember correctly, they didn't have the wheel and they didn't have domesticated animals. So if you really think about it, that's a really huge amount of human misery and toil it must have taken to put this thing together as basically a vanity project. It's like a huge negative connotation if you think about what it took to construct it.Charles C. Mann Sure, but there are lots of really interesting things about Teotihuacan. This is just one of those things where you can only say so much in one book. If I was writing the two-thousand-page version of 1491, I would have included this. So Tehuácan pretty much starts out as a standard Imperial project, and they build all these huge castles and temples and so forth. There's no reason to suppose it was anything other than an awful experience (like building the pyramids), but then something happened to Teotihuacan that we don't understand. All these new buildings started springing up during the next couple of 100 years, and they're all very very similar. They're like apartment blocks and there doesn't seem to be a great separation between rich and poor. It's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is because that's usually thought to be a reflection of social status. So based on the way it looks, could there have been a political revolution of some sort? Where they created something much more egalitarian, probably with a bunch of good guy kings who weren't interested in elevating themselves so much? There's a whole chapter in the book by David Wingrove and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything about this, and they make this argument that Tehuácan is an example that we can look at as an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think. Now, in my view, they go a little overboard–– it was also an aggressive imperial power and it was conquering much of the Maya world at the same time. But it is absolutely true that something that started out one way can start looking very differently quite quickly. You see this lots of times in the Americas in the Southwest–– I don't know if you've ever been to Chaco Canyon or any of those places, but you should absolutely go! Unfortunately, it's hard to get there because of the roads terrible but overall, it's totally worth it. It's an amazing place. Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible, it's just really a fantastic thing to see. There are these enormous structures in Chaco Canyon, that we would call castles if they were anywhere else because they're huge. The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito, is like 800 rooms or some insane number like that. And it's clearly an imperial venture, we know that because it's in this canyon and one side is getting all the good light and good sun–– a whole line of these huge castles. And then on the other side is where the peons lived. We also know that starting around 1100, everybody just left! And then their descendants start the Puebla, who are these sort of intensely socially egalitarian type of people. It looks like a political revolution took place. In fact, in the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing (in a sort of tongue-in-cheek manner but also seriously) that this is the first American Revolution! They got rid of these “kings” and created these very different and much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice about what went on.Dwarkesh Patel Interesting. I think I got a chance to see the Teotihuacan apartments when I was there, but I wonder if we're just looking at the buildings that survived. Maybe the buildings that survived were better constructed because they were for the elites? The way everybody else lived might have just washed away over the years.Charles C. Mann So what's happened in the last 20 years is basically much more sophisticated surveys of what is there. I mean, what you're saying is absolutely the right question to ask. Are the rich guys the only people with things that survived while the ordinary people didn't? You can never be absolutely sure, but what they did is they had these ground penetrating radar surveys, and it looks like this egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. So it's possible that there are more really, really poor people. But at least you'd see an aggressively large “middle class” getting there, which is very, very different from the picture you have of the ancient world where there's the sun priest and then all the peasants around them.New Book ThesisDwarkesh Patel Yeah. By the way, is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this point? It's okay if you're not––Charles C. Mann Sure sure, it's okay! This is a sort of weird thing, it's like a sequel or offshoot of 1491. That book, I'm embarrassed to say, was supposed to end with another chapter. The chapter was going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up, and I'm very fond of it. And apparently, I had a lot to say because when I outlined the chapter; the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. So I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth, and it just was awful. So I just cut it. If you carefully look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending. At the end, the author sort of goes, “Hey! I'm ending, look at how great this is!” So this has been bothering me for 15 years. During the pandemic, when I was stuck at home like so many other people, I held out what I had since I've been saving string and tossing articles that I came across into a folder, and I thought, “Okay, I'm gonna write this out more seriously now.” 15 or 20 years later. And then it was pretty long so I thought “Maybe this could be an e-book.” then I showed it to my editor. And he said, “That is not an e-book. That's an actual book.” So I take a chapter and hope I haven't just padded it, and it's about the North American West. My kids like the West, and at various times, they've questioned what it would be like to move out there because I'm in Massachusetts, where they grew up. So I started thinking “What is the West going to be like, tomorrow? When I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now?”It seems to be that you won't know who's president or who's governor or anything, but there are some things we can know. It'd be hotter and drier than it is now or has been in the recent past, like that wouldn't really be a surprise. So I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that. All the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of Latino descent–– from the south, so to speak. And there's a whole lot of people from Asia along the Pacific coast, so it's going to be a real ethnic mixing ground. There's going to be an epicenter of energy, sort of no matter what happens. Whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, or hydroelectric, the West is going to be economically extremely powerful, because energy is a fundamental industry.And the last thing is (and this is the iffiest of the whole thing), but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294 federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue. That's been going in this very jagged way, but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years, as long as I've been around, the overall trend is in a very clear direction. So then you think, okay, this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties. Nature is also going to really be in kind of a terminal. Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s! And the conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and so forth. There's this breakpoint in history when people who looked like me came in and sort of rolled in from the East and kind of took over everything. And the West disappears! That separate entity, the native people disappear, and nature is tamed. That's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid. Do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is? Dwarkesh Patel No.Charles C. Mann So he's like one of these guys where nobody knows who he is. But he was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas. He wrote this article in 1893, called The Significance of the Frontier. It was what established this idea that there's this frontier moving from East to West and on this side was savagery and barbarism, and on this other side of civilization was team nature and wilderness and all that. Then it goes to the Pacific, and that's the end of the West. That's still in the textbooks but in a different form: we don't call native people “lurking savages” as he did. But it's in my kids' textbooks. If you have kids, it'll very likely be in their textbook because it's such a bedrock. What I'm saying is that's actually not a useful way to look at it, given what's coming up. A wonderful Texas writer, Bruce Sterling, says, “To know the past, you first have to understand the future.”It's funny, right? But what he means is that all of us have an idea of where the trajectory of history is going. A whole lot of history is about asking, “How did we get here? How do we get there?” To get that, you have to have an idea of what the “there” is. So I'm saying, I'm writing a history of the West with that West that I talked about in mind. Which gives you a very different picture: a lot more about indigenous fire management, the way the Hohokam survived the drought of the 1200s, and a little bit less about Billy the Kid. Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley Dwarkesh Patel I love that quote hahaha. Speaking of the frontier, maybe it's a mistaken concept, but I remember that in a chapter of 1493, you talk about these rowdy adventurer men who outnumber the women in the silver mines and the kind of trouble that they cause. I wonder if there's some sort of distant analogy to the technology world or Silicon Valley, where you have the same kind of gender ratio and you have the same kind of frontier spirit? Maybe not the same physical violence––– more sociologically. Is there any similarity there?Charles C. Mann I think it's funny, I hadn't thought about it. But it's certainly funny to think about. So let me do this off the top of my head. I like the idea that at the end of it, I can say, “wait, wait, that's ridiculous.“ Both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose, or were oblivious about what they had to lose, and had a resilience towards failure. I mean, it's amazing, the number of people in Silicon Valley who have completely failed at numbers of things! They just get up and keep trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. It's pretty clear they are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves. So there's at least a sort of shallow comparison, there are some certain similarities. I don't think this is entirely flattering to either group. It's absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia, and in northern Mexico, created to a large extent, the modern world. But it's also true that they created these cesspools of violence and exploitation that had consequences we're still living with today. So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet. And I think that's true of Silicon Valley and its products *chuckles* I use them every day, and I curse them every day.Dwarkesh Patel Right.Charles C. Mann I want to give you an example. The internet has made it possible for me to do something like write a Twitter thread, get millions of people to read it, and have a discussion that's really amazing at the same time. Yet today, The Washington Post has an article about how every book in Texas (it's one of the states) a child checks out of the school library goes into a central state databank. They can see and look for patterns of people taking out “bad books” and this sort of stuff. And I think “whoa, that's really bad! That's not so good.” It's really the same technology that brings this dissemination and collection of vast amounts of information with relative ease. So with all these things, you take the bitter with the sweet. Technological Stupidity in the New WorldDwarkesh Patel I want to ask you again about contingency because there are so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be. I think you talked about how the natives had different forms of metallurgy, with gold and copper, but then they didn't do iron or steel. You would think that given their “warring nature”, iron would be such a huge help. There's a clear incentive to build it. Millions of people living there could have built or developed this technology. Same with the steel, same with the wheel. What's the explanation for why these things you think anybody would have come up with didn't happen?Charles C. Mann I know. It's just amazing to me! I don't know. This is one of those things I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained, and I went out to walk the dog. I'm always amazed that there are literal glistening drops of water on the crabgrass and when you pick it up, sometimes there are little holes eaten by insects in the crabgrass. Every now and then, if you look carefully, you'll see a drop of water in one of those holes and it forms a lens. And you can look through it! You can see that it's not a very powerful lens by any means, but you can see that things are magnified. So you think “How long has there been crabgrass? Or leaves? And water?” Just forever! We've had glass forever! So how is it that we had to wait for whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't get it. In book 1491, I mentioned the moldboard plow, which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the soil much more easily. It was invented in China thousands of years ago, but not around in Europe until the 1400s. Like, come on, guys! What was it? And so, you know, there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity. One of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact is that maybe not everybody is as blind as you and you can learn from them. I mean, that's the most wonderful thing about trade. So in the case of the wheel, the more amazing thing is that in Mesoamerica, they had the wheel on child's toys. Why didn't they develop it? The best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals. A cart then would have to be pulled by people. That would imply that to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road. Whereas they had these travois, which are these things that you hold and they have these skids that are shaped kind of like an upside-down V. You can drag them across rough ground, you don't need a road for them. That's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth. So you look at this, and you think “maybe this was the ultimate way to save labor. I mean, this was good enough. And you didn't have to build and maintain these roads to make this work” so maybe it was rational or just maybe they're just blinkered. I don't know. As for assembly with steel, I think there's some values involved in that. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those things they had in Mesoamerica called Macuahuitl. They're wooden clubs with obsidian blades on them and they are sharp as hell. You don't run your finger along the edge because they just slice it open. An obsidian blade is pretty much sharper than any iron or steel blade and it doesn't rust. Nice. But it's much more brittle. So okay, they're there, and the Spaniards were really afraid of them. Because a single blow from these heavy sharp blades could kill a horse. They saw people whack off the head of a horse carrying a big strong guy with a single blow! So they're really dangerous, but they're not long-lasting. Part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in the sense that conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers in grunts, it was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige. This was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with. So maybe not having steel worked better for their values and what they were trying to do at war. That would've lasted for years and I mean, that's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario where they're not just blinkered but instead expressive on the basis of their different values. This is hugely speculative. There's a wonderful book by Ross Hassig about old Aztec warfare. It's an amazing book which is about the military history of The Aztecs and it's really quite interesting. He talks about this a little bit but he finally just says we don't know why they didn't develop all these technologies, but this worked for them.Dwarkesh Patel Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of similar to China not developing gunpowder into an actual ballistic material––Charles C. Mann Or Japan giving up the gun! They actually banned guns during the Edo period. The Portuguese introduced guns and the Japanese used them, and they said “Ahhh nope! Don't want them.” and they banned them. This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s. But for a long time, supposedly under the Edo period, Japan had the longest period of any nation ever without a foreign war. Dwarkesh Patel Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, it's concerning when you think the lack of war might make you vulnerable in certain ways. Charles C. Mann Yeah, that's a depressing thought.Religious DemoralizationDwarkesh Patel Right. In Fukuyama's The End of History, he's obviously arguing that liberal democracy will be the final form of government everywhere. But there's this point he makes at the end where he's like, “Yeah, but maybe we need a small war every 50 years or so just to make sure people remember how bad it can get and how to deal with it.” Anyway, when the epidemic started in the New World, surely the Indians must have had some story or superstitious explanation–– some way of explaining what was happening. What was it?Charles C. Mann You have to remember, the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. So neither the Spaniards, or the English, or the native people, had a clear idea of what was going on. In fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad, and the air was bad. That was malaria, right? That was an example. To them, it was God that was in control of the whole business. There's a line from my distant ancestor––the Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who's my umpteenth, umpteenth grandfather, that's how waspy I am, he's actually my ancestor––about how God saw fit to clear the natives for us. So they see all of this in really religious terms, and more or less native people did too! So they thought over and over again that “we must have done something bad for this to have happened.” And that's a very powerful demoralizing thing. Your God either punished you or failed you. And this was it. This is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads. People thought “Their god is coming in and they seem to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our God.” Now, both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on! But if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, “Well, maybe I should hit up their God.”Critiques of Civilization Collapse TheoriesDwarkesh Patel Yeah, super fascinating. There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse. There's Joseph Tainter's book, there's Jared Diamond's book. Do you feel like any of them actually do a good job of explaining how these different Indian societies collapsed over time?Charles C. Mann No. Well not the ones that I've read. And there are two reasons for that. One is that it's not really a mystery. If you have a society that's epidemiologically naive, and smallpox sweeps in and kills 30% of you, measles kills 10% of you, and this all happens in a short period of time, that's really tough! I mean COVID killed one million people in the United States. That's 1/330th of the population. And it wasn't even particularly the most economically vital part of the population. It wasn't kids, it was elderly people like my aunt–– I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer. Because I don't mean it that way. But it caused enormous economic damage and social conflict and so forth. Now, imagine something that's 30 or 40 times worse than that, and you have no explanation for it at all. It's kind of not a surprise to me that this is a super challenge. What's actually amazing is the number of nations that survived and came up with ways to deal with this incredible loss.That relates to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in the ways that they sometimes do. Like both of them talk about the Mayan collapse. But there are 30 million Mayan people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards were still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s. In the early 21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost exit province. And that is where the Commandante Cero and the rebellions were going on. We were looking at some Mayan ruins, and they were too beautiful, and I stayed too long, and we were driving back through the night on these terrible roads. And we got stopped by some of these guys with guns. I was like, “Oh God, not only have I got myself into this, I got my son into this.” And the guy comes and looks at us and says, “Who are you?” And I say that we're American tourists. And he just gets this disgusted look, and he says, “Go on.” And you know, the journalist in me takes over and I ask, “What do you mean, just go on?” And he says, “We're hunting for Mexicans.” And as I'm driving I'm like “Wait a minute, I'm in Mexico.” And that those were Mayans. All those guys were Maya people still fighting against the Spaniards. So it's kind of funny to say that their society collapsed when there are Mayan radio stations, there are Maya schools, and they're speaking Mayan in their home. It's true, they don't have giant castles anymore. But, it's odd to think of that as collapse. They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions. So there's this whole aspect of “What do you mean collapse?” And you see that in Against the Grain, the James Scott book, where you think, “What do you mean barbarians?” If you're an average Maya person, working as a farmer under the purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great. So after the collapse, you're probably better off. So all of that I feel is important in this discussion of collapse. I think it's hard to point to collapses that either have very clear exterior causes or are really collapses of the environment. Particularly the environmental sort that are pictured in books like Diamond has, where he talks about Easter Island. The striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees. Easter Island is this little speck of land, in the middle of the ocean, and Dutch guys come there and it's the only wood around for forever, so they cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair, ship repair, and they enslave most of the people who are living there. And we know pretty much what happened. There's no mystery about it.Virginia Company + HubrisDwarkesh Patel Why did the British government and the king keep subsidizing and giving sanctions to the Virginia Company, even after it was clear that this is not especially profitable and half the people that go die? Why didn't they just stop?Charles C. Mann That's a really good question. It's a super good question. I don't really know if we have a satisfactory answer, because it was so stupid for them to keep doing that. It was such a loss for so long. So you have to say, they were thinking, not purely economically. Part of it is that the backers of the Virginia Company, in sort of classic VC style, when things were going bad, they lied about it. They're burning through their cash, they did these rosy presentations, and they said, “It's gonna be great! We just need this extra money.” Kind of the way that Uber did. There's this tremendous burn rate and now the company says you're in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these calves and do all this stuff. The cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are vanishing. So, you know, I think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the Virginia Company. A second thing is that there was this dog-headed belief kind of based on the inability to understand longitude and so forth, that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are. I reproduced this in 1493. There were all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing these little skinny Philippines-like islands. So there's the thought that you just go up the Chesapeake, go a couple 100 miles, and you're gonna get to the Pacific into China. So there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this thought to be very narrow path. Sir Francis Drake and some other people had shown that there was a West Coast so they thought the whole thing was this narrow, Panama-like landform. So there's this geographical confusion. Finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity, because it's not perishable: it's small, you can put it on your ship and bring it back, and it's just great in every way. It's money, essentially. Basically, you dig up money in the hills and there's this long-standing belief that there's got to be more of that in the Americas, we just need to find out where. So there's always that hope. Lastly, there's the Imperial bragging rights. You know, we can't be the only guys with a colony. You see that later in the 19th century when Germany became a nation and one of the first things the Dutch said was “Let's look for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed,” and they set up their own mini colonial empire. So there's this kind of “Keeping Up with the Joneses” aspect, it just seems to be sort of deep in the European ruling class. So then you got to have an empire that in this weird way, seems very culturally part of it. I guess it's the same for many other places. As soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to index other things. You see that over and over again, all over the world. So that's part of it. All those things, I think, contributed to this. Outright lying, this delusion, other various delusions, plus hubris.Dwarkesh Patel It seems that colonial envy has today probably spread to China. I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the Silk Road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise. Is this kind of like when you have the impulse where if you're a nation trying to rise, you have that “I gotta go here, I gotta go over there––Charles C. Mann Yeah and “Show what a big guy I am. Yeah,––China's Silver TradeDwarkesh Patel Exactly. So speaking of China, I want to ask you about the silver trade. Excuse another tortured analogy, but when I was reading that chapter where you're describing how the Spanish silver was ending up with China and how the Ming Dynasty caused too much inflation. They needed more reliable mediums of exchange, so they had to give up real goods from China, just in order to get silver, which is just a medium of exchange––but it's not creating more apples, right? I was thinking about how this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today, (obviously to a much smaller magnitude) but in the sense that you're using up goods. It's a small amount of electricity, all things considered, but you're having to use up real energy in order to construct this medium of exchange. Maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of inflation or some other policy mistake and you can compare it to the Ming Dynasty. But what do you think about this analogy? Is there a similar situation where real goods are being exchanged for just a medium of exchange?Charles C. Mann That's really interesting. I mean, on some level, that's the way money works, right? I go into a store, like a Starbucks and I buy a coffee, then I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it, and they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper. So the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing. History is of course replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money. Things that to us seem very silly like the cowry shell or in the island of Yap where they had giant stones! Those were money and nobody ever carried them around. You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something. I would get some coconuts or gourds or whatever, and now you own that stone on the hill. So there's a tremendous sort of mysteriousness about the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things such as (in Bitcoin's case) strings of zeros and ones. That part of it makes sense to me. What's extraordinary is when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly–– which is what you're talking about in China where people had a medium of exchange, but they had to work hugely to get that money. I don't have to work hugely to get a $1 bill, right? It's not like I'm cutting down a tree and smashing the papers to pulp and printing. But you're right, that's what they're kind of doing in China. And that's, to a lesser extent, what you're doing in Bitcoin. So I hadn't thought about this, but Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy. To me, it's absolutely extraordinary the degree to which people who are Bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. A guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants as part of his idea for climate change and he wants to set them up in really weird remote areas. And I was asking “Well who would be your customers?” and he says Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits. And that's really crazy! To completely upend your life to create something that you hope is a medium of exchange that will allow you to buy the things that you're giving up. So there's a kind of funny aspect to this. That was partly what was happening in China. Unfortunately, China's very large, so they were able to send off all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes, but it definitely weakened the country.Wizards vs. ProphetsDwarkesh Patel Yeah, and that story you were talking about, El Salvador actually tried it. They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano and use the geothermal energy from the volcano to incentivize people to come there and mine cheap Bitcoin. Staying on the theme of China, do you think the prophets were more correct, or the wizards were more correct for that given time period? Because we have the introduction of potato, corn, maize, sweet potatoes, and this drastically increases the population until it reaches a carrying capacity. Obviously, what follows is the other kinds of ecological problems this causes and you describe these in the book. Is this evidence of the wizard worldview that potatoes appear and populations balloon? Or are the prophets like “No, no, carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually.”Charles C. Mann Okay, so let me interject here. For those members of your audience who don't know what we're talking about. I wrote this book, The Wizard and the Prophet. And it's about these two camps that have been around for a long time who have differing views regarding how we think about energy resources, the environment, and all those issues. The wizards, that's my name for them––Stuart Brand called them druids and, in fact, originally, the title was going to involve the word druid but my editor said, “Nobody knows what a Druid is” so I changed it into wizards–– and anyway the wizards would say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemmas. You turn on the science machine, essentially, and then we can escape these kinds of dilemmas. The prophets say “No. Natural systems are governed by laws and there's an inherent carrying capacity or limit or planetary boundary.” there are a bunch of different names for them that say you can't do more than so much.So what happened in China is that European crops came over. One of China's basic geographical conditions is that it's 20% of the Earth's habitable surface area, or it has 20% of the world's population, but only has seven or 8% of the world's above-ground freshwater. There are no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. And there are only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools, and that's you know, rice. So there's this paradox, which is “How do you keep people fed with rice in a country that has very little water?” If you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. So prophets believe that there are these planetary boundaries. In history, these are typically called Malthusian Limits after Malthus and the question is: With the available technology at a certain time, how many people can you feed before there's misery?The great thing about history is it provides evidence for both sides. Because in the short run, what happened when American crops came in is that the potato, sweet potato, and maize corn were the first staple crops that were dryland crops that could be grown in the western half of China, which is very, very dry and hot and mountainous with very little water. Population soars immediately afterward, but so does social unrest, misery, and so forth. In the long run, that becomes adaptable when China becomes a wealthy and powerful nation. In the short run, which is not so short (it's a couple of centuries), it really causes tremendous chaos and suffering. So, this provides evidence for both sides. One increases human capacity, and the second unquestionably increases human numbers and that leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering.Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, that's a thick coin with two sides. By the way, I realized I haven't gotten to all the Wizard and Prophet questions, and there are a lot of them. So I––Charles C. Mann I certainly have time! I'm enjoying the conversation. One of the weird things about podcasts is that, as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream journalist interviewer and I just find that amazing. I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired. You know, they should make you switch roles or something.Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, maybe. Charles C. Mann It's a pleasure to be asked these interesting questions about subjects I find fascinating.Dwarkesh Patel Oh, it's my pleasure to get to talk to you and to get to ask these questions. So let me ask about the Wizard and the Prophet. I just interviewed WIll McCaskill, and we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history. I asked him about Norman Borlaug and said that he's saved a billion lives. But then McCaskill pointed out, “Well, that's an exceptional result” and he doesn't think the technology is that contingent. So if Borlaug hadn't existed, somebody else would have discovered what he discovered about short wheat stalks anyways. So counterfactually, in a world where Ebola doesn't exist, it's not like a billion people die, maybe a couple million more die until the next guy comes around. That was his view. Do you agree? What is your response?Charles C. Mann To some extent, I agree. It's very likely that in the absence of one scientist, some other scientist would have discovered this, and I mentioned in the book, in fact, that there's a guy named Swaminathan, a remarkable Indian scientist, who's a step behind him and did much of the same work. At the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable. The insane amount of work and dedication that he did.. it's really hard to imagine. The fact is that he was going against many of the breeding plant breeding dogmas of his day, that all matters! His insistence on feeding the poor… he did remarkable things. Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered but it would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. I mean, that would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the interim! Because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism, the discovery of antibiotics, and so forth, were leading to a real population rise, and the amount of human misery that would have occurred, it's really frightening to think about. So, in some sense, I think he's (Will McCaskill) right. But I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. And another thing you might be concerned about is that given the hostile attitude that people had towards the green revolution right after, if the actual implementation of these different strains of biochar sent in India, if that hadn't been delayed, it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the governments there are just totally won over by the prophets and they decide to not implant this technology at all. If you think about what happened to nuclear power in the 70s, in many different countries, maybe something similar could have happened to the Green Revolution. So it's important to beat the Prophet. Maybe that's not the correct way to say it. But one way you could put it is: It's important to beat the prophets before the policies are passed. You have to get a good bit of technology in there.Charles C. Mann This is just my personal opinion, but you want to listen to the prophets about what the problems are. They're incredible at diagnosing problems, and very frequently, they're right about those things. The social issues about the Green Revolution… they were dead right, they were completely right. I don't know if you then adopt their solutions. It's a little bit like how I feel about my editors–– my editors will often point out problems and I almost never agree with their solutions. The fact is that Borlaug did develop this wheat that came into India, but it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swaminathan hadn't changed that wheat to make it more acceptable to the culture of India. That was one of the most important parts for me in this book. When I went to Tamil Nadu, I listened to this and I thought, “Oh! I never heard about this part where they took Mexican wheat, and they made it into Indian wheat.” You know, I don't even know if Borlaug ever knew or really grasped that they really had done that! By the way, a person for you to interview is Marci Baranski–– she's got a forthcoming book about the history of the Green Revolution and she sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it. So here's a plug for her.In Defense of Regulatory DelaysDwarkesh Patel So if we applied that particular story to today, let's say that we had regulatory agencies like the FDA back then that were as powerful back then as they are now. Do you think it's possible that these new advances would have just dithered in some approval process that took years or decades to complete? If you just backtest our current process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the green revolution could not have happened or that it would have taken way too long or something?Charles C. Mann It's possible. Bureaucracies can always go rogue, and the government is faced with this kind of impossible problem. There's a current big political argument about whether former President Trump should have taken these top-secret documents to his house in Florida and done whatever he wanted to? Just for the moment, let's accept the argument that these were like super secret toxic documents and should not have been in a basement. Let's just say that's true. Whatever the President says is declassified is declassified. Let us say that's true. Obviously, that would be bad. You would not want to have that kind of informal process because you can imagine all kinds of things–– you wouldn't want to have that kind of informal process in place. But nobody has ever imagined that you would do that because it's sort of nutty in that scenario.Now say you write a law and you create a bureaucracy for declassification and immediately add more delay, you make things harder, you add in the problems of the bureaucrats getting too much power, you know–– all the things that you do. So you have this problem with the government, which is that people occasionally do things that you would never imagine. It's completely screwy. So you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that and that impedes everybody else. In the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30 when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfonamides. They killed hundreds of people! It was a flat-out poison! And, you know, hundreds of people died. You think like who would do that? But somebody did that. So they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay, and then something was solidified. Which they did start here because the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check. So you have this constant problem. I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by the government here in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. I was tracing it crudely, but I think you see the trade-off. So the question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? I would argue that sometimes it's well managed. It's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism, in record time, and they passed pretty rigorous safety reviews and were given to millions and millions and millions of people with very, very few negative effects. I mean, that's a real regulatory triumph there, right?So that would be the counter-example: you have this new thing that you can feed people and so forth. They let it through very quickly. On the other hand, you have things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, especially for the chestnuts, they've made extraordinary efforts to test. I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come. *chuckles* You know, I just feel that there's this great problem. These flaws that you identified, I would like to back off and say that this is a problem sort of inherent to government. They're always protecting us against the edge case. The edge case sets the rules, and that ends up, unless you're very careful, making it very difficult for everybody else.Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. And the vaccines are an interesting example here. Because one of the things you talked about in the book–– one of the possible solutions to climate change is that you can have some kind of geoengineering. Right? I think you mentioned in the book that as long as even one country tries this, then they can effectively (for relatively modest amounts of money), change the atmosphere. But then I look at the failure of every government to approve human challenge trials. This is something that seems like an obvious thing to do and we would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during COVID by speeding up the vaccine approval. So I wonder, maybe the international collaboration is strong enough that something like geoengineering actually couldn't happen because something like human challenge trials didn't happen.Geoengineering Charles C. Mann So let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend, Neal Stephenson, called Termination Shock. Which is about some rich person just doing it. Just doing geoengineering. The fact is that it's actually not actually against the law to fire off rockets into the stratosphere. In his case, it's a giant gun that shoots shells full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. So I guess the question is, what timescale do you think is appropriate for all this? I feel quite confident that there will be geoengineering trials within the next 10 years. Is that fast enough? That's a real judgment call. I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already and that it's way, way too slow. People who are super anxious about moral hazard and precautionary principles say that that's way, way too fast. So you have these different constituencies. It's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an example where these regulatory agencies have actually totally throttled something in a long-lasting way as opposed to delaying it for 10 years. I don't mean to imply that 10 years is nothing. But it's really killing off something. Is there an example you can think of?Dwarkesh Patel Well, it's very dependent on where you think it would have been otherwise, like people say maybe it was just bound to be the state. Charles C. Mann I think that was a very successful case of regulatory capture, in which the proponents of the technology successfully created this crazy…. One of the weird things I really wanted to explain about nuclear stuff is not actually in the book.
In 1783 George Washington said that “we have a national character to establish.” 110 Years later Frederick Jackson Turner published “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and wrote these words: “to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics… coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind…, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom…” Turner identified the closing of the frontier as a watershed for national character. In the 110 years since, we have observed that Washington's project could not be contained in limned geographic descriptions. Have we, then, a national character? And if we do, is it a friend to liberty?Professor William B. Allen is a professor of political philosophy at Michigan State University, and at the time of this recording was the Senior Visiting Fellow at the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University. His areas of expertise include the American founding and U.S. Constitution; the American founders (particularly George Washington); the influence of various political philosophers (especially Montesquieu) on the American founding; liberal arts education, its history, importance and problems; and the intersection of race and politics. Subscribe to our podcasts Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.
La alcaldía de NY: elecciones y análisis del resultado La sorpresa que no es tal en Virginia ¿Qué pasa con los hispanos? Top 10 antisemitas según la Liga Antidifamación ¿Quién es el señor Durr? No se podía saber Nueva sección: Historia de los EEUU. Cap. 1 El Antiguo Oeste. Kyle Rittenhouse. Referencias bibliográficas y filmografía: Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Frederick Jackson Turner, Karl May, Marcial Lafuente Estefanía. John Ford, Sergio Leone, Kevin Costner, Sam Peckinpah. Música introduccion : La Fanfarria del hombre común. Aaron Copland. No Copyright Música sección historia: Once upon a time . Maarten Schellekens. No copyright para propósitos no comerciales
Sermon Notes– “According to the influential historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the presence of “a continually advancing frontier line” at the “edge of free land” profoundly shaped American culture (Turner, 1893). The American frontier gave rise to a persistent culture of rugged individualism.” – Samuel Bazzi, “The Roots and Persistence of Rugged Individualism is the United States”, 2020Midtown itself is made up of several small neighborhood associations. Westport is one of those neighborhoods and is also one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kansas City. It got its name, West Port because it was the western most port in the United States in the mid-1800s. It was the last stop along the trail to the west for settlers to stock up on goods and supplies before venturing into the Kansas Territory. As more and more settlers traveled out West via the nearby California, Oregon, and Santa Fe trails, the more and more Westport grew eventually becoming the sprawling city of Kansas City. Therefore, as people of Kansas City, as pioneering and entrepreneurial as we might be, we are quite literally steeped in rugged individualism. In fact Bazzi and authors found that counties in America with longer historical exposures to frontier life and conditions “exhibit greater individualism.”And the church not just in America but specifically in Kansas City, is not impervious to this rugged individualism. If anything we've allowed it to seep into our already porous ideas about religion. Increasingly, religion has been viewed as a private matter. Specifically, in Christian circles, this private religion or privatized religion has led to a variety of phrases like, “I am into Jesus, but not the Church. ““For Jesus the church was never optional. Jesus was not anti-institutional. He regularly led his disciples and himself into the church of the first century which was the synagogue and temple.” – Tyler Staton, Bridgetown ChurchWhen we examine the scriptures, Jesus was not a rugged individualist. Jesus did not believe in a privatized religion. For Jesus the church was never an option. Three things in mind as in exploring the Sermon on the Mount: The Sermon on the Mount is not an isolated speech. Rather the sermon is an exemplification or personification of Jesus' life. The whole sermon is Christ describing what life in the kingdom and allegiance to Him looks like. So for those of you more practically minded individuals, this is the sermon series for you. Obedience to the Sermon on the Mount is a practice of imagination. That is to say that the specific application of Jesus' sermon given in the first century must be adjusted to apply to our moment today. “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.” Here Jesus is saying you, my disciples, are the salt among the people of this land. Salt in first century Palestine was most likely taken from the dead sea and was very impure.. These impurities could cause the sodium chloride to leach out of the salt essentially rendering it useless or salt without its saltiness. When this happened there was no way to restore the salt, it had to be thrown In today's society, there is a pressure in the words of religious scholar Dave Brunner “to not be too Christian.” There is a pressure to not take our religion too seriously and just to relax a bit. And yet, here Jesus is warning us, don't lose your saltiness, don't water down the very things that make you a disciple. If you do, you will be useless, just like salt that has lost its saltiness. We lose our saltiness when we fall into the temptation to not take our discipleship to Jesus too seriously. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.In the ancient world light was associated with knowledge, truth, revelation, and love. Throughout scriptures, light is specifically associated with Jesus as he is knowledge, truth, revelation and love. “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” – John 8:12When Jesus declares to his disciples in v. 14 that they are the light of the world, it is as if he is passing the light on. This is a commissioning statement. It is as if Jesus is saying I am the light that cannot be hidden, you reflect me! You bring the knowledge, truth, revelation, and love to those around you! You be Me in the world. So to be a light to the world is to exemplify or to be the person of Jesus. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.” Here Jesus gives us yet another example of visibility. He says people don't light a lamp and put it under a basket, they keep the light visible. Visibility is a requirement of being a disciple to Jesus. Not only should you be salty or have the flavor of Jesus, but others need to see that you are a representation of Jesus. Your light cannot be invisible or it ceases to be a light. “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” He shows us that shining our light is to let others see our good works. A majority of scholars believe the good works mentioned here are in reference not only to the beatitudes but also to the set of responsibilities Jesus gives us in the rest of the sermon on the mount. Remember, the Sermon on the Mount is not an isolated speech but rather the sermon is a personification of Jesus' life. Therefore Jesus is saying, when people look at you I want them to see that you are being with Me, becoming like Me, and doing what I did. Here is the big idea: for you to maintain your saltiness, for your light to shine, you must be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what he did. You must be the personification of the Sermon on the Mount or the personification of Jesus to the world We must cast aside our rugged individualism and privatized religion to become a visible disciple of Jesus. “24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another” –Hebrews 10:24-25“According to the influential historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the presence of “a continually advancing frontier line” at the “edge of free land” profoundly shaped American culture (Turner, 1893). The American frontier gave rise to a persistent culture of rugged individualism.” – Samuel Bazzi, “The Roots and Persistence of Rugged Individualism is the United States”, 2020Midtown itself is made up of several small neighborhood associations. Westport is one of those neighborhoods and is also one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kansas City. It got its name, West Port because it was the western most port in the United States in the mid-1800s. It was the last stop along the trail to the west for settlers to stock up on goods and supplies before venturing into the Kansas Territory. As more and more settlers traveled out West via the nearby California, Oregon, and Santa Fe trails, the more and more Westport grew eventually becoming the sprawling city of Kansas City. Therefore, as people of Kansas City, as pioneering and entrepreneurial as we might be, we are quite literally steeped in rugged individualism. In fact Bazzi and authors found that counties in America with longer historical exposures to frontier life and conditions “exhibit greater individualism.”And the church not just in America but specifically in Kansas City, is not impervious to this rugged individualism. If anything we've allowed it to seep into our already porous ideas about religion. Increasingly, religion has been viewed as a private matter. Specifically, in Christian circles, this private religion or privatized religion has led to a variety of phrases like, “I am into Jesus, but not the Church. ““For Jesus the church was never optional. Jesus was not anti-institutional. He regularly led his disciples and himself into the church of the first century which was the synagogue and temple.” – Tyler Staton, Bridgetown ChurchWhen we examine the scriptures, Jesus was not a rugged individualist. Jesus did not believe in a privatized religion. For Jesus the church was never an option. Three things in mind as in exploring the Sermon on the Mount: The Sermon on the Mount is not an isolated speech. Rather the sermon is an exemplification or personification of Jesus' life. The whole sermon is Christ describing what life in the kingdom and allegiance to Him looks like. So for those of you more practically minded individuals, this is the sermon series for you. Obedience to the Sermon on the Mount is a practice of imagination. That is to say that the specific application of Jesus' sermon given in the first century must be adjusted to apply to our moment today. “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.” Here Jesus is saying you, my disciples, are the salt among the people of this land. Salt in first century Palestine was most likely taken from the dead sea and was very impure.. These impurities could cause the sodium chloride to leach out of the salt essentially rendering it useless or salt without its saltiness. When this happened there was no way to restore the salt, it had to be thrown In today's society, there is a pressure in the words of religious scholar Dave Brunner “to not be too Christian.” There is a pressure to not take our religion too seriously and just to relax a bit. And yet, here Jesus is warning us, don't lose your saltiness, don't water down the very things that make you a disciple. If you do, you will be useless, just like salt that has lost its saltiness. We lose our saltiness when we fall into the temptation to not take our discipleship to Jesus too seriously. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.In the ancient world light was associated with knowledge, truth, revelation, and love. Throughout scriptures, light is specifically associated with Jesus as he is knowledge, truth, revelation and love. “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” – John 8:12When Jesus declares to his disciples in v. 14 that they are the light of the world, it is as if he is passing the light on. This is a commissioning statement. It is as if Jesus is saying I am the light that cannot be hidden, you reflect me! You bring the knowledge, truth, revelation, and love to those around you! You be Me in the world. So to be a light to the world is to exemplify or to be the person of Jesus. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.” Here Jesus gives us yet another example of visibility. He says people don't light a lamp and put it under a basket, they keep the light visible. Visibility is a requirement of being a disciple to Jesus. Not only should you be salty or have the flavor of Jesus, but others need to see that you are a representation of Jesus. Your light cannot be invisible or it ceases to be a light. “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” He shows us that shining our light is to let others see our good works. A majority of scholars believe the good works mentioned here are in reference not only to the beatitudes but also to the set of responsibilities Jesus gives us in the rest of the sermon on the mount. Remember, the Sermon on the Mount is not an isolated speech but rather the sermon is a personification of Jesus' life. Therefore Jesus is saying, when people look at you I want them to see that you are being with Me, becoming like Me, and doing what I did. Here is the big idea: for you to maintain your saltiness, for your light to shine, you must be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what he did. You must be the personification of the Sermon on the Mount or the personification of Jesus to the world We must cast aside our rugged individualism and privatized religion to become a visible disciples of Jesus. “24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another” –Hebrews 10:24-25
Welcome to the inaugural episode of Ending the Myth! In this limited series Munya and Brian are going to be discussing Greg Grandin's 2019 book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. In this introduction to the show we discuss historian Frederick Jackson Turner and his Frontier Thesis. We cover material from CH 7, the Introduction, and CH 1.
Join hosts C.J. and Evan as they discuss Frederick Jackson Turner, influential historian and Wisconsinite. FJT taught at UW Madison, during which time he published an essay entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in the American History” which argued that through our frontier expansion Americans became exceptional.
Stu Levitan welcomes UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr., for part two of their discussion of one of the most important presidents in American history – Thomas Woodrow Wilson, whose legacy is as complex and controversial as any of our Chief Magistrates. Wilson amassed one of the most impressive records of progressive legislation of any president, yet left the worst record on race relations of any president in the 20th century, and allowed egregious violations of civil liberties. He kept us out of war in Mexico, but took us into war in Europe. A great student and thinker about good government, he was sloppy in appointing his cabinet officials and negligent in supervising them. A devout Presbyterian, he appointed the first Jew to the US Supreme Court, was the first president to visit the Roman Catholic Pope, and was buried in an Episcopal cathedral. And he's the man after whom Woody Guthrie is named. It's a record so rich for discussion this is our second show devoted to it, following a segment on February 15. There's no better guide to the life and times of our 28th President than John Milton Cooper, Jr., whom the Boston Globe called “the preeminent living historian of Wilson and his era.” We take for our primary text his 2009 volume Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, which the NY Times called “monumental,” and which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And we also note his earlier work, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. It seems Professor Cooper has spent his life in the world of Woodrow Wilson. He even graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C., and received his bachelor′s degree summa cum laude from Wilson's alma mater, Princeton University, where Wilson later taught and served as president. Prof Cooper took his advanced degrees at Columbia University, and after a few years at Wellesley College, came to the University of Wisconsin, where he rose to hold two named chairs in History and American Institutions, and chair the famed Department of History before taking Emeritus status in 2009. And that's even another Wilson connection – when Wilson was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, one of his favorite professors was Richard T. Ely, and one of his favorite students was Frederick Jackson Turner, both of whom would become famed members of the Wisconsin faculty. He has written half a dozen books, dozens of articles, and received numerous honors. He was the honorary president of the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation, and the chief historian on the 2002 American Experience biography of Wilson produced for PBS. I hope you were with us last week for the conversation with Jennifer Chiaverini about her historical fiction, The Women's March, about the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913, and the suffragists effort to get Wilson to endorse a constitutional amendment enfranchising women. Because that is where we pick up our conversation, before going on to talk about race, the war, and other matters. It is a pleasure to again present on Madison BookBeat my friend, UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr.
Folks, the hogs are getting theoretical today. We had legit Marxists Kevin Jun Ha and JR Murray on to talk about how individualism as an ideology is fucking everything up these days and making it feel impossible to deal with the ongoing pandemic, climate change, and the growing threat of space billionaires. This sprawling overview touches on everything from Bezos to Frederick Jackson Turner and, mercifully, we only quoted Marx twice. Smash that play button if you're trying to learn how to cast off your fetters and develop the capabilities of your species. Check out https://cosmonautmag.com and support Ward 2 Mutual Aid at https://t.co/9WlwsKlRXk?amp=1 For full video of this and all recent Hog Planet episodes go to Hog Planet on YouTube. Music by Bags (http://soundcloud.com/josephsbags). Subscribe to hogplanet.substack.com. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/hog-planet/message
On this third Monday of February, a day commonly, but mistakenly, called President's Day, Stu Levitan welcomes UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr., for a discussion of one of the most important presidents in American history – Thomas Woodrow Wilson, whose legacy is as complex and controversial, as any of our Chief Magistrates. It's a record so rich for discussion we're taking two hours to cover it, with out second segment set for early April. He amassed one of the most impressive records of progressive legislation of any president, yet left the worst record on race relations of any president in the 20th century, and allowed egregious violations of civil liberties. He kept us out of war in Mexico, but took us into war in Europe. A great student and thinker about good government, he was sloppy in appointing his cabinet officials and negligent in supervising them. A devout Presbyterian, he appointed the first Jew to the US Supreme Court, was the first president to visit the Roman Catholic Pope, and was buried in an Episcopal cathedral. And he's the man after whom Woody Guthrie is named. There's no better guide to the life and times of our 28th President than JMC Jr, whom the Boston Globe called “the preeminent living historian of Wilson and his era.” We take for our primary text his 2009 volume Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, which the NYTimes called “monumental,” and which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And we also note his earlier work, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. It seems Professor Cooper has spent his life in the world of Woodrow Wilson. He even graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C., and received his bachelor′s degree summa cum laude from Wilson's alma mater, Princeton University, where Wilson later taught and served as president. Prof Cooper took his advanced degrees at Columbia University, and after a few years at Wellesley College, came to the University of Wisconsin, where he rose to hold two named chairs in History and American Institutions, and chair the famed Department of History before taking Emeritus status in 2009. And that's even another Wilson connection – when Wilson was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, one of his favorite professors was Richard T. Ely, and one of his favorite students was Frederick Jackson Turner, both of whom would become famed members of the Wisconsin faculty. He has written half a dozen books, dozens of articles, and received numerous honors. He was the honorary president of the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation, and the chief historian on the 2002 American Experience biography of Wilson produced for PBS. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat my friend, UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr.
Turner argues that the frontier area of free land and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American democracy. Up to the late 1800s, American social development had been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities furnish the forces dominating American character. He says the true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.
Award-winning author and journalist Colin Woodard talks about his latest book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood. Woodard and Dr. Alan Campbell discuss the main figures in the book, including George Bancroft, Woodrow Wilson and Frederick Douglass, and their efforts to create the nation’s identity. Woodard also comments on the current crisis of American unity.
While drinking bourbon and smoking cigars in the backyard, Rich and historian Dr. Dave discuss a range of American history topics. Dr. Dave shares his experience and work in Charleston, South Carolina. Confederate monuments, the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant, and creating change. (25:20) Personal libraries and the different styles of reading Dr. Dave and Rich subscribe to. Learning from history to shape the future. (37:17) Chicago history, Frederick Jackson Turner, the American West, American landscape art, George H.W. Bush's funeral. (47:38) Traveling America, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Eleanor Roosevelt and the role of First Lady (or First "Spouse").
In his popular book, American Nations, award-winning journalist Colin Woodard argued for the existence of 11 separate stateless nations within the United States, where rival cultures explain history, identity, and voting behaviors. With his new book, UNION: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood (Viking), Woodard expands on a theme from Nations: how the cherished idea of a unified country has ignored the basic facts of our history. In this fascinating study of a fractured America, he examines how the myth of our national unity was created and fought over by five men—George Bancroft, William Gilmore Simms, Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, and Frederick Jackson Turner—and how it continues to affect us today. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Colin Woodard is a New York Times bestselling writer, historian, and journalist who has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and six continents. A longtime foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and The San Francisco Chronicle, he is a reporter at the Portland Press Herald, where he received a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and Politico. He is the author of American Nations, American Character, The Lobster Coast, The Republic of Pirates, and Ocean's End and lives in Maine. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/steve-richards/support
The cherished idea of United States as a unified country has been long believed. But today’s guest Colin Woodard argues that this is an invented tradition. He has argued for the existence of 11 separate stateless nations within the United States, where rival cultures explain the history, identity, and voting behaviors of the United States. At least 5 explanations for American ideology have existed, from Manifest Destiny to Frederick Douglas's civic nationalism. However, there is a vision of American that can bring us all together. In his new book “Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood,” he examines how the myth of our national unity was created and fought over by five men—George Bancroft, William Gilmore Simms, Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, and Frederick Jackson Turner—and how it continues to affect us today.If we’ve never been one America, but several, then where did the narrative of United States nationhood come from? Who came up with it, when, and why? How did it come to be accepted and at what point did it succeed in concealing the fragmented reality? In the 19th and early 20th century, a small group of individuals—historians, political leaders, and novelists—fashioned a history that attempted to erase the fundamental differences and profound tensions between the nation’s regional cultures. These men were creating the idea of an American nation instead of a union of disparate states—but their rosy vision was immediately contested by another set of intellectuals who claimed that if we are a nation at all, it is an ethno-state belonging to the allegedly superior Anglo-Saxon race. This concept eventually morphed into white supremacy and ethno-nationalism in people like Woodrow Wilson.The fight continues today but there are narratives that could unite all of us and that's what we'll discuss today.
Sam Ball (@youngbalsamic) creció en un suburbio de San Francisco, y desde muy pequeño se dio cuenta de que los carros y las grandes avenidas lo separaban de lugares donde la vida en comunidad era mucho más rica. Por eso siempre ha pensado en las formas en que los espacios y el transporte público nos conectan. En este episodio hablamos de ciudades: de Bogotá, de Berlín, de Nueva York. Sam nos contó cómo se conecta con la geografía de las ciudades (spoiler: caminando una ciudad de punta a punta durante 8 horas), sobre cómo la idiosincracia estadounidense convirtió a los espacios públicos en espacios vacíos, y sobre lo que hacen las personas, a través del diseño o a pesar de él, para reclamar esos espacios. ¡Suscríbanse a Expertos de Sillón en su aplicación de podcasts favorita! Pueden seguirnos en @expertosdesillon en Instagram, @expertosillon en Twitter, o escribirnos a expertosdesillon@gmail.com REFERENCIAS: La tesis de Frederick Jackson Turner sobre la mentalidad fronteriza o de frontera y su importancia en el desarrollo de EE.UU. la encuentran en su ensayo The Significance of the Frontier in American History; el libro de Jane Jacobs se llama La muerte y la vida de las grandes ciudades americanas; las supermanzanas en Barcelona se llaman superilles; la historia del mapa del metro de Londres la encuentran en Wikipedia; Sam recomienda la novela Berlin Alexanderplatz de Alfred Döblin, el libro Ciudad de Cuarzo del sociólogo Mike Davis y la película Paris, Texas de Wim Wenders. Y de ñapa, les dejamos Autoretrato del Subway de Gilberto Owens: 1. Perfil Viento nomás pero corregido en cauces de flauta con el pecado de nombrar quemándome hijo en un hilo de mis ojos suspenso adiós alta flor sin miedo y sin tacha condenada a la Geografía y a un litoral con sexo tú vertical pura inhumana adiós Manhattan abstracción roída de tiempo y de mi prisa irremediable caer fantasma anochecido de aquel río que se soñaba encontrado en un solo cauce volver en la caída noche al sube y baja del Niágara qué David tira la piedra de aire y esconde la honda y no hay al frente una frente que nos justifique habitantes de un eco en sueños sino un sonámbulo ángel relojero que nos despierta en la estación precisa adiós sensual sueño sensual Teología al sur del sueño hay cosas ay que nos duele saber sin los sentidos 2. Vuelo Ventana a no más paisaje y sin más dimensiones que el tiempo noche de cerbatana nos amanecería un sol de alambre sólo hay pájaros que no aclimatan su ritmo a un poco balas ríos alpinistas que nacen al nivel de sueños sin pájaros y no se mueren ni matan a balas perdidas que nadie ha gritado ahorcada cortina forma dura que corriges mi inglés y mi julio mi pulso insegura línea fría del frío bailada de electricidad alambrista enjaulados nosotros o el tiempo cebra inmóvil patinadora en llamas la prisa une los postes la reja es ya muro se despluma contra él la plegaria pisada lineal los numerales hacen hoy más esta ciudad una mera hipótesis recuerdo una sonrisa que yo sabía pronunciar delgado la llamaba Carmen de ti y alguien que era más sensual y más puro y qué pena en realidad el sueño no se casa con sus amantes y se amanece al fin de cuando en vez de nieve espuma de un mar más alto llamémosla en llamas Jesús
What does anti-imperialism look like from the vantage point of North America? In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad(University of California Press, 2019), Manu Karuka (Barnard College) answers this question by reinterpreting the significance of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples—in particular the Paiute, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Karuka proposes three new concepts—counter-sovereignty, continental imperialism, and modes of relationship— for our understanding of this history. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Empire’s Tracks engages with writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Frederick Jackson Turner to Ella Deloria, and draws also from legal, legislative, military, and business records. Ultimately, Karuka gives the lie to exceptionalist narratives of the United States by showing how its transportation infrastructure, like those around the world, emerged violently at the nexus of war and finance. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does anti-imperialism look like from the vantage point of North America? In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad(University of California Press, 2019), Manu Karuka (Barnard College) answers this question by reinterpreting the significance of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples—in particular the Paiute, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Karuka proposes three new concepts—counter-sovereignty, continental imperialism, and modes of relationship— for our understanding of this history. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Empire’s Tracks engages with writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Frederick Jackson Turner to Ella Deloria, and draws also from legal, legislative, military, and business records. Ultimately, Karuka gives the lie to exceptionalist narratives of the United States by showing how its transportation infrastructure, like those around the world, emerged violently at the nexus of war and finance. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does anti-imperialism look like from the vantage point of North America? In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad(University of California Press, 2019), Manu Karuka (Barnard College) answers this question by reinterpreting the significance of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples—in particular the Paiute, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Karuka proposes three new concepts—counter-sovereignty, continental imperialism, and modes of relationship— for our understanding of this history. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Empire’s Tracks engages with writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Frederick Jackson Turner to Ella Deloria, and draws also from legal, legislative, military, and business records. Ultimately, Karuka gives the lie to exceptionalist narratives of the United States by showing how its transportation infrastructure, like those around the world, emerged violently at the nexus of war and finance. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does anti-imperialism look like from the vantage point of North America? In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad(University of California Press, 2019), Manu Karuka (Barnard College) answers this question by reinterpreting the significance of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples—in particular the Paiute, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Karuka proposes three new concepts—counter-sovereignty, continental imperialism, and modes of relationship— for our understanding of this history. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Empire’s Tracks engages with writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Frederick Jackson Turner to Ella Deloria, and draws also from legal, legislative, military, and business records. Ultimately, Karuka gives the lie to exceptionalist narratives of the United States by showing how its transportation infrastructure, like those around the world, emerged violently at the nexus of war and finance. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does anti-imperialism look like from the vantage point of North America? In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad(University of California Press, 2019), Manu Karuka (Barnard College) answers this question by reinterpreting the significance of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples—in particular the Paiute, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Karuka proposes three new concepts—counter-sovereignty, continental imperialism, and modes of relationship— for our understanding of this history. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Empire’s Tracks engages with writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Frederick Jackson Turner to Ella Deloria, and draws also from legal, legislative, military, and business records. Ultimately, Karuka gives the lie to exceptionalist narratives of the United States by showing how its transportation infrastructure, like those around the world, emerged violently at the nexus of war and finance. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does anti-imperialism look like from the vantage point of North America? In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad(University of California Press, 2019), Manu Karuka (Barnard College) answers this question by reinterpreting the significance of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples—in particular the Paiute, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Karuka proposes three new concepts—counter-sovereignty, continental imperialism, and modes of relationship— for our understanding of this history. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Empire’s Tracks engages with writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Frederick Jackson Turner to Ella Deloria, and draws also from legal, legislative, military, and business records. Ultimately, Karuka gives the lie to exceptionalist narratives of the United States by showing how its transportation infrastructure, like those around the world, emerged violently at the nexus of war and finance. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This might be the first episode of Being Jim Davis to mention Frederick Jackson Turner. Or maybe it's not? Your hosts for today's episode: Jon Gibson, Christopher Winter. Today's strip Become a Patron! Or visit these other fine internet URLs: BJD Homepage | BJD Twitter | BJD Facebook Page | Pitchdrop Network Homepage
Frontiers Series, Episode #2 of 4. Is space the new frontier? What are the links between the so-called “age of exploration,” the conquering of the American West, and the United States space program? We will be covering those questions and others in today's podcast, The Final Frontier: History, Science, and Space Exploration. Bibliography and transcript at digpodcast.org. Show Notes Howard McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments. In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments. In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments. In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments. In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments. In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its environments. The human history of western ecologies extends back thousands of years, writes the historian Sara Dant in her new synthesis, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley Blackwell, 2017). Dant, a professor of history at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, traces the history of how people changed, and in turn were changed by, the American West’s myriad environments. In Losing Eden, Dant describes how pre-contact societies made water flow in the desert, how Spanish colonizers introduced fauna to the region now taken for granted as decidedly “western,” and how American commodification of the non-human world fundamentally altered human perceptions of western landscapes. By the late nineteenth century, the concept of commodification had led to both great material wealth for the United States, and almost irreparable damage to western environments. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that, according to Dant, some Americans began to look upon their “lost Eden” and ask, “at what cost?” Losing Eden is a book which, at heart, seeks to disprove the notion that the American West was ever an Eden at all by showing that the history of environmental change in the region is as old as human footsteps on western soil, while also arguing for a new ethic of collective action to reverse some of the most far reaching changes wrought by humans in the American West. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Karl Malcolm, Bjorn Fredrickson, and Jerry Monzingo of the U.S. Forest Service, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: The National Wild and Scenic Rivers Systems; the Cascades as a nexus for the climbing world; Karl's unlikely cure for not drawing an elk tag; the many homes of Aldo Leopold; Curt Meine's Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work; Howard Zahniser and the Wilderness Act; the societal challenges of Wilderness; dudes who just love a good conspiracy theory; Wilderness as a part of the American identity; Frederick Jackson Turner; Frontier Anxiety; helicopters in Wilderness and the "Minimum Requirements Necessary" concept; does Wilderness need to justify itself financially?; Ben Lilly and other rogue wildmen of the Southwest; and more. Get your tickets to the MeatEater Podcast, Live with Steven Rinella and Friends here. Join Steven Rinella and a couple surprise guests for a live recording of his popular MeatEater Podcast. Tickets for a raffle, with high-end prizes from Yeti, Vortex Optics, First Lite, Stone Glacier, Savage Arms, Benchmade Knife Company, Schnee’s and Seek Outside, will be sold at the event. Raffle proceeds benefit Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Raffle winners will be drawn following the podcast recording and Steven will be on hand signing books. Check out the show notes to dig deeper into the books, ideas, and stories mentioned in this episode here.
Intro and outro music excerpted from the song “Gay Bar Videogame” by The Wildbunch http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Wildbunch/Gay_Bar/Gay_Bar_videogame 1:30 Introducing the show 2:08 High concept 3:18 Cody Lundin – our barefoot hero 4:08 Joe Teti – our military badass 5:13 JS’s prior knowledge of this show 5:44 How the hosts’ differences defied Mike’s expectations 6:42 Main difference in philosophies: Risk-reward 7:40 To what extent are the producers influencing decisions? 8:20 72-hour scenarios 10:06 Mike wonders if military aspect is essential or appeal to a demographic 11:30 JS thinks military is good training for situation, even if not as thorough as survival school 13:47 Were Joe’s risks questionable for real survival situation as opposed to TV survival situation? 14:56 Choreography of survival TV – what’s spontaneous and what’s presented by producers? 15:50 An example of clear producer intervention 18:32 A clarification on Joe’s background 19:45 Many clips were re-used for behind-the-scenes special 20:36 Each episode structured loosely around background scenario 22:01 The merits (or lack thereof) of drinking your own urine; psychology v. physiology 23:26 Educational segments – ‘Art of Self Reliance’ 23:59 Intro of risk v. reward – go up for water or go down for better air? 24:57 Rare instance where Mike found Joe’s risk-tasking realistic 26:14 JS doubted the authenticity of the poachers 26:49 Mike’s rant about ‘white savior’ conservationist narratives 27:42 Poachers driven by poverty, not love of killing endangered species 28:30 Mike doubted sincerity of Joe’s comments about the poachers 30:14 JS’s doubts stemmed from a steady accumulation of disbelief 32:06 The camps might be legit, but probably had been abandoned for some time 32:34 This show misunderstands the role of violence in organized crime 34:06 Role of safety in the series as a whole 34:51 A rescue of questionable authenticity 36:22 JS’s LOL moment 37:05 Comparing hosts to Hollywood stuntmen 38:14 Main risk is mechanical injury, not dehydration or starvation 38:40 Mike found the heightened stakes detracted from the spontaneity 40:02 JS liked the show, would watch it outside the podcast (Finding Bigfoot without the BS) 41:30 The hosts’ disagreement over the rotting steer 44:48 The boar hunt – authentic and fabricated aspects 46:42 Mike found crew’s masculine hero-worship over the top; JS was impressed by the technical skill 48:25 The staged nature of the rescues 50:44 The gendered appeal was noteworthy 51:27 Appeal of survival shows to those living comfortably 52:33 Mike thought show’s aesthetic would appeal to suburban/rural over urban 54:01 Frederick Jackson Turner – frontier thesis 54:36 Appeal of the survival genre – vicariously overcoming physical hardship and adversity 55:39 Tension b/w show’s educational and entertainment mission 59:30 Cody’s criticism of survival TV 1:00:20 The ‘behind the scenes’ drama 1:02:10 Behind-the-scenes tension never cropped up in the final product 1:03:33 Introducing the next show – impromptu style 1:04:36 Signing off
You’ve seen enough Westerns and Game of Throne episodes to know a frontier when you see it, but what exactly is this boundary between the laws of your world and the promise or threat of another? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the membranous nature of frontier in world-systems theory, as well as Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential thesis on the American frontier. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers
Battle of Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee Massacre, The Ghost Dance, Dawes Severalty Act, Frederick Jackson Turner
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
