Historically Thinking
484 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★★ - 51 ratingsConversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it.
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Episodes
Episode 32: Marco Cabrera Geserick on Cultural History
October 01, 2015 00:11 - 44 minutes - 40.5 MBIt goes without saying that “culture” is a confusing word, this year or any year. Merriam-Webster offers six definitions for it (including the biological one, as in “bacterial culture”). The problem is that “culture” is more than the sum of its definitions. If anything, its value as a word depends on the tension between them. The critic Raymond Williams, in his souped-up dictionary, “Keywords,” writes that “culture” has three divergent meanings: there’s culture as a process of individual enr...
From the Archives: Episode 16: Mark Carnes
September 23, 2015 22:05 - 39 minutes - 36.5 MBAre games important? They're certainly profitable and far more pervasive that you might think. Microsoft's video game Halo, and all its successors, have sold over 60 million copies worldwide, and have grossed $3.4 billion. It's not outrageous to say that games are just as important and influential–if not more so–than films and television, let alone books. But are they useful? Of what practical value could they be for...well, teaching history? Back from the archives, ready for a new round of...
Episode 31: Mark Carnes, From the Archives
September 23, 2015 22:05 - 39 minutes - 36.5 MBAre games important? They're certainly profitable and far more pervasive that you might think. Microsoft's video game Halo, and all its successors, have sold over 60 million copies worldwide, and have grossed $3.4 billion. It's not outrageous to say that games are just as important and influential–if not more so–than films and television, let alone books. But are they useful? Of what practical value could they be for...well, teaching history? Back from the archives, ready for a new round of...
Episode 30: Mike Edmondson, from the Archives
September 18, 2015 22:41 - 42 minutes - 38.8 MBThis week, Al Zambone is deep in the teaching weeds, and we thought we'd bring newer listeners an episode they might have overlooked from our expanding archives. While this is a show called Historically Thinking, it's put together by people intensely interested (at times self-interestedly so) in the state of higher education. Higher ed is often confusing, perplexing, and anxiety-inducing. Often attempts to explain it are well-intentioned but not well-informed; or they're not particularly wel...
From the Archives: Episode 8: Mike Edmondson
September 18, 2015 22:41 - 42 minutes - 38.8 MBThis week, Al Zambone is deep in the teaching weeds, and we thought we'd bring newer listeners an episode they might have overlooked from our expanding archives. While this is a show called Historically Thinking, it's put together by people intensely interested (at times self-interestedly so) in the state of higher education. Higher ed is often confusing, perplexing, and anxiety-inducing. Often attempts to explain it are well-intentioned but not well-informed; or they're not particularly wel...
Episode 29: Tim Lacy on American Intellectual History
September 11, 2015 12:46 - 42 minutes - 39.1 MBIn our continuing tour of the sub disciplines of historical study, today we reach intellectual history–or at least that part of intellectual history that focuses on America. Our guest is Tim Lacy, who among other things is the author of The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer Adler and the Great Books Idea and one of the group of people who in 2007 founded a blog devoted to intellectual history that grew up to be the Society for US Intellectual History. Tim and Al Zambone talk about the ...
Episode 28: The First Three Weeks of College
September 03, 2015 18:03 - 47 minutes - 43.7 MBWhile this is a podcast about history and historical thinking (you've noticed, right?), it's also a podcast that emanates from the second floor of Old Main at Augustana College. So everyone connected with it is concerned, with varying degrees of frenetic energy, about higher education. It hasn't escaped anyone's notice that higher education is not only very expensive, it's gotten ever more complex to figure out. Hence our decision to do occasional episodes which, taken together, will form "An...
Episode 27: Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Historical Thinking
August 26, 2015 21:52 - 50 minutes - 45.8 MBIn August 1973, officers of the soviet secret police seized a draft typescript of the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. On September 5 he gave instructions for it to be printed in Paris; and on December 28 it was announced to the world. This "experiment in literary investigation" (which could as easily have been called an experiment in historical investigation) had many consequences, among them Solzhenitsyn's arrest and expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 19...
Episode 26: Peter Stearns on World History
August 20, 2015 16:14 - 40 minutes - 36.7 MBFrom the very small to the very large: having tackled Local History in Episode 24, we now turn to World History. And to guide us through this relatively recent sub-discipline of historical studies we turn to Peter Stearns. He's an eminent historian and academician. Now a Professor at George Mason University, he has served as GMU's Provost. Prior to coming to George Mason, he was a member of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon, and the Dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and S...
Episode 25: American Slavery
August 13, 2015 02:45 - 48 minutes - 44.3 MBMark Twain supposedly said (he's misquoted for a lot of things, because he's so quotable; think about that) "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." That's certainly true, about a lot of things; and it's certainly true of the hard truths of American slavery. This week Al Zambone is joined by Bob Elder, Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University and, like Al, a historian of the American South. It's the first time ...
Episode 24: Bob Beatty on Local History, Place, Good Museums, etc., etc., etc.
August 07, 2015 02:20 - 52 minutes - 47.7 MBThis week there's a little something for everyone when Al Zambone talks with Bob Beatty of the American Association for Local and State History. They were supposed to talk about Local History. But they spend a lot of time talking about place, a preoccupation at Historically Thinking, and a lot of other things besides. It's a podcast that careens and weaves and bobs, and hits the median a couple of times as it drives down its forty or so minutes of highway. We hope you enjoy it, and we hope to...
Episode 23: Megan Kate Nelson on the Destruction of the Civil War
July 29, 2015 11:00 - 51 minutes - 47.6 MBThe Civil War was incredibly destructive–750,000 dead, according to the latest revision of the numbers, meaning that more Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined. But it also resulted in untold numbers of wounded and maimed. Of all the operations performed in the Civil War, 75% or roughly 60,000, were amputations. Also, for the very first time, American cities stood in ruins. Atlanta; Columbia and Charleston in South Carolina; and Petersburg, Fredericksburg,...
Episode 22: Who was Cotton Mather? (Part II)
July 22, 2015 15:32 - 46 minutes - 42.2 MBAfter another hiatus (the last one of the summer–promise!) we return to conclude our conversation with Rick Kennedy on Cotton Mather. His father, Increase Mather (yes, that was his first name; no, we didn't ask why, and if we ever knew, we forgot), died just five years before Cotton did. So for almost his entire life, Cotton was his father's associate pastor. While Increase was writing sermons, and theology, and butting into politics, and sailing off to London, Cotton was walking around the...
Episode 21: Who was Cotton Mather? (Part One)
July 08, 2015 16:36 - 46 minutes - 42.6 MBHello! Historically Thinking today returns from a summer break (or, to be precise, Al Zambone does). Recording far from the Augustana College campus and the studio of WAUG, in a pirate-radio bootleg setup of sorts, we bring you a thrill-ride of a summer blockbuster devoted to...a colonial New England theologian you've never heard of. Probably ever. Unless you're weird. Or over-educated. Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was a Boston preacher who was the son of a Boston preacher and the grandson of a...
Episode 20: Founders as Father’s Day
June 17, 2015 13:52 - 43 minutes - 39.8 MBToday on Historically Thinking, Al Zambone interviews Lorri Glover on her book The Founders as Fathers. It's a holiday twofer mashup: a sort of July 4th Founding Father theme, wound around a jumble of Father's Day parental anxieties. In the course of the interview, the two historians mull over a set of related questions. How did a man who was almost certainly infertile became so quickly identified as his country's Father? Why did every founder–with the exception of Washington himself–go back...
Episode 19: Vicki Howard on the Death of the Little Store Around the Corner
June 10, 2015 16:57 - 40 minutes - 37.3 MBThis week we take a break from fun and games to talk about business and consumerism–which, to be sure, is for some people also fun and games. As Vicki Howard reminds us in her new book, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store, it used to be that America was filled with department stores. Congenital nostalgics remember places like Wanamaker's in Philadelphia; they even print books about the big-city department stores of Days Gone By. But that ignores the i...
Episode 18: Kellian Adams, and Playing More Games with History
June 04, 2015 02:12 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MBThis week on Historically Thinking we continue our occasional series on games and history education. Following our conversation with Mark Carnes, we dig a little deeper into the philosophy of educational games with Kellian Adams. She's the Founder and Mastermind of Green Door Labs, which creates "educational game design on demand!" She and Al Zambone discuss why games are both composed of both arbitrary rules and reality, how that makes them a lot like life, and why Kellian hates, hates, hat...
Episode 17: Hard Questions to Ask College Admissions Officers
May 27, 2015 17:09 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBIn his book Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College, Andrew Ferguson observed that for parents the entire ordeal of college admissions combines most of the things that are important to them: "our vanities, our social ambitions and class insecurities, and most profoundly our love and hopes for our children." As kids these say, sometimes in college essays, true dat. Given that summer is now for many not a time of vacation but of campus tours, we thought that Historicall...
Episode 16: Mark Carnes on Playing Games with History
May 21, 2015 01:01 - 39 minutes - 36.5 MBAre games important? They're certainly profitable and far more pervasive that you might think. Microsoft's video game Halo, and all its successors, have sold over 60 million copies worldwide, and have grossed $3.4 billion. It's not outrageous to say that games are just as important and influential–if not more so–than films and television, let alone books. But are they useful? Of what practical value could they be for...well, teaching history? Today is the first of a three part series on gam...
Episode 15: John Shelton Reed on North Carolina Barbecue; Its History, Philosophy, Orthodoxy, and Orthopraxy
May 13, 2015 12:55 - 42 minutes - 38.5 MBHere on the Upper Mississippi it's May, which means winter is just about over; people are creeping outside and beginning to put things on the grill; and the redolent smoke is floating through the late evening, a sign and seal of the approach of summer. Sometimes these nice Midwestern folk call what they're doing barbecue; and while they're good people, that "just ain't right." Barbecue is ... well, What Barbecue Is happens to be the subject of this podcast. Once again, the eminence grease of...
Episode 14: Alex Mikaberidze, on the World History of the Napoleonic Wars
May 06, 2015 22:32 - 51 minutes - 47 MBIn Episode 10 of Historically Thinking, Al Zambone talked with Gareth Glover about the Battle of Waterloo, the final battle of that period of conflict known as the "Napoleonic Wars" (and whose bicentennial occurs on June 18th, 2015). This week the guest on Historically Thinking is Alex Mikaberidze, Associate Professor of History at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. Dr. Mikaberidze has written prolifically on the wars that engulfed Europe between 1793 and 1815, the "Revolutionary Wars"...
Episode 13: Jon Lauck on the History of the Midwest, and Why It Matters
April 29, 2015 11:49 - 41 minutes - 38.1 MBThe guest this week on Historically Thinking is Jon Lauck. He's the author of The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History, which is several things at once: a brief illustration of the importance of the Midwest to both American and World History; the history of the concept of midwestern history; and a manifesto for the renewal of historical focus upon the Midwest. Zambone and Lauck chat about all these topics, as well as how the new Midwestern History Association was formed, why Mi...
Episode 12: Brian Leech on Environmental History
April 22, 2015 15:49 - 41 minutes - 37.6 MBIn her palace, Clio the patron Goddess of History has many rooms. This is the first of a recurring series of conversations in which we investigate one of the sub-disciplines of historical study. For those with a casual interest in history, it will be a way of learning something new. For graduate students, it should be a great introduction to studying for comprehensive exams. As a way of beginning the series, and simultaneously celebrate Earth Day, Al Zambone has a conversation with his colle...
Episode 011: Barry Strauss on “The Death of Caesar”
April 15, 2015 15:53 - 43 minutes - 40.3 MB"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So said L.P. Hartley, a novelist now only remembered for a line that's increasingly a cliché. Often it's an aphorism taken by its speaker to mean that the past is unknowable, unattainable, unreachable. Yet people travel to foreign countries all the time. When they do, they have essentially two options. One is to see the sites, but to do so from within their own comfortable cultural bubble. Alternatively, they could learn the ...
Episode 010: Gareth Glover on the Battle of Waterloo
April 08, 2015 12:33 - 51 minutes - 47.2 MBWere you at Waterloo? I have been at Waterloo. 'Tis no matter what you do, If you were at Waterloo. Thus a little ditty that appeared in the United Service Gazette, thirty years after the Battle of Waterloo was fought on June 18, 1815. It was the third day of a series of battles fought between the Emperor Napoleon of France, newly returned from exile, and an Allied Coalition led by Britain's Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, and Prussia's Gebhard von Blücher, Prince von Wahlstatt. To...
Episode 009: John Shelton Reed on Dixie Bohemia
April 01, 2015 11:00 - 46 minutes - 42.6 MBJohn Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology (emeritus) at the University of North Carolina, has been observing the South for decades. This week he and Al Zambone talk about New Orleans in the 1920s, the subject of his book Dixie Bohemia. For Further Reading William Faulkner, Mosquitoes Phyllis M. Goddard, Spratling Silver: A Field Guide Taylor D. Littleton, William Spratling: His Life and Art John Shelton Reed, Dixie Bohemia, The Enduring South
Episode 008: Why the Liberal Arts is Not A Career Killer
March 25, 2015 14:28 - 42 minutes - 38.8 MBToday Dr. Mike Edmondson is the guest on the show. He's the Associate Vice President of Career Development at Augustana College, and the author of Marketing Your Value: Nine Steps to Navigate Your Career. In the course of the interview, Mike and Al Zambone discuss the current and coming job market; explore why someone who has a doctorate in history cares about career services; and talk about why a liberal arts degree can contribute to getting good jobs, and keeping them. Also, the two of them...
Episode 007: John Kolp, Virginia, and State History
March 18, 2015 11:00 - 52 minutes - 48.2 MBThis week, Al Zambone speaks with John Kolp, Emeritus Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy. He's the author of Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Practices in Colonial Virginia, and one of the four co-authors of Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A New History of Virginia. There are few better people to talk about Virginia with, or why we should bother to write the history of the individual states of the United States. After all, isn't state history just for fourth graders?
Episode 006: Brian Leech on the “City That Ate Itself”
March 11, 2015 11:00 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBIn this week's podcast, Brian Leech discusses his award-winning work on Butte, Montana, "the city that ate itself." Leech and host Al Zambone discuss mining and its history, the rich cultural and social world of an isolated city in Montana, and how the transition from underground to open pit mining changed everything about all of the above.
Episode 005: Diamonds Are a Problem
March 04, 2015 03:55 - 40 minutes - 56.2 MBThis week Al Zambone talks with his colleague Todd Cleveland about Todd's new book Stones of Contention: A History of Africa's Diamonds. During their conversation they touch on the interaction between geological history and human history; the moral difficulties of determining what a conflict diamond actually is; how this history is related to how outsiders have always imagined the African continent; and whether Todd would, knowing what he now knows, still buy a diamond.
Episode 004: Marco Cabrera-Geserick on “Ephemeral Republics”
February 25, 2015 12:00 - 53 minutes - 97.4 MBThis week Al Zambone chats with his colleague Marco Cabrera-Geserick, who is currently in the early stages of a project investigating what Marco calls "republics prior to nations". These were Latin American republics that had brief lives prior to the nation-states that now occupy the same geographical and cultural space. Typically these have been dismissed as "ephemeral republics" of little importance. But Cabrera-Geserick believes that not only are their births and deaths fascinating in and ...
Episode 003: Fly Fishing with Matthew T. Dickerson and David L. O’Hara
February 18, 2015 12:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBMatthew T. Dickerson of Middlebury College and David L. O’Hara of Augustana College (South Dakota) talk with Historically Thinking host Al Zambone about their book, Downstream: Reflections on Brook Trout, Fly Fishing, and the Waters of Applachia. A mix of memoir, narrative, reporting, and meditation, Downstream explores the relationship between humans and the rivers around them. The conversation moves from brook trout and the elemental facts of fly-fishing, to rivers that the authors fish and...
Episode 002: Michael Connolly on Presidential History
February 11, 2015 12:00 - 55 minutes - 101 MBMichael Connolly of Purdue University North Central talks about presidents and their legacies with Historically Thinking host Al Zambone. Connolly surveys past presidents, and argues that the way in which we assess them is often mistaken. He argues that presidential history is a very real and necessary sub-discipline. Given public interest in presidential history, Connolly asserts, historians disregard it at their own risk. Books, Articles, and Links to Things Mentioned in the Conversation M...
Episode 001: Uncoverage
February 04, 2015 12:00 - 39 minutes - 54.2 MBToday Lendol Calder talks about uncoverage, a term he coined some years ago to describe how he thinks history survey courses ought to be taught. Zambone and Calder discuss how surveys are usually taught, and why history teachers should consider another approach. Calder describes how his finest moment as a lecturer led him to stop lecturing; discusses his new approach to introductory history courses; and argues that how he teaches now conforms more closely to how historians actually study hi...