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 314: Peerless Among Princes
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour - 101 MBIn the early sixteenth century there emerged upon the world stage a cast of royal characters that could almost persuade the most hardened social historian to read Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In Europe were Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England, and Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. In Russia ruled Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible; in India Babur and Akbar, founders of the Moghul Dynasty; and in Persia the Savafid rulers Sh...
Episode 313: Intellectual Humility, Social Psychologically Speaking
April 17, 2023 15:32 - 51 minutes - 46.9 MBThis is the second of our continuing series on intellectual humility and historical thinking. Today I'm interested in exploring the social science of intellectual humility. Igor Grossman is a social psychologist, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “Most of our work,” he writes, describing his lab, “either focuses on how people make sense of the world around them—their expectations, lay theories, meta-cognitions, forecasts—or it concerns how larger c...
Episode 312: Gods of Thunder
April 10, 2023 13:22 - 59 minutes - 81.1 MBThe medieval warm period began in the mid-tenth century, around and about 950 AD. A warmer climate led to higher agricultural yields, and in an agricultural society that meant surplus profits. These were invested in building monasteries and cathedrals; they attracted the attention of larcenous Scandinavians, who became known as the Vikings. Benefiting from warmer temperatures, they traveled widely, built colonies from Greenland to Ireland to central Russia. Nor were they alone. Medieval peop...
Episode 311: Knowledge Towns
April 06, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutes - 75.9 MBFrom the beginning of the university in the middle ages, relations between town and gown–between students and citizens– began badly and got worse. Perhaps the lowest point was the St. Scholastica Riot in Oxford, beginning on February 12th, 1355, in which a tavern punchup led to an episode of urban warfare–which is no exaggeration in describing three days of street battles, and besieged colleges, with showers of arrows going back and forth that ultimately claimed the lives of somewhere between...
Episode 310: Intellectual Humility and the “Internet of Us”
April 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour - 55.8 MBIf we believed in click bait, we would title this "one weird historical thinking trick to save your country." But it's not, so you get a boring but highly accurate title. For this is the first of special series of occasional episodes through the rest of 2023 that explore the connection between intellectual humility and historically thinking. Since the podcast began, we’ve made the claim that historical thinking “gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense; and that it cultivates not only ...
Episode 310: Intellectual Humility and Historical Thinking
April 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour - 55.8 MBIf we believed in click bait, we would title this "one weird historical thinking trick to save your country." But it's not, so you get a boring but highly accurate title. For this is the first of special series of occasional episodes through the rest of 2023 that explore the connection between intellectual humility and historically thinking. Since the podcast began, we’ve made the claim that historical thinking “gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense; and that it cultivates not only ...
Episode 309: What’s the Use of Your Humanities Degree in an AI World?
March 27, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutes - 77.3 MBSo, said an uncle to a student of mine, you’re getting a history degree, huh? When you graduate, you gonna get a job in a history store? The numbers show that the uncle’s jab is winning. As friend of the podcast Jon Lauck has demonstrated in a Fall 2022 editorial in the Middle West Review, the number of history majors in US colleges and universities has dropped by more than 50%. Departments have begun to shrink as a consequence of this, and that shrinkage shows no sign in many institutions...
Episode 308: Breakfast Cereal
March 20, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutes - 52 MBEverything has a history, even breakfast cereal. And that history is involved with the history of grain–which means it is involved with both the history of agriculture and urbanism; how humans mark time during the day; meal customs, which means it’s also involved with the history of the family; nutrition and health, and all the ideas and fears involved with those terms, as well as the history of science and, believe it or not, the history of religion and of political progressivism; and, sinc...
Episode 307: Eisenhower’s Guerrillas
March 13, 2023 14:00 - 1 hour - 92.2 MBIn August 1944, Fred Bailey jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, landing in a disused brickyard. Growing up he had been a sickly child with a heart condition, which led his family to move out of London for his health. But in 1941 at age 18 he had joined the British Army’s Royal Armored Corps, and served with the Desert Army. Bored after the fight for North Africa was over, he volunteered for special duties, and soon found himself in the Special ...
Episode 306: Long Walk
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour - 59.1 MBIn October 1569, a captain of a French ship off the northern coast of Nova Scotia was summoned on deck. Alongside was a canoe, and in it were three Englishmen–David Ingram, Richard Browne, and Richard Twide. They claimed to be the survivors of a group of 100 men marooned on the Gulf coast of Mexico by an English slave-trading expedition. From that point, the three of them had walked north for 3,600 miles, making the journey in about a year. Thirteen years later, in August 1582, David Ingram ...
Episode 305: Degrading Equality
February 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour - 108 MBIn 1835, Oberlin College in Ohio determined that it would admit black students. A very few other colleges did at the time, but Oberlin was unique in that it chose to do so as an explicit matter of college policy. At Oberlin, and a few other places both before and after the Civil War, black and white students were allied first in the cause of emancipation, and then for civil rights. Yet following the end of Reconstruction, even once revolutionary campuses like Oberlin and Berea College in Ke...
Episode 304: Mass Expulsion
February 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour - 87.9 MB“At the start of the twelfth century,” writes Rowan Dorin, “western European rulers almost never resorted to the collective expulsions of wrongdoers from their domains; ecclesiastical authorities evinced little concern about the Jewish communities living under Christian rule; and the church’s efforts to repress usury focused largely on clerics who engaged in money lending. By the late thirteenth century, expulsion had become a recurring tool of royal governance in both England and France; bi...
Episode 303: Victorian Jacobites
February 13, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutes - 73.8 MBOn a January night in 1897, a crowded Episcopal church in Philadelphia was the stage for a curious ceremony. In the Church of the Evangelists, located in south Society Hill just ten or so blocks from Independence Hall, a gaggle of clerics unveiled a life-size painting of Charles I, King of England and–so far as the clerics were concerned–saint and martyr. Then Williams Stevens Perry, the Episcopal Bishop of Iowa, ascended to the pulpit to explain to the assembled multitude how Charles I, far ...
Episode 302: Tudor England
February 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour - 86.1 MBOn 11 October 1537, Henry VIII finally received the son for which he had been waiting for decades. The day before the future Edward VI was born, friars, priests, livery companies, and the mayor and aldermen of London all processed through the city streets, praying for the Queen’s safe delivery. With his birth te deums were sung in London’s churches, bells were rung, fires were lit in every street, and volleys of gunfire resounded from the walls of the Tower of London It was a classic Tudor e...
Episode 301: Wandering Army
January 23, 2023 14:13 - 1 hour - 94.4 MBOn May 11th, 1745, the British Army went into battle against the army of France near the village of Fontenoy, in what is now Belgium. 15,000 British soldiers marched forward bearing not only their muskets, but the reputation that they had gained in the continental campaigns of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. But Marlborough had by then been dead for nearly 25 years, and the British Army had not adapted or altered. The result was a humiliating defeat, with 6,000 of those 15,000...
Episode 300: Wild Problems
January 09, 2023 15:48 - 1 hour - 94.4 MBWelcome to Episode 300 of Historically Thinking! Design theorists popularized the idea of “tame problems” and “wicked problems.” “Tame problems” are answers to questions like how to get to Chicago, or how to increase the battery life of a cell phone. As in mathematics and chess have clarity in their aims and their solutions. “Wicked problems” have neither clarity in their aims or in their solutions. But what about wild problems? By wild problems, my guest Russ Roberts refers to the pr...
Episode 299: The Good Country
January 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour - 93 MBWhat lover of American literature doesn’t remember these haunting lines: “Tell about the Midwest. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” Of course that was, as some of you quickly recognized, a deliberate mangling of a famous passage from William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom. It’s more than a little disconcerting, as I hope you noticed, to substitute Midwest for South. The South is haunted, and mysterious, and interesting. The Midwest…isn...
Episode 298: How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon
December 19, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour - 86.9 MBThe Victorians didn’t actually travel to the moon. But they were the first people, observes my guest Iwan Morus, to think that travel to the Moon was not only possible, but that “their science already possessed – or would soon possess – the means of getting there.” This confidence was based on the cascades of “new technologies, new ways of making knowledge and new visions about the future came together during the nineteenth century to create a new kind of world.” In an important sense, then, ...
Episode 297: Reign of Arrows
December 12, 2022 16:05 - 1 hour - 107 MBIf the Parthian Empire is known at all, it’s by students of Roman history who see it pop up from time to time, before disappearing once again. Marcus Licinius Crassus, a member of the first triumvirate– consisting of himself, Pompey, and Julius Caesar– died in battle against the Parthians. At the moment of his assasination, Caesar was preparing for a campaign against Parthia; and Mark Anthony, of the second triumvirate, was defeated by the Parthians when he attempted to realize Caesar’s dre...
Episode 296: Mercy
December 05, 2022 12:07 - 57 minutes - 79.5 MBI can't introduce Cathal Nolan's book Mercy: Humanity in War any better than he does himself, with these words: This is not a book about war. It is about mercy and humanity… Mercy happens in a microsecond, wrapped inside a surprise moment of mortal danger; it restrains baser instinct and reminds us about higher things. This book shows that mercy limits cruelty in ways laws and honor codes seldom do, because mercy is the highest personal and moral quality any of us achieves. It is above all ot...
Episode 295: New England Fashion
November 28, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour - 80.5 MBWhen the Massachusetts Historical Society was founded in 1791, its august members probably did not anticipate that one day its archives would contain not only family papers, but family dresses–as well as waistcoats, wigs, and at least two scarlet cloaks worn by fashionable men in the late eighteenth century. Kimberley Alexander (who is Director of Museum Studies and Lecturer at the University of New Hampshire) was last heard on the podcast talking about shoes, but more recently curated a 201...
Episode 294: Black Suffrage
November 21, 2022 14:46 - 54 minutes - 75.2 MBOn April 11, 1865, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd gathered outside the White House. He spoke not of recent victories, or those to come, but to the shape of the peace that would follow. Now that the Thirteenth Amendment had been passed by Congress, he urged that it be ratified. Moreover, it seemed to him, Lincoln said, that it was necessary for “the colored man” to have the right to vote. “I myself,” Lincoln told the crowd, “would prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, ...
Episode 293: Brilliant Commodity
November 14, 2022 14:31 - 57 minutes - 78.8 MBAt the end of the 19th century, Amsterdam was home to nearly seventy diamond factories, in which were 7,500 steam-powered polishing mills. The workers who cut and polished the diamonds, brought there from the mines of South Africa, were not all Jewish–but many of them were. Indeed, in the late 1890s Jews were about 10% of the population of Amsterdam, and half of them were economically reliant on what the Dutch called simply “the profession”. The Jewish community in Amsterdam were not the on...
Episode 292: Mutiny!
November 07, 2022 22:37 - 1 hour - 86.5 MBIt is perhaps the greatest scandal and sea-story of the first half of 19th Century America that nearly everyone has forgotten. It led to a court martial, endless headlines, a fistfight in a meeting of the President’s cabinet, and quite possibly to the foundation of the United States Naval Academy. And given that nearly everyone who went to see in the early American republic seemed to know one another, there was one degree of separation between this story and James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melv...
Episode 291: True Blue
October 31, 2022 12:41 - 1 hour - 88.7 MBIn late November, 1864, David R. Snelling visited his uncle, who then lived in Baldwin County near Milledgeville, Georgia. As a boy, he had worked in his uncle’s fields alongside those his uncle enslaved. Now Snelling returned home as a Lieutenant in the Army of the United States, commanding Company I of the First Alabama Cavalry–though detached on temporary duty as commander of the headquarters escort for General William Tecumseh Sherman. The homecoming was not a happy one, at least for Snel...
Episode 290: Oh, Dakota!
October 27, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutes - 73.2 MBMy guest today is Dr. Ben Jones, Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society and the South Dakota State Historian. Ben Jones served for 23 years in the United States Air Force, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. During his service he taught at the Air Force Academy. Subsequently he was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at South Dakota State University from 2013 to 2019, and Secretary of Education of South Dakota from January 2019 to December 2020. He is now the 9th...
Episode 289: Peace and Friendship in the American West
October 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 85.8 MBFor over a generation the history of the American West has been described by scholars as one of violence, including genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and settler colonialism. While it replaced an older history which spoke of “winning the West” and the triumph of civilization, curiously enough both the old and the now aging histories of the west focused on violence. After all, in the popular imagination, every Western town hosted a gunfight in its one street on a nearly daily basis. But what if ami...
Episode 288: The American Revolution in Hapsburg Lands
October 20, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 86.6 MBIn 1780, captured American naval officer Joshua Barney escaped from prison in Plymouth, made his way to London, and with the help of some English sympathizers to the American Revolution was able to take the ferry to Ostend, the principal port of the Austrian Netherlands. During his journey he struck up an acquaintance with an Italian noblewoman after curing her seasickness. Grateful, she insisted that he accompany her by carriage to Brussels, where in a “certain hotel” a porter ushered the tw...
Episode 287: The Hessians are Coming!
October 17, 2022 17:51 - 1 hour - 100 MBIn 1776 a massive British fleet of more than 400 ships carrying tens of thousands of soldiers arrived outside New York Harbor. Many of these soldiers were German, hired from their princes by the British government. Americans then and now have called them Hessians. For the next seven years, these German soldiers marched, fought, and suffered seemingly everywhere in eastern North America, from the walls of Quebec City to the sandy beaches of Pensacola Bay. When the British army left, many Germa...
Episode 286: Weavers, Scribes, and Kings
October 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 109 MBThe history of the ancient Near East can seem like staring down a deep, deep well of time, so deep that it gives one vertigo. It stretches back to 3,500 BC: that is, I’ll do the math for you, 5,522 years ago. In thinking about its 3,000 years of history, one begins to think not in terms of years, but in decades and centuries. Yet there were continuities amidst change, not simply within those three-plus millennia, but between then and now. For surely it would be impossible to imagine what 2022...
Episode 285: Finding Agatha Christie
October 10, 2022 14:40 - 1 hour - 86.9 MBAt her 80th birthday party Agatha Christie described a conversation she had once overheard about herself. She had been on a train, and there listened to two ladies talking about her, copies of her latest mystery perched on both their knees. “I hear,” said one, “that she drinks like a fish.” Christie’s latest biographer Lucy Worsley begins her new book with that anecdote because for her it so nicely captures at least three things about the author. First, that she told the story on her 80th b...
Episode 284: The Greatest Russian General, in War and Peace
October 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 93.6 MBIf we know Mikhail Ilarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov, we know him as Tolstoy imagined him, as an old man, before Austerlitz, “with his uniform unbuttoned so that his fat neck bulged over his collar if escaping… in a low chair with his podgy old hands resting symmetrically on its arms'' who begins to snore loudly and rhythmically as his generals plan the battle. Why? Because he alone understands the hand of providence, or the finger of fate; because he alone “recognizes that there are forces in...
Episode 283: Two Houses, Two Kingdoms
September 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 97.3 MBFor centuries the Kingdom of England faced northeast, across the northern seas towards Scandinavia. Indeed, under King Canute, England was part of Scandinavia. But with the Norman invasion–even though the Normans were eponymously “North-men”–that changed dramatically. Within a few decades, the French and English royal trees began to intertwine, to graft branches to one another, to make love and war, sometimes at one and the same time. Catherine Hanley's new book Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A ...
Episode 282: Griffins, Greek Fire, and Ancient Poisons
September 26, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutes - 69.7 MBFor thousands of years humans have in war and peace attempted to poison one another—or, perhaps for variety, burn each other to death. We might think of poison gas, biological weapons, or the use of unwitting victims to spread epidemics as being modern innovations, but such horrors have been employed since the earliest recorded history. Moreover, for nearly that entire time humans have debated the morality of employing those weapons. My guest Adrienne Mayor describes this history in Greek...
Episode 281: The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy
September 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 88.5 MBIn 1815, John Adams wrote to a correspondent of the importance, of all things, of the Boston Committee of Correspondence in the 1760s: …I never belonged to any of these Committees and have never Seen one of their Letters Sent or received... But in my Opinion the History of the United States never can be written, till they are discovered. What an Engine! France imitated it, and produced a Revolution. England and Scotland was upon the Point of imitating it, in order to produce another Revolutio...
Episode 280: Thinking about Historically Thinking
September 14, 2022 18:44 - 1 hour - 92 MBWell, this is something new. After 279 podcasts, someone is asking Al Zambone questions about the podcast. Carol Adrienne, recently heard talking on Episode 278 about her book Healing a Divided Nation: How the Civil War Revolutionized Western Medicine insisted that it was a really good idea that she be allowed to record a podcast about this podcast. So she did. It turns out to be a pretty good introduction to the podcast, if you're new to the podcast, as many references are made to past episo...
Episode 279: Count the Dead
September 08, 2022 11:14 - 59 minutes - 82.2 MBStephen Berry begins his new book Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It with these two paragraphs: This is a book about death and data or, more specifically, about the dead as data. The dead and the formerly living are not the same. The formerly living built the Parthenon and the Brooklyn Bridge…[they] also made brutal wars and ghastly decisions we are still struggling to live down. Revered or reviled, however, the formerly living have always counted because ...
Episode 278: Healing a Divided Nation
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutes - 81.1 MBWhen Confederate cannons fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, the United States Army was comprised of only 16,000 soldiers. Its medical staff was numbered just 113 doctors. And here’s another fun fact: taking into account all of the doctors then practicing in the United States, possibly as few as 300 doctors in the entire United States had witnessed surgery, or seen a gunshot wound. Over the next four years all of those numbers would dramatically increase. To meet the unprecedented casualtie...
Episode 277: Saving Freud
August 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 87.9 MBOn March 15, 1938, Adolf Hitler addressed 250,000 Austrians in Vienna, announcing the end of the Austrian state. Close by on that same day, Nazis entered the apartment of Dr. Sigmund Freud and his family. They were literally bought off when first his wife Martha offered them cash, and then daughter Anna Freud opened a safe and gave them the equivalent of $840. At this point “the stern figure of Sigmund Freud himself suddenly appeared,” writes my guest Andrew Nagorski, “glaring at the intruder...
Episode 276: The Secret Syllabus
August 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 90.1 MBNew college students usually get lots of advice. “Go to office hours.” “Ask good questions.” “Declare a major as soon as you can.” “Take some time to figure out who you are.” “Get some research experience.” “Get good internships with real-life experience.” “Sit in the front row.” “Avoid procrastination.” Some of this advice is obvious, some of it is contradictory, and some of it is bad.. It almost never explains why, or even how. So the new college student is apt to ignore all of it. In the...
Episode 275: The World the Plague Made
August 08, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 89.2 MBThe pandemic of 1346–the Black Death–in some areas of Europe killed as much as 50% of the population. But this first outbreak, while the worst, was not the last. For three centuries it persisted, with at least 30 further outbreaks. Such numbers indicated that the Black Death resulted in unimaginable suffering and tragedy from which no-one was untouched. But the Black Death also brought about a cultural and economic renewal. Labor scarcity encouraged the development of new or improved techno...
Episode 274: Afghan Crucible
August 01, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 95.8 MBIn December 24, 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. They entered a country already engaged in a civil war. Figuratively, Afghans had been engaged in a war for nearly 100 years over their identity and direction. Dissension had finally led to political violence in 1978, as Afghans sought to impose upon one another their preferred model of statehood. What happened in Afghanistan, argues Elisabeth Leake, was never determined solely by the rules of the Cold War, or the desires of policymaker...
Episode 273: Founder of Modern Poland
July 25, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 152 MBThe Dictator and His Daughter (c. 1934) On the morning of November 10, 1918, the overnight train from Berlin arrived in Warsaw station. One of its passengers was Josef Pilsudski. For twenty-six years he had been striving for the liberation of Poland from the Russian Empire, and its re-creation as an independent state and culture. Now, at the end of that train journey, he not only found himself at long last in a free Poland but surrounded by ever-growing crowds that saw him as the leader of t...
Episode 272: Germans without Borders
July 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 87.7 MBWhen the Bavarian naturalist Moritz Wagner travelled in the kingdom of Georgia, in 1819, he encountered there thousands of Germans, some of them living in what he described as a “ganz deutscher Bauart”, a German-designed village. They or their parents hhd emigrated there after the Napoleonic Wars. What Wagner found in the Caucusus could also be encountered elsewhere in Russia, as well as in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, “the triangular area between Cincinannti, St. Louis, and St. Paul”, and in p...
Episode 271: The Man at the Center of Two Revolutions
July 04, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 97.3 MBMy guest today is Martin Clagget, author of A Spark of Revolution: William Small, Thomas Jefferson, and James Watt; The Curious Connection Between the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. It’s the first biography of William Small ever written. If Small is remembered at all, it’s because he was the tutor of Thomas Jefferson at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. But Clagget meticulously demonstrates that his life contained much more than that. For Small was a Scots...
Episode 270: Great Tomatoes of World History
June 27, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 101 MBColonel Robert Gibbon Johnson of Salem County, New Jersey Joseph T. Buckingham, editor of the Boston Courier in the 1830s, had a way with invective: The mere fungus of an offensive plant which one cannot touch without an immediate application of soap and water with an infusion of eau de cologne, to sweeten the hand…O ye caterers of luxuries, ye gods and godesses of the science of cookery! Deliver us from tomatoes. You have to wonder what Buckingham said about politicians. Everything has a...
Episode 269: Free People of Color
June 20, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutes - 64.7 MBBy 1861, there were 250,000 free people of color living in the American South. They were signs of contradiction amidst a slave society built upon the concept of white supremacy in a racial hierarchy. Laws curtailed and denied their rights seemingly in every conceivable way, from prohibiting their legal testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. Whites attempted to control them through classification, variously and contradictorily terming them "negroes," "mulattoes," "mustee...
Episode 268: Feeding Washington’s Army
June 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 101 MBIn early December, 1777, Joseph Plumb Martin and his comrades in the Continental Army sat down to feast upon a Our Hero: Rhode Island Quaker ironworker turned Major General and logistician Thanksgiving meal, mandated by the Second Continental Congress. “...To add something extraordinary to our present stock of provisions, our country, ever mindful of its suffering army,” wrote Martin decades later, “ opened her sympathizing heart so wide, upon this occasion, as to give us something to make...
Episode 267: African Founders
June 06, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutes - 73.3 MBIn 1609 a free man of African and European ancestry, Juan Rodriguez, left the Dutch ship Jonge Tobias anchored off Manhattan Island with “eighty hatchets and some knives” to set himself up in trading with the local Indians. Ashore in coming years he fought off Dutch rivals, married an Indian woman, and started a family, all the while prospering by trading in bear and beaver pelts. His is one of the many stories presented by David Hackett Fischer in his new book African Founders: How Enslaved...
Episode 266: Happy Dreams of Liberty
May 30, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour - 85.7 MBHello, when Samuel Townsend died in 1856 near Huntsville, Alabama, he was the era’s equivalent of a multimillionaire. He had thousands of acres of cotton-land, and hundreds of enslaved people who planted, harvested, and processed that cotton to make him rich. Like many other parents, he left it all to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces. But in this case all of them were slaves. And that crucial event is not even the beginning of the intricate, horrible, thrilling, and ennobling st...