Podcasts about history department

In this episode, historian Daniel Hummel joins me to discuss the fascinating rise and decline of dispensationalism, a theological movement deeply embedded in American evangelicalism. Daniel shares his personal journey growing up in a dispensationalist environment, exploring its roots with John Nelson Darby, its influence post-Civil War, and its widespread popularity through media like the Left Behind series. This conversation delves into dispensationalism's impacts on evangelical views regarding end-times, Israel, biblical interpretation, and societal engagement. Daniel provides valuable insights into how anxieties, cultural shifts, and media have reshaped evangelical priorities and engagement today. So join us to discover how our beliefs about the future shape our actions and commitments in the present, and how interpreting scripture continues to influence contemporary Christian life.Daniel G. Hummel (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is the director of the Lumen Center in Madison, WI and a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans, 2023).Daniel's Book:The Rise and Fall of DispensationalismDaniel's Recommendations:Self MadeOn the IncarnationSubscribe to Our Substack: Shifting CultureConnect with Joshua: jjohnson@allnations.usGo to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky or YouTubeConsider Giving to the podcast and to the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link belowSubscribe for Early, Ad-Free Access to New Episodes Support the show

Alan Lowe speaks with Dr. Simon Cordery about the transformative role of railroads in American history. From the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1828 to a national network by 1916, Cordery details how rail shaped commerce, industry, and infrastructure. He also explores regulation, from early oversight efforts to the 1980 Staggers Act, which revitalized the struggling industry. The conversation touches on Amtrak's dependence on subsidies, the challenges of expansion, and the promise of high-speed rail. Cordery also previews his book on Albert Pullman, a largely forgotten innovator behind the Pullman Company's early success and a symbol of overlooked entrepreneurial ambition.     Guest Bio Dr. Simon Cordery is Chair of the History Department at Iowa State University and a leading scholar of American labor and transportation history. He previously served as department chair at Western Illinois University and Monmouth College. Dr. Cordery has authored several acclaimed books, including Mother Jones: Raising Cain and Consciousness and The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The Story of Illinois Railroading. His forthcoming work, Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman, explores the overlooked legacy of the elder Pullman brother and offers fresh insight into the entrepreneurial spirit of 19th-century America.     Show Highlights (2:14) When railroads first arrived in America and how quickly they spread (6:18) Changes in the business world that supported and continued railroad expansion (7:16) The impact of government oversight as the industry develops (14:47) When deregulation of the railroad industry occurred and the effects it had (19:46) The effects railroads had on labor organization and the labor market in America (22:32) How railroad expansion affected how we keep time throughout the U.S. (24:28) The effect of digital technology on the American railroad industry (31:47) Is high-speed rail a profitable enterprise? (35:23) Simon Cordery's upcoming book, Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman     Links Referenced Mother Jones: Raising Cain and Consciousness: https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Jones-Raising-Consciousness-Biography/dp/0826348106   The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The Story of Illinois Railroading: https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Road-Prairie-State-Railroading-ebook/dp/B017SJ126Q   Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman: https://www.amazon.com/Gilded-Age-Entrepreneur-American-Financier-ebook/dp/B0DVMQHYWP

Gazi Mizanur Rahman's In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers the first sustained historical study of Bengali migration to British Malaya from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth. Drawing on archival research in South and Southeast Asia, as well as oral histories and travel accounts, Rahman reconstructs the formation of a transnational Bengali presence that has been largely overlooked in the broader literature on Indian migration. The book argues that Bengali migrants—across class, religion, and occupation—constituted a distinct group within the South Asian diaspora in the Malay world. Colonial administrators often reduced them to the generic category of “Indian,” but Bengalis in Malaya included plantation workers, lascars, domestic servants, professionals, and traders. They moved through varied migration routes and formed diverse community institutions, including mosques, cultural associations, and legal aid networks. Rahman introduces the concept of “space-making” to show how Bengali migrants created social, institutional, and urban spaces that allowed them to adapt and persist in new settings. These spaces were not only material (homes, neighbourhoods, workplaces) but also relational, sustained by kinship ties, religious practice, and civic engagement. Particularly important are the chapters on Bengali medical professionals and maritime labour, which demonstrate how this group contributed to colonial infrastructure while navigating systemic racial and occupational hierarchies. The book also engages with the postcolonial period, tracing the arrival of Bangladeshi workers in the 1980s and 1990s and the new forms of marginality they encountered. These later migrants, often undocumented or temporary, faced challenges similar to those of their predecessors but within different political and economic regimes. Rahman's study challenges the dominant focus on Tamil and Sikh diasporas in Southeast Asia and contributes to a growing body of scholarship that disaggregates the “Indian” category in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It is a methodologically rigorous and empirically rich work that will interest historians of migration, labour, and the Indian Ocean world. Soumyadeep Guha is a third-year graduate student in the History Department at the State University of New York, Binghamton, with research interests in Agrarian History, the History of Science and Technology, and Global History, focusing on 19th and 20th century India. His MA dissertation, War, Science and Survival Technologies: The Politics of Nutrition and Agriculture in Late Colonial India, explored how wartime imperatives shaped scientific and agricultural policy during the Second World War in India. Currently, his working on his PhD dissertation on the histories of rice and its production in late colonial and early post-colonial Bengal, examining the entangled trajectories of agrarian change, scientific knowledge, and state-making.

Gazi Mizanur Rahman's In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers the first sustained historical study of Bengali migration to British Malaya from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth. Drawing on archival research in South and Southeast Asia, as well as oral histories and travel accounts, Rahman reconstructs the formation of a transnational Bengali presence that has been largely overlooked in the broader literature on Indian migration. The book argues that Bengali migrants—across class, religion, and occupation—constituted a distinct group within the South Asian diaspora in the Malay world. Colonial administrators often reduced them to the generic category of “Indian,” but Bengalis in Malaya included plantation workers, lascars, domestic servants, professionals, and traders. They moved through varied migration routes and formed diverse community institutions, including mosques, cultural associations, and legal aid networks. Rahman introduces the concept of “space-making” to show how Bengali migrants created social, institutional, and urban spaces that allowed them to adapt and persist in new settings. These spaces were not only material (homes, neighbourhoods, workplaces) but also relational, sustained by kinship ties, religious practice, and civic engagement. Particularly important are the chapters on Bengali medical professionals and maritime labour, which demonstrate how this group contributed to colonial infrastructure while navigating systemic racial and occupational hierarchies. The book also engages with the postcolonial period, tracing the arrival of Bangladeshi workers in the 1980s and 1990s and the new forms of marginality they encountered. These later migrants, often undocumented or temporary, faced challenges similar to those of their predecessors but within different political and economic regimes. Rahman's study challenges the dominant focus on Tamil and Sikh diasporas in Southeast Asia and contributes to a growing body of scholarship that disaggregates the “Indian” category in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It is a methodologically rigorous and empirically rich work that will interest historians of migration, labour, and the Indian Ocean world. Soumyadeep Guha is a third-year graduate student in the History Department at the State University of New York, Binghamton, with research interests in Agrarian History, the History of Science and Technology, and Global History, focusing on 19th and 20th century India. His MA dissertation, War, Science and Survival Technologies: The Politics of Nutrition and Agriculture in Late Colonial India, explored how wartime imperatives shaped scientific and agricultural policy during the Second World War in India. Currently, his working on his PhD dissertation on the histories of rice and its production in late colonial and early post-colonial Bengal, examining the entangled trajectories of agrarian change, scientific knowledge, and state-making. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Gazi Mizanur Rahman's In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers the first sustained historical study of Bengali migration to British Malaya from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth. Drawing on archival research in South and Southeast Asia, as well as oral histories and travel accounts, Rahman reconstructs the formation of a transnational Bengali presence that has been largely overlooked in the broader literature on Indian migration. The book argues that Bengali migrants—across class, religion, and occupation—constituted a distinct group within the South Asian diaspora in the Malay world. Colonial administrators often reduced them to the generic category of “Indian,” but Bengalis in Malaya included plantation workers, lascars, domestic servants, professionals, and traders. They moved through varied migration routes and formed diverse community institutions, including mosques, cultural associations, and legal aid networks. Rahman introduces the concept of “space-making” to show how Bengali migrants created social, institutional, and urban spaces that allowed them to adapt and persist in new settings. These spaces were not only material (homes, neighbourhoods, workplaces) but also relational, sustained by kinship ties, religious practice, and civic engagement. Particularly important are the chapters on Bengali medical professionals and maritime labour, which demonstrate how this group contributed to colonial infrastructure while navigating systemic racial and occupational hierarchies. The book also engages with the postcolonial period, tracing the arrival of Bangladeshi workers in the 1980s and 1990s and the new forms of marginality they encountered. These later migrants, often undocumented or temporary, faced challenges similar to those of their predecessors but within different political and economic regimes. Rahman's study challenges the dominant focus on Tamil and Sikh diasporas in Southeast Asia and contributes to a growing body of scholarship that disaggregates the “Indian” category in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It is a methodologically rigorous and empirically rich work that will interest historians of migration, labour, and the Indian Ocean world. Soumyadeep Guha is a third-year graduate student in the History Department at the State University of New York, Binghamton, with research interests in Agrarian History, the History of Science and Technology, and Global History, focusing on 19th and 20th century India. His MA dissertation, War, Science and Survival Technologies: The Politics of Nutrition and Agriculture in Late Colonial India, explored how wartime imperatives shaped scientific and agricultural policy during the Second World War in India. Currently, his working on his PhD dissertation on the histories of rice and its production in late colonial and early post-colonial Bengal, examining the entangled trajectories of agrarian change, scientific knowledge, and state-making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Gazi Mizanur Rahman's In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers the first sustained historical study of Bengali migration to British Malaya from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth. Drawing on archival research in South and Southeast Asia, as well as oral histories and travel accounts, Rahman reconstructs the formation of a transnational Bengali presence that has been largely overlooked in the broader literature on Indian migration. The book argues that Bengali migrants—across class, religion, and occupation—constituted a distinct group within the South Asian diaspora in the Malay world. Colonial administrators often reduced them to the generic category of “Indian,” but Bengalis in Malaya included plantation workers, lascars, domestic servants, professionals, and traders. They moved through varied migration routes and formed diverse community institutions, including mosques, cultural associations, and legal aid networks. Rahman introduces the concept of “space-making” to show how Bengali migrants created social, institutional, and urban spaces that allowed them to adapt and persist in new settings. These spaces were not only material (homes, neighbourhoods, workplaces) but also relational, sustained by kinship ties, religious practice, and civic engagement. Particularly important are the chapters on Bengali medical professionals and maritime labour, which demonstrate how this group contributed to colonial infrastructure while navigating systemic racial and occupational hierarchies. The book also engages with the postcolonial period, tracing the arrival of Bangladeshi workers in the 1980s and 1990s and the new forms of marginality they encountered. These later migrants, often undocumented or temporary, faced challenges similar to those of their predecessors but within different political and economic regimes. Rahman's study challenges the dominant focus on Tamil and Sikh diasporas in Southeast Asia and contributes to a growing body of scholarship that disaggregates the “Indian” category in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It is a methodologically rigorous and empirically rich work that will interest historians of migration, labour, and the Indian Ocean world. Soumyadeep Guha is a third-year graduate student in the History Department at the State University of New York, Binghamton, with research interests in Agrarian History, the History of Science and Technology, and Global History, focusing on 19th and 20th century India. His MA dissertation, War, Science and Survival Technologies: The Politics of Nutrition and Agriculture in Late Colonial India, explored how wartime imperatives shaped scientific and agricultural policy during the Second World War in India. Currently, his working on his PhD dissertation on the histories of rice and its production in late colonial and early post-colonial Bengal, examining the entangled trajectories of agrarian change, scientific knowledge, and state-making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

François, Jenn, and Çınla speak with Jennifer Burns, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Admissions in the History Department at Stanford University, about her book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (2023). 

Kornel Chang on U.S. Power, Korean Resistance, and the Birth of Division What if Korea's true revolution was never allowed to happen? In this episode, I talk with historian Kornel Chang, author of A Fractured Liberation, to explore a moment in Korean history that most people never learn about. A moment when ordinary Koreans believed they were on the brink of something new. In 1945 Japanese colonial rule had ended and, across the peninsula, people were filled with hope. Workers seized factories, farmers reclaimed land, and women demanded rights. It was Korea's “Asian Spring”...an explosion of grassroots energy and possibility. But it didn't last.  Instead of freedom, Koreans faced a new occupying force: the U.S. military government in the South. Kornel walks us through how the American-led administration, fearful of leftist movements and obsessed with anti-communism, sidelined local efforts toward democracy, reinstalled collaborators from the colonial regime, and helped lay the groundwork for division, war, and decades of authoritarian rule. This is a story about who gets to decide the future when the dust of war settles. And it's more important than ever.    Buy A Fractured Liberation: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674258433 Kornel Chang is the author of Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands, winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Prize in History. He is Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University–Newark.   About David A. Tizzard  David A. Tizzard has a PhD in Korean Studies and lectures at Seoul Women's University and Hanyang University. He writes a weekly column in the Korea Times, is a social-cultural commentator, and a musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He can be reached at datizzard@swu.ac.kr. Watch this video next: https://youtu.be/QJ66Ew2FsOI?si=bSVFz590fd1xQPsM Subscribe to the channel: @DavidTizzard/videos Thanks to Patreon members: Hee Ji Jacobs, Bhavya, Roxanne Murrell Join Patreon: Support Korea Deconstructed: https://www.patreon.com/c/user?u=62047873   Discussion Outline   0:00 From Pyongyang to New York 9:49 The Paths Not Taken 27:48 Why Was Korea Divided? 41:36 Who Could Lead Korea? 52:42 Collaboration with the Japanese 1:04:35 The Lived Experiences of 1945-1948 1:17:14 Using Literature to Centre Ordinary Koreans 1:26:23 On Korean Studies and its Factions 1:37:00 Recommendations   Music by Jocelyn Clark Connect with us: ▶ Get in touch: datizzard@swu.ac.kr ▶ David's Insta: @datizzard ▶ KD Insta: @koreadeconstructed Questions or Topic Suggestions? Write in the Comments Below! #KoreaDeconstructed #korea #koreanhistory #koreanculture   Listen to Korea Deconstructed  ▶ Listen on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/kr/podcast/korea-deconstructed/id1587269128 ▶Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5zdXkG0aAAHnDwOvd0jXEE ▶ Listen on podcasts: https://koreadeconstructed.libsyn.com 

A Martian lands on Earth, heads to the nearest university's History Department, and asks the question, “What is Asia?” What kind of response would they get? We explore this question with historian Nile Green, who outlines a forum titled “Big Asia: Rethinking a Region” that appears in the June 2025 issue of the AHR.

Today, on the Hudson Mohawk Magazine, we bring you a May Day special, focusing on labor. The following program of oral histories was conducted by undergraduate students in History 263: American Labor History, a course taught by Professor Eric J. Morser at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, as part of The Saratoga Labor History Digital Archive. Project Credits: Project Manager: Professor Eric J. Morser, History Department, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York Audio Editor and Narrator: Emma Gill Project Consultant/Community Producer: Willie Terry The project was produced in collaboration with MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative and Hudson Mohawk Magazine. It was supported by the MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative and funded in part by the Mellon Foundation. Special thanks to Angela Beallor Press.

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms. Our guest today is Professor Philip J. Stern, Professor of History at the History Department at Duke University. Philip is a historian of the British Empire, with an interest in the role of companies and corporations in colonial enterprise, overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, and digital and data visualization approaches to the problem of colonial sovereignty. We spoke with Philip in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his most recent book, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard University Press, 2023). The book places corporations at the centre of the story of the British Empire. It is both a masterful synthesis of a vast body of existing historiographical literature and an incredibly original contribution describing the various corporations engaged in the interrelated and competing projects of what it terms as “corporate or venture colonialism” and their long afterlives of entangled sovereign and commercial powers. 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

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms. Our guest today is Professor Philip J. Stern, Professor of History at the History Department at Duke University. Philip is a historian of the British Empire, with an interest in the role of companies and corporations in colonial enterprise, overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, and digital and data visualization approaches to the problem of colonial sovereignty. We spoke with Philip in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his most recent book, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard University Press, 2023). The book places corporations at the centre of the story of the British Empire. It is both a masterful synthesis of a vast body of existing historiographical literature and an incredibly original contribution describing the various corporations engaged in the interrelated and competing projects of what it terms as “corporate or venture colonialism” and their long afterlives of entangled sovereign and commercial powers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms. Our guest today is Professor Philip J. Stern, Professor of History at the History Department at Duke University. Philip is a historian of the British Empire, with an interest in the role of companies and corporations in colonial enterprise, overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, and digital and data visualization approaches to the problem of colonial sovereignty. We spoke with Philip in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his most recent book, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard University Press, 2023). The book places corporations at the centre of the story of the British Empire. It is both a masterful synthesis of a vast body of existing historiographical literature and an incredibly original contribution describing the various corporations engaged in the interrelated and competing projects of what it terms as “corporate or venture colonialism” and their long afterlives of entangled sovereign and commercial powers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms. Our guest today is Professor Philip J. Stern, Professor of History at the History Department at Duke University. Philip is a historian of the British Empire, with an interest in the role of companies and corporations in colonial enterprise, overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, and digital and data visualization approaches to the problem of colonial sovereignty. We spoke with Philip in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his most recent book, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard University Press, 2023). The book places corporations at the centre of the story of the British Empire. It is both a masterful synthesis of a vast body of existing historiographical literature and an incredibly original contribution describing the various corporations engaged in the interrelated and competing projects of what it terms as “corporate or venture colonialism” and their long afterlives of entangled sovereign and commercial powers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms. Our guest today is Professor Philip J. Stern, Professor of History at the History Department at Duke University. Philip is a historian of the British Empire, with an interest in the role of companies and corporations in colonial enterprise, overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, and digital and data visualization approaches to the problem of colonial sovereignty. We spoke with Philip in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his most recent book, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard University Press, 2023). The book places corporations at the centre of the story of the British Empire. It is both a masterful synthesis of a vast body of existing historiographical literature and an incredibly original contribution describing the various corporations engaged in the interrelated and competing projects of what it terms as “corporate or venture colonialism” and their long afterlives of entangled sovereign and commercial powers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms. Our guest today is Professor Philip J. Stern, Professor of History at the History Department at Duke University. Philip is a historian of the British Empire, with an interest in the role of companies and corporations in colonial enterprise, overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, and digital and data visualization approaches to the problem of colonial sovereignty. We spoke with Philip in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his most recent book, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard University Press, 2023). The book places corporations at the centre of the story of the British Empire. It is both a masterful synthesis of a vast body of existing historiographical literature and an incredibly original contribution describing the various corporations engaged in the interrelated and competing projects of what it terms as “corporate or venture colonialism” and their long afterlives of entangled sovereign and commercial powers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

So what, exactly, was “The Enlightenment”? According to the Princeton historian David A. Bell, it was an intellectual movement roughly spanning the early 18th century through to the French Revolution. In his Spring 2025 Liberties Quarterly piece “The Enlightenment, Then and Now”, Bell charts the Enlightenment as a complex intellectual movement centered in Paris but with hubs across Europe and America. He highlights key figures like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, and Franklin, discussing their contributions to concepts of religious tolerance, free speech, and rationality. In our conversation, Bell addresses criticisms of the Enlightenment, including its complicated relationship with colonialism and slavery, while arguing that its principles of freedom and reason remain relevant today. 5 Key Takeaways* The Enlightenment emerged in the early 18th century (around 1720s) and was characterized by intellectual inquiry, skepticism toward religion, and a growing sense among thinkers that they were living in an "enlightened century."* While Paris was the central hub, the Enlightenment had multiple centers including Scotland, Germany, and America, with thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Franklin contributing to its development.* The Enlightenment introduced the concept of "society" as a sphere of human existence separate from religion and politics, forming the basis of modern social sciences.* The movement had a complex relationship with colonialism and slavery - many Enlightenment thinkers criticized slavery, but some of their ideas about human progress were later used to justify imperialism.* According to Bell, rather than trying to "return to the Enlightenment," modern society should selectively adopt and adapt its valuable principles of free speech, religious tolerance, and education to create our "own Enlightenment."David Avrom Bell is a historian of early modern and modern Europe at Princeton University. His most recent book, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Described in the Journal of Modern History as an "instant classic," it is available in paperback from Picador, in French translation from Fayard, and in Italian translation from Viella. A study of how new forms of political charisma arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book shows that charismatic authoritarianism is as modern a political form as liberal democracy, and shares many of the same origins. Based on exhaustive research in original sources, the book includes case studies of the careers of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louverture and Simon Bolivar. The book's Introduction can be read here. An online conversation about the book with Annette Gordon-Reed, hosted by the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, can be viewed here. Links to material about the book, including reviews in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues can be found here. Bell is also the author of six previous books. He has published academic articles in both English and French and contributes regularly to general interest publications on a variety of subjects, ranging from modern warfare, to contemporary French politics, to the impact of digital technology on learning and scholarship, and of course French history. A list of his publications from 2023 and 2024 can be found here. His Substack newsletter can be found here. His writings have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swedish, Polish, Russian, German, Croatian, Italian, Turkish and Japanese. At the History Department at Princeton University, he holds the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Chair in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions, and offers courses on early modern Europe, on military history, and on the early modern French empire. Previously, he spent fourteen years at Johns Hopkins University, including three as Dean of Faculty in its School of Arts and Sciences. From 2020 to 2024 he served as Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Bell's new project is a history of the Enlightenment. A preliminary article from the project was published in early 2022 by Modern Intellectual History. Another is now out in French History.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. FULL TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello everybody, in these supposedly dark times, the E word comes up a lot, the Enlightenment. Are we at the end of the Enlightenment or the beginning? Was there even an Enlightenment? My guest today, David Bell, a professor of history, very distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, has an interesting piece in the spring issue of It is One of our, our favorite quarterlies here on Keen on America, Bell's piece is The Enlightenment Then and Now, and David is joining us from the home of the Enlightenment, perhaps Paris in France, where he's on sabbatical hard life. David being an academic these days, isn't it?David Bell: Very difficult. I'm having to suffer the Parisian bread and croissant. It's terrible.Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, I won't keep you too long. Is Paris then, or France? Is it the home of the Enlightenment? I know there are many Enlightenments, the French, the Scottish, maybe even the English, perhaps even the American.David Bell: It's certainly one of the homes of the Enlightenment, and it's probably the closest that the Enlightened had to a center, absolutely. But as you say, there were Edinburgh, Glasgow, plenty of places in Germany, Philadelphia, all those places have good claims to being centers of the enlightenment as well.Andrew Keen: All the same David, is it like one of those sports games in California where everyone gets a medal?David Bell: Well, they're different metals, right, but I think certainly Paris is where everybody went. I mean, if you look at the figures from the German Enlightenment, from the Scottish Enlightenment from the American Enlightenment they all tended to congregate in Paris and the Parisians didn't tend to go anywhere else unless they were forced to. So that gives you a pretty good sense of where the most important center was.Andrew Keen: So David, before we get to specifics, map out for us, because everyone is perhaps as familiar or comfortable with the history of the Enlightenment, and certainly as you are. When did it happen? What years? And who are the leaders of this thing called the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, that's a big question. And I'm afraid, of course, that if you ask 10 historians, you'll get 10 different answers.Andrew Keen: Well, I'm only asking you, so I only want one answer.David Bell: So I would say that the Enlightenment really gets going around the first couple of decades of the 18th century. And that's when people really start to think that they are actually living in what they start to call an Enlightenment century. There are a lot of reasons for this. They are seeing what we now call the scientific revolution. They're looking at the progress that has been made with that. They are experiencing the changes in the religious sphere, including the end of religious wars, coming with a great deal of skepticism about religion. They are living in a relative period of peace where they're able to speculate much more broadly and daringly than before. But it's really in those first couple of decades that they start thinking of themselves as living in an enlightened century. They start defining themselves as something that would later be called the enlightenment. So I would say that it's, really, really there between maybe the end of the 17th century and 1720s that it really gets started.Andrew Keen: So let's have some names, David, of philosophers, I guess. I mean, if those are the right words. I know that there was a term in French. There is a term called philosoph. Were they the founders, the leaders of the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, there is a... Again, I don't want to descend into academic quibbling here, but there were lots of leaders. Let me give an example, though. So the year 1721 is a remarkable year. So in the year, 1721, two amazing events happened within a couple of months of each other. So in May, Montesquieu, one of the great philosophers by any definition, publishes his novel called Persian Letters. And this is an incredible novel. Still, I think one of greatest novels ever written, and it's very daring. It is the account, it is supposedly a an account written by two Persian travelers to Europe who are writing back to people in Isfahan about what they're seeing. And it is very critical of French society. It is very of religion. It is, as I said, very daring philosophically. It is a product in part of the increasing contact between Europe and the rest of the world that is also very central to the Enlightenment. So that novel comes out. So it's immediately, you know, the police try to suppress it. But they don't have much success because it's incredibly popular and Montesquieu doesn't suffer any particular problems because...Andrew Keen: And the French police have never been the most efficient police force in the world, have they?David Bell: Oh, they could be, but not in this case. And then two months later, after Montesquieu published this novel, there's a German philosopher much less well-known than Montesqiu, than Christian Bolz, who is a professor at the Universität Haller in Prussia, and he gives an oration in Latin, a very typical university oration for the time, about Chinese philosophy, in which he says that the Chinese have sort of proved to the world, particularly through the writings of Confucius and others, that you can have a virtuous society without religion. Obviously very controversial. Statement for the time it actually gets him fired from his job, he has to leave the Kingdom of Prussia within 48 hours on penalty of death, starts an enormous controversy. But here are two events, both of which involving non-European people, involving the way in which Europeans are starting to look out at the rest of the world and starting to imagine Europe as just one part of a larger humanity, and at the same time they are starting to speculate very daringly about whether you can have. You know, what it means to have a society, do you need to have religion in order to have morality in society? Do you need the proper, what kind of government do you need to to have virtuous conduct and a proper society? So all of these things get, you know, really crystallize, I think, around these two incidents as much as anything. So if I had to pick a single date for when the enlightenment starts, I'd probably pick that 1721.Andrew Keen: And when was, David, I thought you were going to tell me about the earthquake in Lisbon, when was that earthquake?David Bell: That earthquake comes quite a bit later. That comes, and now historians should be better with dates than I am. It's in the 1750s, I think it's the late 1750's. Again, this historian is proving he's getting a very bad grade for forgetting the exact date, but it's in 1750. So that's a different kind of event, which sparks off a great deal of commentary, because it's a terrible earthquake. It destroys most of the city of Lisbon, it destroys other cities throughout Portugal, and it leads a lot of the philosophy to philosophers at the time to be speculating very daringly again on whether there is any kind of real purpose to the universe and whether there's any kind divine purpose. Why would such a terrible thing happen? Why would God do such a thing to his followers? And certainly VoltaireAndrew Keen: Yeah, Votav, of course, comes to mind of questioning.David Bell: And Condit, Voltaire's novel Condit gives a very good description of the earthquake in Lisbon and uses that as a centerpiece. Voltair also read other things about the earthquake, a poem about Lisbon earthquake. But in Condit he gives a lasting, very scathing portrait of the Catholic Church in general and then of what happens in Portugal. And so the Lisbon Earthquake is certainly another one of the events, but it happens considerably later. Really in the middle of the end of life.Andrew Keen: So, David, you believe in this idea of the Enlightenment. I take your point that there are more than one Enlightenment in more than one center, but in broad historical terms, the 18th century could be defined at least in Western and Northern Europe as the period of the Enlightenment, would that be a fair generalization?David Bell: I think it's perfectly fair generalization. Of course, there are historians who say that it never happened. There's a conservative British historian, J.C.D. Clark, who published a book last summer, saying that the Enlightenment is a kind of myth, that there was a lot of intellectual activity in Europe, obviously, but that the idea that it formed a coherent Enlightenment was really invented in the 20th century by a bunch of progressive reformers who wanted to claim a kind of venerable and august pedigree for their own reform, liberal reform plans. I think that's an exaggeration. People in the 18th century defined very clearly what was going on, both people who were in favor of it and people who are against it. And while you can, if you look very closely at it, of course it gets a bit fuzzy. Of course it's gets, there's no single, you can't define a single enlightenment project or a single enlightened ideology. But then, I think people would be hard pressed to define any intellectual movement. You know, in perfect, incoherent terms. So the enlightenment is, you know by compared with almost any other intellectual movement certainly existed.Andrew Keen: In terms of a philosophy of the Enlightenment, the German thinker, Immanuel Kant, seems to be often, and when you describe him as the conscience or the brain or a mixture of the conscience and brain of the enlightenment, why is Kant and Kantian thinking so important in the development of the Enlightenment.David Bell: Well, that's a really interesting question. And one reason is because most of the Enlightenment was not very rigorously philosophical. A lot of the major figures of the enlightenment before Kant tended to be writing for a general public. And they often were writing with a very specific agenda. We look at Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau. Now you look at Adam Smith in Scotland. We look David Hume or Adam Ferguson. You look at Benjamin Franklin in the United States. These people wrote in all sorts of different genres. They wrote in, they wrote all sorts of different kinds of books. They have many different purposes and very few of them did a lot of what we would call rigorous academic philosophy. And Kant was different. Kant was very much an academic philosopher. Kant was nothing if not rigorous. He came at the end of the enlightenment by most people's measure. He wrote these very, very difficult, very rigorous, very brilliant works, such as The Creek of Pure Reason. And so, it's certainly been the case that people who wanted to describe the Enlightenment as a philosophy have tended to look to Kant. So for example, there's a great German philosopher and intellectual historian of the early 20th century named Ernst Kassirer, who had to leave Germany because of the Nazis. And he wrote a great book called The Philosophy of the Enlightened. And that leads directly to Immanuel Kant. And of course, Casir himself was a Kantian, identified with Kant. And so he wanted to make Kant, in a sense, the telos, the end point, the culmination, the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. But so I think that's why Kant has such a particularly important position. You're defining it both ways.Andrew Keen: I've always struggled to understand what Kant was trying to say. I'm certainly not alone there. Might it be fair to say that he was trying to transform the universe and certainly traditional Christian notions into the Enlightenment, so the entire universe, the world, God, whatever that means, that they were all somehow according to Kant enlightened.David Bell: Well, I think that I'm certainly no expert on Immanuel Kant. And I would say that he is trying to, I mean, his major philosophical works are trying to put together a system of philosophical thinking which will justify why people have to act morally, why people act rationally, without the need for Christian revelation to bolster them. That's a very, very crude and reductionist way of putting it, but that's essentially at the heart of it. At the same time, Kant was very much aware of his own place in history. So Kant didn't simply write these very difficult, thick, dense philosophical works. He also wrote things that were more like journalism or like tablets. He wrote a famous essay called What is Enlightenment? And in that, he said that the 18th century was the period in which humankind was simply beginning to. Reach a period of enlightenment. And he said, he starts the essay by saying, this is the period when humankind is being released from its self-imposed tutelage. And we are still, and he said we do not yet live in the midst of a completely enlightened century, but we are getting there. We are living in a century that is enlightening.Andrew Keen: So the seeds, the seeds of Hegel and maybe even Marx are incant in that German thinking, that historical thinking.David Bell: In some ways, in some ways of course Hegel very much reacts against Kant and so and then Marx reacts against Hegel. So it's not exactly.Andrew Keen: Well, that's the dialectic, isn't it, David?David Bell: A simple easy path from one to the other, no, but Hegel is unimaginable without Kant of course and Marx is unimagineable without Hegel.Andrew Keen: You note that Kant represents a shift in some ways into the university and the walls of the universities were going up, and that some of the other figures associated with the the Enlightenment and Scottish Enlightenment, human and Smith and the French Enlightenment Voltaire and the others, they were more generalist writers. Should we be nostalgic for the pre-university period in the Enlightenment, or? Did things start getting serious once the heavyweights, the academic heavyweighs like Emmanuel Kant got into this thing?David Bell: I think it depends on where we're talking about. I mean, Adam Smith was a professor at Glasgow in Edinburgh, so Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment was definitely at least partly in the universities. The German Enlightenment took place very heavily in universities. Christian Vodafoy I just mentioned was the most important German philosopher of the 18th century before Kant, and he had positions in university. Even the French university system, for a while, what's interesting about the French University system, particularly the Sorbonne, which was the theology faculty, It was that. Throughout the first half of the 18th century, there were very vigorous, very interesting philosophical debates going on there, in which the people there, particularly even Jesuits there, were very open to a lot of the ideas we now call enlightenment. They were reading John Locke, they were reading Mel Pench, they were read Dekalb. What happened though in the French universities was that as more daring stuff was getting published elsewhere. Church, the Catholic Church, started to say, all right, these philosophers, these philosophies, these are our enemies, these are people we have to get at. And so at that point, anybody who was in the university, who was still in dialog with these people was basically purged. And the universities became much less interesting after that. But to come back to your question, I do think that I am very nostalgic for that period. I think that the Enlightenment was an extraordinary period, because if you look between. In the 17th century, not all, but a great deal of the most interesting intellectual work is happening in the so-called Republic of Letters. It's happening in Latin language. It is happening on a very small circle of RUD, of scholars. By the 19th century following Kant and Hegel and then the birth of the research university in Germany, which is copied everywhere, philosophy and the most advanced thinking goes back into the university. And the 18th century, particularly in France, I will say, is a time when the most advanced thought is being written for a general public. It is being in the form of novels, of dialogs, of stories, of reference works, and it is very, very accessible. The most profound thought of the West has never been as accessible overall as in the 18 century.Andrew Keen: Again, excuse this question, it might seem a bit naive, but there's a lot of pre-Enlightenment work, books, thinking that we read now that's very accessible from Erasmus and Thomas More to Machiavelli. Why weren't characters like, or are characters like Erasmuus, More's Utopia, Machiavell's prints and discourses, why aren't they considered part of the Enlightenment? What's the difference between? Enlightened thinkers or the supposedly enlightened thinkers of the 18th century and thinkers and writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.David Bell: That's a good question, you know, I think you have to, you, you know, again, one has to draw a line somewhere. That's not a very good answer, of course. All these people that you just mentioned are, in one way or another, predecessors to the Enlightenment. And of course, there were lots of people. I don't mean to say that nobody wrote in an accessible way before 1700. Obviously, lots of the people you mentioned did. Although a lot of them originally wrote in Latin, Erasmus, also Thomas More. But I think what makes the Enlightened different is that you have, again, you have a sense. These people have have a sense that they are themselves engaged in a collective project, that it is a collective project of enlightenment, of enlightening the world. They believe that they live in a century of progress. And there are certain principles. They don't agree on everything by any means. The philosophy of enlightenment is like nothing more than ripping each other to shreds, like any decent group of intellectuals. But that said, they generally did believe That people needed to have freedom of speech. They believed that you needed to have toleration of different religions. They believed in education and the need for a broadly educated public that could be as broad as possible. They generally believed in keeping religion out of the public sphere as much as possible, so all those principles came together into a program that we can consider at least a kind of... You know, not that everybody read it at every moment by any means, but there is an identifiable enlightenment program there, and in this case an identifiable enlightenment mindset. One other thing, I think, which is crucial to the Enlightenment, is that it was the attention they started to pay to something that we now take almost entirely for granted, which is the idea of society. The word society is so entirely ubiquitous, we assume it's always been there, and in one sense it has, because the word societas is a Latin word. But until... The 18th century, the word society generally had a much narrower meaning. It referred to, you know, particular institution most often, like when we talk about the society of, you know, the American philosophical society or something like that. And the idea that there exists something called society, which is the general sphere of human existence that is separate from religion and is separate from the political sphere, that's actually something which only really emerged at the end of the 1600s. And it became really the focus of you know, much, if not most, of enlightenment thinking. When you look at someone like Montesquieu and you look something, somebody like Rousseau or Voltaire or Adam Smith, probably above all, they were concerned with understanding how society works, not how government works only, but how society, what social interactions are like beginning of what we would now call social science. So that's yet another thing that distinguishes the enlightened from people like Machiavelli, often people like Thomas More, and people like bonuses.Andrew Keen: You noted earlier that the idea of progress is somehow baked in, in part, and certainly when it comes to Kant, certainly the French Enlightenment, although, of course, Rousseau challenged that. I'm not sure whether Rousseaut, as always, is both in and out of the Enlightenment and he seems to be in and out of everything. How did the Enlightement, though, make sense of itself in the context of antiquity, as it was, of Terms, it was the Renaissance that supposedly discovered or rediscovered antiquity. How did many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers, writers, how did they think of their own society in the context of not just antiquity, but even the idea of a European or Western society?David Bell: Well, there was a great book, one of the great histories of the Enlightenment was written about more than 50 years ago by the Yale professor named Peter Gay, and the first part of that book was called The Modern Paganism. So it was about the, you know, it was very much about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the ancient Greek synonyms. And certainly the writers of the enlightenment felt a great deal of kinship with the ancient Greek synonymous. They felt a common bond, particularly in the posing. Christianity and opposing what they believed the Christian Church had wrought on Europe in suppressing freedom and suppressing free thought and suppassing free inquiry. And so they felt that they were both recovering but also going beyond antiquity at the same time. And of course they were all, I mean everybody at the time, every single major figure of the Enlightenment, their education consisted in large part of what we would now call classics, right? I mean, there was an educational reformer in France in the 1760s who said, you know, our educational system is great if the purpose is to train Roman centurions, if it's to train modern people who are not doing both so well. And it's true. I mean they would spend, certainly, you know in Germany, in much of Europe, in the Netherlands, even in France, I mean people were trained not simply to read Latin, but to write in Latin. In Germany, university courses took part in the Latin language. So there's an enormous, you know, so they're certainly very, very conversant with the Greek and Roman classics, and they identify with them to a very great extent. Someone like Rousseau, I mean, and many others, and what's his first reading? How did he learn to read by reading Plutarch? In translation, but he learns to read reading Plutach. He sees from the beginning by this enormous admiration for the ancients that we get from Bhutan.Andrew Keen: Was Socrates relevant here? Was the Enlightenment somehow replacing Aristotle with Socrates and making him and his spirit of Enlightenment, of asking questions rather than answering questions, the symbol of a new way of thinking?David Bell: I would say to a certain extent, so I mean, much of the Enlightenment criticizes scholasticism, medieval scholastic, very, very sharply, and medieval scholasticism is founded philosophically very heavily upon Aristotle, so to that extent. And the spirit of skepticism that Socrates embodied, the idea of taking nothing for granted and asking questions about everything, including questions of oneself, yes, absolutely. That said, while the great figures of the Red Plato, you know, Socrates was generally I mean, it was not all that present as they come. But certainly have people with people with red play-doh in the entire virus.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Benjamin Franklin earlier, David. Most of the Enlightenment, of course, seems to be centered in France and Scotland, Germany, England. But America, many Europeans went to America then as a, what some people would call a settler colonial society, or certainly an offshoot of the European world. Was the settling of America and the American Revolution Was it the quintessential Enlightenment project?David Bell: Another very good question, and again, it depends a bit on who you talk to. I just mentioned this book by Peter Gay, and the last part of his book is called The Science of Freedom, and it's all about the American Revolution. So certainly a lot of interpreters of the Enlightenment have said that, yes, the American revolution represents in a sense the best possible outcome of the American Revolution, it was the best, possible outcome of the enlightened. Certainly there you look at the founding fathers of the United States and there's a great deal that they took from me like Certainly, they took a great great number of political ideas from Obviously Madison was very much inspired and drafting the edifice of the Constitution by Montesquieu to see himself Was happy to admit in addition most of the founding Fathers of the united states were you know had kind of you know We still had we were still definitely Christians, but we're also but we were also very much influenced by deism were very much against the idea of making the United States a kind of confessional country where Christianity was dominant. They wanted to believe in the enlightenment principles of free speech, religious toleration and so on and so forth. So in all those senses and very much the gun was probably more inspired than Franklin was somebody who was very conversant with the European Enlightenment. He spent a large part of his life in London. Where he was in contact with figures of the Enlightenment. He also, during the American Revolution, of course, he was mostly in France, where he is vetted by some of the surviving fellows and were very much in contact for them as well. So yes, I would say the American revolution is certainly... And then the American revolutionary scene, of course by the Europeans, very much as a kind of offshoot of the enlightenment. So one of the great books of the late Enlightenment is by Condor Say, which he wrote while he was hiding actually in the future evolution of the chariot. It's called a historical sketch of the progress of the human spirit, or the human mind, and you know he writes about the American Revolution as being, basically owing its existence to being like...Andrew Keen: Franklin is of course an example of your pre-academic enlightenment, a generalist, inventor, scientist, entrepreneur, political thinker. What about the role of science and indeed economics in the Enlightenment? David, we're going to talk of course about the Marxist interpretation, perhaps the Marxist interpretation which sees The Enlightenment is just a euphemism, perhaps, for exploitative capitalism. How central was the growth and development of the market, of economics, and innovation, and capitalism in your reading of The Enlightened?David Bell: Well, in my reading, it was very important, but not in the way that the Marxists used to say. So Friedrich Engels once said that the Enlightenment was basically the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie, and there was whole strain of Marxist thinking that followed the assumption that, and then Karl Marx himself argued that the documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which obviously were inspired by the Enlightment, were simply kind of the near, or kind of. Way that the bourgeoisie was able to advance itself ideologically, and I don't think that holds much water, which is very little indication that any particular economic class motivated the Enlightenment or was using the Enlightment in any way. That said, I think it's very difficult to imagine the Enlightement without the social and economic changes that come in with the 18th century. To begin with globalization. If you read the great works of the Enlightenment, it's remarkable just how open they are to talking about humanity in general. So one of Voltaire's largest works, one of his most important works, is something called Essay on Customs and the Spirit of Nations, which is actually History of the World, where he talks learnedly not simply about Europe, but about the Americas, about China, about Africa, about India. Montesquieu writes Persian letters. Christian Volpe writes about Chinese philosophy. You know, Rousseau writes about... You know, the earliest days of humankind talks about Africa. All the great figures of the Enlightenment are writing about the rest of the world, and this is a period in which contacts between Europe and the rest the world are exploding along with international trade. So by the end of the 18th century, there are 4,000 to 5,000 ships a year crossing the Atlantic. It's an enormous number. And that's one context in which the enlightenment takes place. Another is what we call the consumer revolution. So in the 18th century, certainly in the major cities of Western Europe, people of a wide range of social classes, including even artisans, sort of somewhat wealthy artisians, shopkeepers, are suddenly able to buy a much larger range of products than they were before. They're able to choose how to basically furnish their own lives, if you will, how they're gonna dress, what they're going to eat, what they gonna put on the walls of their apartments and so on and so forth. And so they become accustomed to exercising a great deal more personal choice than their ancestors have done. And the Enlightenment really develops in tandem with this. Most of the great works of the Enlightment, they're not really written to, they're treatises, they're like Kant, they're written to persuade you to think in a single way. Really written to make you ask questions yourself, to force you to ponder things. They're written in the form of puzzles and riddles. Voltaire had a great line there, he wrote that the best kind of books are the books that readers write half of themselves as they read, and that's sort of the quintessence of the Enlightenment as far as I'm concerned.Andrew Keen: Yeah, Voltaire might have been comfortable on YouTube or Facebook. David, you mentioned all those ships going from Europe across the Atlantic. Of course, many of those ships were filled with African slaves. You mentioned this in your piece. I mean, this is no secret, of course. You also mentioned a couple of times Montesquieu's Persian letters. To what extent is... The enlightenment then perhaps the birth of Western power, of Western colonialism, of going to Africa, seizing people, selling them in North America, the French, the English, Dutch colonization of the rest of the world. Of course, later more sophisticated Marxist thinkers from the Frankfurt School, you mentioned these in your essay, Odorno and Horkheimer in particular, See the Enlightenment as... A project, if you like, of Western domination. I remember reading many years ago when I was in graduate school, Edward Said, his analysis of books like The Persian Letters, which is a form of cultural Western power. How much of this is simply bound up in the profound, perhaps, injustice of the Western achievement? And of course, some of the justice as well. We haven't talked about Jefferson, but perhaps in Jefferson's life and his thinking and his enlightened principles and his... Life as a slave owner, these contradictions are most self-evident.David Bell: Well, there are certainly contradictions, and there's certainly... I think what's remarkable, if you think about it, is that if you read through works of the Enlightenment, you would be hard-pressed to find a justification for slavery. You do find a lot of critiques of slavery, and I think that's something very important to keep in mind. Obviously, the chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas began well before the Enlightment, it began in 1500. The Enlightenment doesn't have the credit for being the first movement to oppose slavery. That really goes back to various religious groups, especially the Fakers. But that said, you have in France, you had in Britain, in America even, you'd have a lot of figures associated with the Enlightenment who were pretty sure of becoming very forceful opponents of slavery very early. Now, when it comes to imperialism, that's a tricky issue. What I think you'd find in these light bulbs, you'd different sorts of tendencies and different sorts of writings. So there are certainly a lot of writers of the Enlightenment who are deeply opposed to European authorities. One of the most popular works of the late Enlightenment was a collective work edited by the man named the Abbe Rinal, which is called The History of the Two Indies. And that is a book which is deeply, deeply critical of European imperialism. At the same time, at the same of the enlightenment, a lot the works of history written during the Enlightment. Tended, such as Voltaire's essay on customs, which I just mentioned, tend to give a kind of very linear version of history. They suggest that all societies follow the same path, from sort of primitive savagery, hunter-gatherers, through early agriculture, feudal stages, and on into sort of modern commercial society and civilization. And so they're basically saying, okay, we, the Europeans, are the most advanced. People like the Africans and the Native Americans are the least advanced, and so perhaps we're justified in going and quote, bringing our civilization to them, what later generations would call the civilizing missions, or possibly just, you know, going over and exploiting them because we are stronger and we are more, and again, we are the best. And then there's another thing that the Enlightenment did. The Enlightenment tended to destroy an older Christian view of humankind, which in some ways militated against modern racism. Christians believed, of course, that everyone was the same from Adam and Eve, which meant that there was an essential similarity in the world. And the Enlightenment challenged this by challenging the biblical kind of creation. The Enlightenment challenges this. Voltaire, for instance, believed that there had actually been several different human species that had different origins, and that can very easily become a justification for racism. Buffon, one of the most Figures of the French Enlightenment, one of the early naturalists, was crucial for trying to show that in fact nature is not static, that nature is always changing, that species are changing, including human beings. And so again, that allowed people to think in terms of human beings at different stages of evolution, and perhaps this would be a justification for privileging the more advanced humans over the less advanced. In the 18th century itself, most of these things remain potential, rather than really being acted upon. But in the 19th century, figures of writers who would draw upon these things certainly went much further, and these became justifications for slavery, imperialism, and other things. So again, the Enlightenment is the source of a great deal of stuff here, and you can't simply put it into one box or more.Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier, David, that Concorda wrote one of the later classics of the... Condorcet? Sorry, Condorcets, excuse my French. Condorcès wrote one the later Classics of the Enlightenment when he was hiding from the French Revolution. In your mind, was the revolution itself the natural conclusion, climax? Perhaps anti-climax of the Enlightenment. Certainly, it seems as if a lot of the critiques of the French Revolution, particularly the more conservative ones, Burke comes to mind, suggested that perhaps the principles of in the Enlightment inevitably led to the guillotine, or is that an unfair way of thinking of it?David Bell: Well, there are a lot of people who have thought like that. Edmund Burke already, writing in 1790, in his reflections on the revolution in France, he said that everything which was great in the old regime is being dissolved and, quoting, dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. And then he said about the French that in the groves of their academy at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing but the Gallows. So there, in 1780, he already seemed to be predicting the reign of terror and blaming it. A certain extent from the Enlightenment. That said, I think, you know, again, the French Revolution is incredibly complicated event. I mean, you certainly have, you know, an explosion of what we could call Enlightenment thinking all over the place. In France, it happened in France. What happened there was that you had a, you know, the collapse of an extraordinarily inefficient government and a very, you know, in a very antiquated, paralyzed system of government kind of collapsed, created a kind of political vacuum. Into that vacuum stepped a lot of figures who were definitely readers of the Enlightenment. Oh so um but again the Enlightment had I said I don't think you can call the Enlightement a single thing so to say that the Enlightiment inspired the French Revolution rather than the There you go.Andrew Keen: Although your essay on liberties is the Enlightenment then and now you probably didn't write is always these lazy editors who come up with inaccurate and inaccurate titles. So for you, there is no such thing as the Enlighten.David Bell: No, there is. There is. But still, it's a complex thing. It contains multitudes.Andrew Keen: So it's the Enlightenment rather than the United States.David Bell: Conflicting tendencies, it has contradictions within it. There's enough unity to refer to it as a singular noun, but it doesn't mean that it all went in one single direction.Andrew Keen: But in historical terms, did the failure of the French Revolution, its descent into Robespierre and then Bonaparte, did it mark the end in historical terms a kind of bookend of history? You began in 1720 by 1820. Was the age of the Enlightenment pretty much over?David Bell: I would say yes. I think that, again, one of the things about the French Revolution is that people who are reading these books and they're reading these ideas and they are discussing things really start to act on them in a very different way from what it did before the French revolution. You have a lot of absolute monarchs who are trying to bring certain enlightenment principles to bear in their form of government, but they're not. But it's difficult to talk about a full-fledged attempt to enact a kind of enlightenment program. Certainly a lot of the people in the French Revolution saw themselves as doing that. But as they did it, they ran into reality, I would say. I mean, now Tocqueville, when he writes his old regime in the revolution, talks about how the French philosophes were full of these abstract ideas that were divorced from reality. And while that's an exaggeration, there was a certain truth to them. And as soon as you start having the age of revolutions, as soon you start people having to devise systems of government that will actually last, and as you have people, democratic representative systems that will last, and as they start revising these systems under the pressure of actual events, then you're not simply talking about an intellectual movement anymore, you're talking about something very different. And so I would say that, well, obviously the ideas of the Enlightenment continue to inspire people, the books continue to be read, debated. They lead on to figures like Kant, and as we talked about earlier, Kant leads to Hegel, Hegel leads to Marx in a certain sense. Nonetheless, by the time you're getting into the 19th century, what you have, you know, has connections to the Enlightenment, but can we really still call it the Enlightment? I would sayAndrew Keen: And Tocqueville, of course, found democracy in America. Is democracy itself? I know it's a big question. But is it? Bound up in the Enlightenment. You've written extensively, David, both for liberties and elsewhere on liberalism. Is the promise of democracy, democratic systems, the one born in the American Revolution, promised in the French Revolution, not realized? Are they products of the Enlightment, or is the 19th century and the democratic systems that in the 19th century, is that just a separate historical track?David Bell: Again, I would say there are certain things in the Enlightenment that do lead in that direction. Certainly, I think most figures in the enlightenment in one general sense or another accepted the idea of a kind of general notion of popular sovereignty. It didn't mean that they always felt that this was going to be something that could necessarily be acted upon or implemented in their own day. And they didn't necessarily associate generalized popular sovereignty with what we would now call democracy with people being able to actually govern themselves. Would be certain figures, certainly Diderot and some of his essays, what we saw very much in the social contract, you know, were sketching out, you knows, models for possible democratic system. Condorcet, who actually lived into the French Revolution, wrote one of the most draft constitutions for France, that's one of most democratic documents ever proposed. But of course there were lots of figures in the Enlightenment, Voltaire, and others who actually believed much more in absolute monarchy, who believed that you just, you know, you should have. Freedom of speech and freedom of discussion, out of which the best ideas would emerge, but then you had to give those ideas to the prince who imposed them by poor sicknesses.Andrew Keen: And of course, Rousseau himself, his social contract, some historians have seen that as the foundations of totalitarian, modern totalitarianism. Finally, David, your wonderful essay in Liberties in the spring quarterly 2025 is The Enlightenment, Then and Now. What about now? You work at Princeton, your president has very bravely stood up to the new presidential regime in the United States, in defense of academic intellectual freedom. Does the word and the movement, does it have any relevance in the 2020s, particularly in an age of neo-authoritarianism around the world?David Bell: I think it does. I think we have to be careful about it. I always get a little nervous when people say, well, we should simply go back to the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenments is history. We don't go back the 18th century. I think what we need to do is to recover certain principles, certain ideals from the 18 century, the ones that matter to us, the ones we think are right, and make our own Enlightenment better. I don't think we need be governed by the 18 century. Thomas Paine once said that no generation should necessarily rule over every generation to come, and I think that's probably right. Unfortunately in the United States, we have a constitution which is now essentially unamendable, so we're doomed to live by a constitution largely from the 18th century. But are there many things in the Enlightenment that we should look back to, absolutely?Andrew Keen: Well, David, I am going to free you for your own French Enlightenment. You can go and have some croissant now in your local cafe in Paris. Thank you so much for a very, I excuse the pun, enlightening conversation on the Enlightenment then and now, Essential Essay in Liberties. I'd love to get you back on the show. Talk more history. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades. Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.'s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations. Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Fractured Liberation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades. Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.'s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations. Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Fractured Liberation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. 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

Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades. Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.'s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations. Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Fractured Liberation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades. Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.'s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations. Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Fractured Liberation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades. Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.'s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations. Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Fractured Liberation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/korean-studies

Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades. Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.'s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations. Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Fractured Liberation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades. Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.'s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations. Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Fractured Liberation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Primary sources can often feel irrelevant and difficult to navigate for students. In this episode, Jessamyn Neuhaus joins us to discuss how student-created photographs can provide a personalized learning experience and foster a deeper connection to history and the university archives.  Jessamyn is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence and Professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University. Prior to this, she served as Director of the SUNY Plattsburgh Center for Teaching Excellence and was also a Professor in the History Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. Jessamyn is the author of Geeky Pedagogy: a Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to be Effective Teachers and the editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. See is also the editor of Teaching History: A Journal of Methods. Jessamyn also regularly serves as keynote speaker and workshop facilitator. A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.

Tonight on The Brian Crombie Hour, David Wilson is interviewed. David is a professor in the University of Toronto's History Department and his research focus is on the Irish in North America; revolutionary and conservative movements; state security and civil liberty; religion and nationalism; Ireland, race and empires. He has earned numerous accolades including 2023 Person of the Year Award for "exceptional contributions to Ireland-Canada Relations" and outstanding teaching award 2000. He talks about the history of Irish Canadians in honour of St. Patrick's Day. Waves of Irish immigration to Canada, Thomas D'Arcy McGee an Irish revolutionary turned Father of Confederation, the troubles and lessons learned about refugees and immigration are some of the topics discussed.

Special episode! Live recording at the 2024 Latinos and Planning LUGARES Conference. Keyanna Ortiz-Cedeño and Matt Gomez chat with Dr. Christine Marin, Professor Emeritus and Archivist-Historian at Arizona State University, about growing up in a copper mining town and the influence this had on her relationship with labor and union organizing. Dr. Marin speaks about the importance of supporting students, Chicana/o studies and the waves of other Chicana/o/Latino/a/x professors, archivists, librarians who are helping share and preserve our history. She highlights the importance of never giving up on your dream, no matter how long it takes -- "you have to be persistent," she says. Dr. Christine Marin is Professor Emeritus and Archivist-Historian at Arizona State University. Dr. Marin is the founder of the prestigious archival repository, the Chicano/a Research Collection and Archives at the Hayden Library in Tempe, Arizona. As Adjunct Faculty Associate in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, she taught courses on the history of Mexican Americans for the former History Department and the School of Transborder Studies, and the history of Mexican American women and Latinas for the Women and Gender Studies Department. The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies awarded Dr. Marin its Community Award “in recognition of her commitment to the Latino community as an archivist and historian in the field of Chicano and Chicana Studies.”   Arizona Humanities awarded her the  Juliana Yoder Friend of the Humanities Award, 2021 “in recognition of her research, writing and scholarship for her work that supports and promotes the Humanities.”  Her most recent publication is “Amazing Grace Keeps the Platters Spinning. A Photo Essay on Radio and Television Trailblazer Graciela Gil Olivarez.” IN: Feminist Media Histories. (2021) Vol. 7:4. Pp. 107-135. Profiles: Christine Marin | ASU Search Dr. Christine Marin Staff Award Christine Marin, PhD | Advisory Council on Historic Preservation Dr. Christine Marín: Archivist/Historian | Arizona Memory Project ASU Organizations and People: ASU Hispanic Research Center Hispanic Research Center ASU Provost Dr. Nancy Gonzales  ASU Chicano Research Archives https://lib.asu.edu/collections/chicano  Nancy Godoy -Director of Community-Driven Archives ASU School of Transborder Studies https://sts.asu.edu/  AZ Central Article: "How a kid from an Arizona mining town went on to create a historic Latino archive at ASU"Plan Dulce is a podcast by the ⁠Latinos and Planning Division of the American Planning Association. Want to recommend our next great guests and stay updated on the latest episodes? We want to hear from you! Follow, rate, and subscribe! Your support and feedback helps us continue to amplify insightful and inspiring stories from our wonderfully culturally and professionally diverse community.Follow Latinos and Planning on Social Media: Facebook Youtube

Dr. Nicholas Cross, USNA, continues the story of Alcibiades -- the Athenian Statesman / General, strategic advisor to Sparta, and a defector to Persia.

If you're struggling to keep people engaged and loyal in your product or business, check out my FREE gamification course to learn how to do just that: professorgame.com/freecommunity-web Discover the intersection of AI and gamification in education to enhance creativity and efficiency. We're joined by Dr. Victoria "Tori" Mondelli, a pioneer in the field of educational game design and the founding director of the University of Missouri's Teaching for Learning Center. This episode dives deep into the world of gamification, exploring how games can be used as powerful educational tools to enhance engagement and learning outcomes. Dr. Mondelli serves as the Founding Director of the University of Missouri's Teaching for Learning Center. She is an affiliated faculty member in Adroit Studios Gaming Lab in the College of Education & Human Development and the History Department in the College of Arts and Science. She holds a Ph.D. in early modern European history. Her training as a historian led her to prize writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines' pedagogies. From there, she became an expert in coaching faculty and other educators to incorporate the full gamut of evidence-based and creative practices to maximize student engagement and deepen learning. Her passion for game-based learning was ignited while at the City University of New York and led her to facilitate workshops nationally, often with her co-author, Dr. Joe Bisz. Their collaborative, highly interactive pedagogy was in need of a scholarly design method to leverage research-based principles known to improve learning. After years of research and praxis, Mondelli and Bisz released their book in 2023, The Educator's Guide to Designing Games and Creative Active-Learning Exercises: The Allure of Play. When not playing games, Dr. Mondelli can be found leading strategic teaching initiatives to enhance support for faculty members and graduate instructors. Lately, she has been in the thick or pedagogical and ethical discussions and policy-making for Gen AI at her institution. In short, tech or no tech, she aims to increase the prevalence of learning environments that intentionally build a sense of belonging for ALL learners, while structuring active learning and transparent assessment. Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He's also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.   Guest Links and Info Websites: victoriamondelli.com allureofplay.com LinkedIn: Victoria Tori Mondelli   Links to episode mentions: Proposed guest: Dr Robert Duncan Recommended book: Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal Favorite game: Snake Oil   Lets's do stuff together! Get started in Gamification for FREE! LinkedIn Twitter Facebook Instagram TikTok YouTube Ask a question

In this Episode of Tell Me Another, Dr. Nicholas Cross (USNA), discusses one of the most fascinating figures in Greek history: Alcibiades. In his lifetime he served as Athenian Statesman, Athenian General, strategic advisor to Sparta, and a defector to Persia.

Captain Stan Fisher, USN, Permanent Military Professor, discusses his book Sustaining the Carrier War: The Deployment of U.S. Naval Air Power to the Pacific. Captain Fisher's book recently received the John R. Lyman Award from the North American Society for Oceanic History (NASOH).

The Cape Sable seaside sparrow is one of the most endangered birds in the continental United States, numbering only 2,000 or so individuals, all living in the Everglades. Conflicting water management aims in South Florida pitting Big Sugar against the environment is resulting in the state taking drastic measures to pursue survival of the species.In 1960, African American equal rights activists in Tampa followed suit along with those in other cities around the South, staging sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in department stores like Woolworth's. Joining us to discuss this little known aspect of Florida history are Steven Lawson, an historian of the Civil Rights Movement and the former chair of the History Department at USF, and Karla Hartley, Producing Artistic Director of Stageworks Theatre, which will be performing a play based on the sit-ins, "When the Righteous Triumph," March 6-9, 2025, at the Straz Performing Arts Center in Tampa. Our previous episode about oysters featured a documentarian working on a film about oyster bed restoration. That documentary is now available on PBS stations and streaming.Help support "Welcome to Florida" by becoming a $5 a month patron at www.patreon.com/welcometoflorida. Patrons receive exclusive access to our weekly Florida conservation newsletter highlighting the top environmental stories around the state.

Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900–1975 (Cornell UP, 2021) moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined nature of police and caste in the Tamil countryside. Radha Kumar argues that the colonial police deployed rigid notions of caste in their everyday tasks, refashioning rural identities in a process that has cast long postcolonial shadows. Kumar draws on previously unexplored police archives to enter the dusty streets and market squares where local constables walked, following their gaze and observing their actions towards potential subversives. Station records present a textured view of ordinary interactions between police and society, showing that state coercion was not only exceptional and spectacular; it was also subtle and continuous, woven into everyday life. The colonial police categorized Indian subjects based on caste to ensure the security of agriculture and trade, and thus the smooth running of the economy. Among policemen and among the objects of their coercive gaze, caste became a particularly salient form of identity in the politics of public spaces. Police Matters demonstrates that, without doubt, modern caste politics have both been shaped by, and shaped, state policing.  Radha Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at the Maxwell School in Syracuse University. Dr. Kumar holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, where she specialized in Modern South Asian Studies. She has conducted archival research in a range of cities including Madurai, Tirunelveli, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, and London, and was supported by the History Department at Princeton University and by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. 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

Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900–1975 (Cornell UP, 2021) moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined nature of police and caste in the Tamil countryside. Radha Kumar argues that the colonial police deployed rigid notions of caste in their everyday tasks, refashioning rural identities in a process that has cast long postcolonial shadows. Kumar draws on previously unexplored police archives to enter the dusty streets and market squares where local constables walked, following their gaze and observing their actions towards potential subversives. Station records present a textured view of ordinary interactions between police and society, showing that state coercion was not only exceptional and spectacular; it was also subtle and continuous, woven into everyday life. The colonial police categorized Indian subjects based on caste to ensure the security of agriculture and trade, and thus the smooth running of the economy. Among policemen and among the objects of their coercive gaze, caste became a particularly salient form of identity in the politics of public spaces. Police Matters demonstrates that, without doubt, modern caste politics have both been shaped by, and shaped, state policing.  Radha Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at the Maxwell School in Syracuse University. Dr. Kumar holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, where she specialized in Modern South Asian Studies. She has conducted archival research in a range of cities including Madurai, Tirunelveli, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, and London, and was supported by the History Department at Princeton University and by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900–1975 (Cornell UP, 2021) moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined nature of police and caste in the Tamil countryside. Radha Kumar argues that the colonial police deployed rigid notions of caste in their everyday tasks, refashioning rural identities in a process that has cast long postcolonial shadows. Kumar draws on previously unexplored police archives to enter the dusty streets and market squares where local constables walked, following their gaze and observing their actions towards potential subversives. Station records present a textured view of ordinary interactions between police and society, showing that state coercion was not only exceptional and spectacular; it was also subtle and continuous, woven into everyday life. The colonial police categorized Indian subjects based on caste to ensure the security of agriculture and trade, and thus the smooth running of the economy. Among policemen and among the objects of their coercive gaze, caste became a particularly salient form of identity in the politics of public spaces. Police Matters demonstrates that, without doubt, modern caste politics have both been shaped by, and shaped, state policing.  Radha Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at the Maxwell School in Syracuse University. Dr. Kumar holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, where she specialized in Modern South Asian Studies. She has conducted archival research in a range of cities including Madurai, Tirunelveli, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, and London, and was supported by the History Department at Princeton University and by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900–1975 (Cornell UP, 2021) moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined nature of police and caste in the Tamil countryside. Radha Kumar argues that the colonial police deployed rigid notions of caste in their everyday tasks, refashioning rural identities in a process that has cast long postcolonial shadows. Kumar draws on previously unexplored police archives to enter the dusty streets and market squares where local constables walked, following their gaze and observing their actions towards potential subversives. Station records present a textured view of ordinary interactions between police and society, showing that state coercion was not only exceptional and spectacular; it was also subtle and continuous, woven into everyday life. The colonial police categorized Indian subjects based on caste to ensure the security of agriculture and trade, and thus the smooth running of the economy. Among policemen and among the objects of their coercive gaze, caste became a particularly salient form of identity in the politics of public spaces. Police Matters demonstrates that, without doubt, modern caste politics have both been shaped by, and shaped, state policing.  Radha Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at the Maxwell School in Syracuse University. Dr. Kumar holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, where she specialized in Modern South Asian Studies. She has conducted archival research in a range of cities including Madurai, Tirunelveli, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, and London, and was supported by the History Department at Princeton University and by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kara and Jordan talk with Professor Anne Austin (University of Missouri - St. Louis) about her book Healthmaking in Ancient Egypt: The Social Determinants of Health at Deir el-Medina, how she uses data from ancient Egyptian human remains to understand health care practices, disease, and illness in the past, and her work on tattooing in ancient Egypt. Introducing Prof. Anne AustinDr. Anne Austin is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri St. Louis (UMSL). She received her B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in the Archaeology program at UCLA. She joined UMSL in 2017 after completing a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in the History Department at Stanford University. Her research combines the fields of osteology and Egyptology in order to document medicine and disease in the past. In her book, Healthmaking in Ancient Egypt, Anne uses data from ancient Egyptian human remains and daily life texts to reconstruct ancient Egyptian health networks and identify how ancient Egyptians improved their health and responded to illness. While working at Deir el-Medina, Anne discovered the mummified remains of a woman with 30 different tattoos. Since then, she and her team have identified several other tattooed women, rewriting the history of tattooing in ancient Egypt. Anne's next book will explore the practice of tattooing in ancient Egypt and its potential connections to gender, religion, and medicine.Healthmaking in Ancient Egypt: The Social Determinants of Health at Deir el-MedinaShow NotesT/W- Human Remains* Deir el-Medina* Social Determinants of Health* Working in Tomb Spaces* Butehamon* Naunakhte* Archeology Ink Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 2935 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature Professor Mark Atwood Lawrence who talks about his new book End of Ambition. He is an eminent who is currently serving as the head of the History Department of the … Continue reading →

Nicole O'Byrne speaks with Geoff Hudson, Megan Davies, John Belshaw, Darrel Manitowabi, and Sasha Mullally about An Accidental History of Canada published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 2024. An Accidental History of Canada explores the often overlooked smaller-scale accidents in Canadian history, from the 1630s to the 1970s. Covering incidents in workplaces, homes, and leisure activities, the book examines how these events reveal vulnerabilities, inequalities, and power dynamics in colonial, Indigenous, rural, and urban contexts. It contrasts Indigenous and settler views on accidents, linking them to the rise of the modern state. The volume argues that accidents, whether seen as fate or miscalculations, reflect shared societal values and attitudes toward risk. Geoff Hudson is an Associate Professor in the history of medicine at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University. Megan Davies is Professor Emerita at York University. She is a historian of health with a regional focus on British Columbia John Belshaw is a historian at Thompson Rivers University. Darrel Manitowabi is an Associate Professor in the Human Sciences Division at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University Sudbury Campus where he is the inaugural Hannah Chair in Indigenous Health and Indigenous Traditional Medicine. Sasha Mullally is a Professor in the History Department at the University of New Brunswick. Image Credit: McGill-Queen's University Press If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society's mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada's past.

On Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024, the Church History Department celebrated the release of the fourth and final volume of the “Saints” historical series, chronicling the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Saints, Volume 4: Sounded in Every Ear” is now available in 14 languages and various formats, appropriately as the volume follows the rapid growth in Church membership globally from 1955 to 2020. On this episode of the Church News podcast, Church History Department historians Scott Hales and James Perry join to discuss the growing publication of this literary series, the importance of personal historical narratives and the ever-expanding positive impact of the Church as it continues to roll forth in every nation, kindred, tongue and people. The Church News Podcast is a weekly podcast that invites listeners to make a journey of connection with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints across the globe. Host Jon Ryan Jensen, editor of The Church News, shares a unique view of the stories, events, and people who form this international faith. With each episode, listeners are asked to embark on a journey to learn from one another and ponder, “What do I know now?” because of the experience. Produced by KellieAnn Halvorsen.

Professor Greg Kaster's love for learning and deep appreciation for the people around him left an indelible mark on Gustavus Adolphus College, creating a lasting legacy beyond the classroom. This past summer, on June 22, 2024, Greg unexpectedly passed away. In this episode, Carley, who worked closely with Greg on his podcast, interviewed professors who knew him well. She spoke with his colleagues in the History Department, Professors Kate Aguilar, Kate Keller, Glenn Kranking, Maddalena Marinari, and David Tobaru Obermiller as well as a few colleagues from across campus: Jennifer Ackil (Psychological Sciences), Jill Locke (Political Science), and Eric Vrooman (English). They all reflected on his passion for fostering a rich intellectual community. Greg's legacy was not just in his work but in how he engaged with, inspired, and learned from those around him. Whether collaborating on projects, mentoring students, or discussing history, he nurtured a spirit of curiosity and respect that made everyone feel valued. His dedication to the pursuit of knowledge and his genuine care for others will forever be remembered as a hallmark of his time at Gustavus.

*Audio recording of a panel orgnized by friend of the show Frances Hasso. Video edition coming soon!* Convened by Dr. Frances S. Hasso, Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, History, and Sociology, as part of The Palestine Seminar at Duke University https://gendersexualityfeminist.duke.edu/literary-gaza-hybrid Speakers “My Age is Thirty-five Years Old and Five Wars" Basman Aldirawi  Basman Aldirawi (also Basman Derawi) is a Palestinian and Gazan, a refugee from Bi'r al-Saba`, and currently in Egypt due to the aggression on Gaza. He works as a physiotherapist at the Gaza Ministry of Health and since 2018 has been a member of the Gaza Poets Society, the first spoken word community in Gaza. He has contributed dozens of stories and poems to many online platforms and publications, including We Are Not Numbers (2019), Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire (2022), and the We Are Not Numbers online platform that gives a voice to the victims of Israeli aggression in Gaza/Palestine. "The Demon of Gaza" Esmat Elhalaby Esmat Elhalaby is an Assistant Professor of transnational history at the University of Toronto. He works principally on the intellectual history of West and South Asia, particularly colonial and anti-colonial thought. “The 5 Stages of Grief, According to a Palestinian” Samah Serour Fadil Samah Serour Fadil is an Afro-Palestinian writer, editor and translator. Her work has been featured at the Yale University Art Gallery, Fresno State University and The Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, among others.  “Tent in the Sky” Alaa Na`eem `Ali Al-Qatrawi:   Alaa Na`eem `Ali al-Qatrawi completed her PhD in 2022 in Arabic Literature and Criticism at the Islamic University in Gaza, focused on the poetry of Adonis. Her MA thesis at the Islamic University, which examined Ahmed Bakhit's poetry, won the Award for Best MA thesis in the Humanities in 2015. Dr. Al-Qatrawi is an accomplished poet and short story and operetta writer, winning among others the Abdulaziz Al-Babtain Award for the best poetry collection in the category of young poets in 2022, first in the Union of Palestinian Writers Competition in 2015, first in the Ministry of Culture's poetry competition among all Palestinian universities in 2013, first in short stories in the Arab world in the international competition organized by Chinese Books and Dar Fadaat Publishing House in Amman (2019), and first in the Letter to Jerusalem competition (2010). She works as an Arabic Language teacher in UNRWA schools at the elementary and secondary levels. She has previously worked as a linguist and screenwriter for UNRWA children's programming. Dr. Alaa's Instagram and Facebook pages. Sponsor Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Duke University Co-Sponsor(s) Asian & Middle Eastern Studies Program (AMES); History Department; Middle East Studies Center (DUMESC); Asian American & Diaspora Studies Program

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message!We are talking about Ancestry today. Our guest is Maya Jasanoff who is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University's History Department.Maya's teaching and research extend from the history of the British Empire to global history. She is the author of three prize-winning books. The Dawn Watch examines the dynamics of modern globalization through the life and times of the novelist Joseph Conrad. Her other books are Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World and her first book,  Edge of Empire explores British expansion in India and Egypt through the lives of art collectors. She is currently working on a book about the human preoccupation with ancestry.In addition to classes on imperial history, she teaches a multidisciplinary Gen Ed course on the topic of "Ancestry: Where Do We Come From and Why Do We Care?". In 2015 Jasanoff was named a Harvard College Professor for excellence in undergraduate teaching. From 2019 to 2022, she is a part-time Visiting Professor at Ahmedabad University in India, where she has been helping launch new curricula in the liberal arts.Jasanoff has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2013), a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, a Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. She has participated in several BBC documentaries, and her essays and reviews regularly appear in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New Yorker and The New York Times.We will be talking about:The history of ancestryCaste systems in IndiaHerder and the Idea of a NationImmigrant nationsBards as knowledge keepersRace as a factor for resource allocationAffirmative Action university admissionGenerational privilege and dispossessionTransatlantic slave tradeLet's go back to our roots!Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyzTwitter: @whrshallwemeetInstagram: @whrshallwemeet

Today, our guest is Dr. David Pace. David has dedicated his career to enhancing student engagement in the learning process, beginning his journey as an instructor in the History Department at Indiana University Bloomington in 1971. His teaching has earned him prestigious accolades, including the American Historical Association's Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award and Indiana University's Frederic Bachman Lieber Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching. David's contributions extend beyond the classroom. Since the 1990s, he has been a pivotal figure in the scholarship of teaching and learning, serving as a Fellow in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and as President of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History for a decade. In 2019, he was honored as a Fellow in the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. David has authored several influential books and numerous articles and book chapters, contributing to esteemed publications worldwide. Alongside Joan Middendorf, he co-directed the Indiana University Freshman Learning Project, pioneering the Decoding the Disciplines approach to enhance college learning. Though officially retired, David continues to teach and offer workshops globally, sharing his expertise in decoding, history teaching, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. We are delighted to have Dr. Pace on the show to discuss the evolution of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, evaluating teaching, and the ethics of teaching.   Resources: David's Blog: https://decodingtheivorytower.net/   Decoding the Disciplines

In episode 3 of our series on Christian Zionism, Daniel Bannoura has a conversation with Daniel Hummel about the history of dispensationalism, its waning influence over Christian Zionism, and the general contours of theological developments and political activism of Christian Zionism since 1948 and until today.  For our Patreon supporters they have an extended conversation about the absence of Palestinians and Palestinian Christians in the thinking and activism of Christian Zionists.To access this extended conversation and previous ones, consider supporting us on Patreon.  Daniel G. Hummel is the director of The Lumen Center in Madison, WI and a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of two books Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations and most recently The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation. Learn more about Dan here. If you enjoy our podcast, please consider becoming a Patreon monthly supporter at: https://www.patreon.com/AcrosstheDivide  Follow Across the Divide on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ and ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠⁠⁠‪@AcrosstheDividePodcast‬⁠⁠⁠

Hello and welcome to The Rob Burgess Show. I am, of course, your host, Rob Burgess. On this, our 262nd episode, our returning guest is Brian VanDeMark. You first heard Brian VanDeMark on Episode 134 of the podcast. Brian VanDeMark grew up and attended college in Texas, went to graduate school in California, and now lives in Maryland. He teaches history at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, where he has been a member of its History Department since 1990. The author of several books on American history, he co-authored Robert McNamara's #1 best-selling Vietnam memoir, “In Retrospect,” which became the basis of Errol Morris's Academy Award-winning documentary film, "The Fog of War." His book, “Road to Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam” was published by HarperCollins in 2018. His latest book, “Kent State: An American Tragedy” was published by W. W. Norton & Company in August 2024. Subscribe to my Substack: therobburgessshow.substack.com/ Follow me on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/robaburg.bsky.social Follow me on Mastodon: newsie.social/@therobburgessshow Check out my Linktree: linktr.ee/therobburgessshow

Join NAWL Advocacy Committee Members, Siobhan Barco, Princeton PhD Candidate, and Nicolette Sullivan, Milbank LLP Associate, as they interview a distinguished panel of historians and advocates for freedom from gender-based violence, including, Laura Edwards, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty in the History Department at Princeton University, Sara Mayeux, Associate Professor of Law and History at Vanderbilt University, and Margaret Drew, Associate Professor atUMass Law School. This episode closes a compelling two-part series exploring the historical context surrounding the Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Rahimi. Please note that this episode was recorded before the Supreme Court decision was issued in this case. NAWL strongly supports the Supreme Court's decision in US v. Rahimi, upholding federal restrictions preventing those under domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. This ruling reaffirms critical protections against gun violence, particularly for individuals at heightened risk in domestic abuse situations. NAWL remains committed to advocating for policies against gender-based violence recognizing that gender equality cannot be achieved without freedom from gender-based violence.

In this episode, Caleb is joined by Daniel Hummel (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) director of The Lumen Center and a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to discuss the history of dispensationalism. Together they discuss the origins of this theological system and its key players from its inception to today as well as dispensationalism's impact on American culture, the church, and Christian higher education over the past century.  Resources: ⁠The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation⁠ by Daniel Hummel  ⁠J.N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism⁠ by Crawford Gribben ⁠Three Views on the Rapture: Pretribulation, Prewrath, or Posttribulation  ⁠by Craig Blaising, Doug Moo, Alan Hultberg ⁠The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views⁠ by George Ladd, Herman Hoyt, Lorraine Boettner, and Anthony Hoekema ⁠Covenantal and Dispensational Theologies: Four Views on the Continuity of Scripture⁠ edited by Richard Lucas and Brent Parker ⁠Discontinuity to Continuity: A Survey of Dispensational and Covenantal Theologies⁠ by Ben Merkle

Russia's intensive involvement with the African continent goes back decades. During the Cold War, Moscow viewed Africa as its “natural” sphere of influence and a staging ground for active measures and proxy wars aiming to undermine American interests. When the USSR fell apart, an intermission followed. Today, Russia is unquestionably back. What draws Russia to Africa? Which African countries attract it and why? What purposes do relationships with various African states serve for Russia—and what makes Russia attractive to the African states that choose to partner with it? What is the role of the Russian private military companies Wagner and Africa Corps in these relationships? And what is Africa's role in Russia's global propaganda and disinformation effort? Izabella Tabarovsky discusses these and other questions with Maxim Matusevich, professor of history at Seton Hall University in New Jersey and chair of the university's History Department. The episode was recorded on July 26. For time stamps and transcript, please visit here: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/audio/role-africa-russias-geopolitics

Dr. Abby Mullen discusses her forthcoming book To Fix a National Character: The United States in the First Barbary War, 1800-1805 with Tyler Pitrof. A periodic host of Preble Hall herself, Dr. Mullen is currently serving as an assistant professor in the History Department at the United States Naval Academy.