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 218: To Her Credit
August 16, 2021 21:05 - 1 hour - 84.1 MBIn 1756 an unmarried Quaker woman wrote “Deborah Morris, her book, 1756” in, of all things, a book entitled The American Instructor, or, Young Man’s Best Companion. That might seem to have been an odd choice. But as my guest Sarah Damiano explains, it was a very useful book for Deborah Morris to have, because Deborah Morris was a landlady, a retailer, and an investor. In this she was far from alone among 18th century American women, as much as that surprise us. Credit was at the heart of the...
Episode 217: When Money Talks
August 09, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBThose of us who still carry coins or cash—and I notice that I do that less and less—carry around “a pocket guide to world history and culture.” Money, writes Frank Holt, provides us with a historical record “unrivaled by papyrus, paper and parchment. Coins are perhaps the most sucessful information technology ever devised.” In his new book When Money Talks: A History of Coins and Numismatics, Holt briskly and whimsically explores the life of coins; the importance of coins; and how to decode ...
Episode 216: The Appalachian Trail
August 02, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutes - 78.6 MBNearly every introduction to the Appalachian Trail seems to begin by giving its length (about 2,100 miles) and that it goes from Georgia to Maine. Which is strange, when you think about it. No one much talks about I-95, or the I-10, or the I-5—maybe they should—and when they do they don’t tell us about their length, or where they begin and end. Neither really tell us much about the thing itself. Philip D’Anieri has done something different. He has written a biography of the Appalachian Trail...
Episode 215: The Other Face of Battle
July 26, 2021 08:00 - 1 hour - 101 MBThroughout their history Americans have found themselves fighting “unexpected enemies—foes from different cultural backgrounds, who fought in unfamiliar ways, and against whom they were unprepared to fight.” In the new book The Other Face of Battle: America's Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat, a group of military historians has put together three exemplars of such fights, woven together with an analysis of the discontinuity and continuity of the way that Americans have waged such wa...
Episode 214: Just a Few Questions
July 19, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutes - 78.2 MBThis our fourth episode in our year-long series about the skills of historical thinking, and it’s about that terrifying moment which leads to actually writing about history: the question, and the thesis. When we ask historical questions, we’re first asking a bigger question: What questions make historical sense of these documents? Then, in the thesis, we try to answer it, hopefully with a claim that’s worth making. What good questions are, and what claims are worth making, are some of the th...
Episode 213: From Rebel to Ruler
July 12, 2021 11:50 - 1 hour - 119 MBIn July and August of 1921 a group of young men met in Shanghai to found the Chinese Communist Party. They undoubtedly had great dreams, but even so they might have found it hard to believe that they were initiating the largest revolutionary movement of the 20th century, and that their party would thirty years later rule China. Certainly they would have scoffed at the idea that, one hundred years after their meeting, their party’s far from doctrinaire Marxist reforms would have not only led ...
Episode 212: The Perennial Russian Pivot to Asia
July 08, 2021 19:42 - 1 hour - 84.4 MBPeter the Great is known to history as the ruler who pushed for the westernization of Russia; who defeated Sweden, thereby making Russia a Baltic power; and who then built a great capital on that Baltic Sea to be Russia’s window to the west. Yet on his deathbed Peter was thinking of Asia, dreaming of a passage to China and India through the Arctic Sea. It's with this vignette that Chris Miller begins his new book We Shall Be Masters: Russia’s Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin...
Episode 211: The [Quiet] Russian Revolution
June 28, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 90.4 MBFor Russia the year 1837 began with the death of the poet Alexander Pushkin in a duel, and ended with a fire that destroyed the Czar’s Winter Palace. These two happenstance events in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg frame a series of extraordinary changes that occurred that year throughout Russia. For historian Paul Werth these events amount to a “quiet revolution”, one that changed Russia and provided it with features—religious, cultural, intellectual, institutional, political, and eth...
Episode 210: Very Personal History
June 17, 2021 16:07 - 1 hour - 84.3 MBOne California afternoon William Damon received a call from his daughter. A sleepless night had led her to do a little internet sleuthing, and the result was Damon discovering that the father he had thought died in World War II had in fact not only lived, but had a career in the United States Information Agency, before dying in Thailand in 1992 after a long illness. One of the results of that discovery, and the years spent not only learning about his father but reviewing his own life, is Dam...
Episode 209: Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith
June 09, 2021 15:46 - 1 hour - 97.5 MBThroughout human history, we have been deeply affected by our environment, particularly climate. At certain times there have been such alterations in climate that they amount to cultural shocks, resulting not only in famine, disease, and violence, but also in religious changes. That's the argument presented by this week's guest, Philip Jenkins, in his new book Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval. We discuss the mechanisms by which the climate is a...
Episode 208: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
June 02, 2021 10:57 - 57 minutes - 79.1 MBThroughout early modern Europe it was expected that neighbor would love neighbor as a spiritual practice, and that this corresponded with a discernible set of rules for everyday living. That's Katie Barclay's argument in her most recent book Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self. Moreover she also argues that not only was caritas an ethical norm, it was also an emotion that was part of the experience of people of all levels of society. Using Scottish legal records from the 17th...
Episode 207: After the Black Death
May 26, 2021 12:21 - 1 hour - 88.6 MBIn 1347 the population of England was something on the order of 5.5 million. After the first wave of the Black Death had crashed upon the island’s shores and then receded, that population had been reduced to 2.8 million. Immense tragedy lies behind that number, and immense consequences as well. But the plague would return to England again in 1361, 1369, and 1375, with further human cost. And the climate made war against the English as well, with a cold period that led to crop loss and famine....
Episode 206: Sick and Tired
May 12, 2021 13:49 - 56 minutes - 77 MBIn her new book Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue, Emily K. Abel has written the first history of fatigue, one which also contains a memoir of her own experiences as a cancer survivor afflicted with fatigue. In this wide-ranging history, Abel shows how our view of fatigue is intimately connected with our view of work, and how "the American cultural emphasis on productivity intersect to stigmatize those with fatigue...When fatigue limits our ability to work, our society sees us as...
Episode 205: Can There Ever Be History for the Common Good?
May 05, 2021 10:00 - 53 minutes - 74.1 MBA young boy hands out flags to the public prior to the start of the 1981 Inauguration Day parade. Source: US National Archives “Patriotic history is more suspect these days than it was when I was its young student, 50 years ago,” writes Eliot Cohen. But, he continues, “civic education is also inextricably interwoven with patriotism, without which commitment to the values that make free government possible will not exist” since “civic education depends not only on an understanding of fundame...
Episode 204: The Peace Treaty of 1916 That Didn’t Happen
April 28, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 89.2 MBBy August of 1916, the combatants in the First World War had been locked in struggle for two years. While the German Empire had enjoyed astonishing and unexpected success on the eastern front, on the Western Front things were very different. The German plan to bleed the French Army dry at Verdun had begun in February, and had months of further futility and agony to go. The Allied attempt to break the German lines along the River Somme had begun on July 1, and would go on to November, with inc...
Episode 203: The Saint, the Count, and Sourcing (Historical Thinking Series)
April 08, 2021 19:41 - 1 hour - 91.9 MBThis is the third of our conversations on the skills of historical thinking, and this time the subject is sourcing. It’s a term invented by Sam Wineburg–patron saint of this podcast, whom you can listen to in Episode 100, also talking about sourcing–and it refers to the act of identifying sources, contextualizing and assessing documents for bias, reliability, relevance, and point of view. To paraphrase the title of one of Sam's books, sourcing is perhaps the most unnatural act of historical t...
Episode 202: Talking History, Podcasting, and the Age of Jackson, with Daniel N. Gullotta
March 31, 2021 09:27 - 48 minutes - 67 MBToday's podcast is something we haven't done for a year, a conversation with another history podcaster. A year ago, just as the pandemic was beginning to ooze out over the globe, I talked with Michael Robinson, host of the great Time to Eat the Dogs. This week I talk with Daniel Gullotta, who hosts a podcast I’ve thoroughly enjoyed since it began, The Age of Jackson. Daniel focuses on talking with authors of the latest books that focus on American politics, culture, religion—and just about ev...
Episode 201: Isaac Newton, After Gravity
March 24, 2021 10:00 - 59 minutes - 82.2 MBIn 1696, Isaac Newton, then Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, moved rather suddenly to London. There he took the position of Master of the Royal Mint, residing at first nearby the mint in the Tower of London. He would by the end of his life have spent more time living in London then in Cambridge. Yet historians have often been reticent, even embarrassed, to delve into the second act of Newton's life. After gravity, the calculus, and optics it all seems so pedestrian....
Episode 200: Connecting, from an English Portrait to Galileo and Beyond, with J.L. Heilbron
March 17, 2021 10:00 - 56 minutes - 77.7 MBThis is the second of Historically Thinking’s yearlong series on the the skills of historical thinking. In our first installment this year, which was Episode 196, we heard cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham explain reading comprehension, without which none of the other skills really work. Today in the podcast's 200th episode we’re going to tackle Connecting. If we put connecting into the form of a question, it would be something like “How does this document [or any other source, from p...
Episode 199: George Washington, Politician
March 10, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 84.9 MBIf you count up all his military service, George Washington was a soldier for about thirteen years. But as an elected representative he served for 26 years, first as a member of the House of Burgesses in Virginia, then as President of the United States. And that's not counting being appointed by Virginia's legislature to the First and Second Continental Congresses, and to the Constitutional Convention. That also passes over his simultaneous service as a Justice of Fairfax County, and member o...
Bonus: Comprehending Dante, with Guy Raffa
March 05, 2021 15:17 - 1 hour - 84.4 MBThis bonus episode is with Guy Raffa, last heard in Episode 183 discussing his book Dante's Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy. It was a great conversation about Italy, and the culture and idea of Italy. But then and since I've been wanting to talk about Dante's poetry, particularly about the Divine Comedy. This was my chance to not only do that, but to talk with Guy about how to approach poetry which is notoriously difficult to understand. It's hard enough for us to do that. How does Guy help ...
Episode 198: American Heretic
March 03, 2021 11:30 - 1 hour - 138 MB"Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born, and never could be extinguished." -Harriet Martineau John C. Calhoun was, for his contemporaries, an unforgettable presence whether they despised or cherished him. Harriet Martineau, an English social theorist and pioneering feminist, made the above unforgettable observation. Compared to others of his opponents, she was positively kind. They saw him as the human embodiment of Milton's Satan, a burning bright Lucifer with ma...
Episode 197: An Independent Woman of the Eighteenth Century
February 24, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 94.3 MBEliza Lucas Pinckney was born in 1722 on the island of Antigua in the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, one of the tinier colonies of the British Empire, and she died in 1793 in Philadelphia, the capital of the new American Republic. Those places of birth and death, and the seventy-odd years between the two events, encapsulate a life that not only saw tumultuous change, but helped to create it. For Eliza Pinckney was one of the wealthiest, most respected, and influential women of her era. Thi...
From the Archive: The Skills of Historical Thinking
January 29, 2021 21:26We’ve just begun a unique experiment, creating a year long series devoted to explain what historical thinking is, why it’s important, and how to do it.The series kicked off this week with a conversation I had with Daniel Willingham about “comprehension”, the first necessary skill for historical thinking–without understanding what we read, it’s very hard … From the Archive: The Skills of Historical Thinking Read More » The post From the Archive: The Skills of Historical Thinking first app...
From the Archives: Episode 39: The Skills of Historical Thinking
January 29, 2021 21:26 - 36 minutes - 33.8 MBWe've just begun a unique experiment, creating a year long series devoted to explain what historical thinking is, why it's important, and how to do it. The series kicked off this week with a conversation I had with Daniel Willingham about "comprehension", the first necessary skill for historical thinking–without understanding what we read, it's very hard to think about the past. When we're done, there will be twelve monthly conversations, eleven devoted solely to one skill. (The twelfth, in c...
Episode 196: Comprehending What We Read (Historical Thinking Series)
January 27, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 107 MBWhen I used to grade historical essays, I would provide students with a rubric that I stole from Lendol Calder, and which allowed them to understand how they were being evaluated, and for what. The very first item on the rubric reads as follows: Comprehension: What do the documents say/mean? Accurately reconstructs the meaning of documents. No misreadings, serious misconceptions of authors’ meanings, or relevant documents ignored. Comprehension is not something I had ever given a lot of th...
Episode 195: Battling for the Classics
January 20, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 95.5 MBOn December 2, 2020, the University of Vermont announced that it would be eliminating the geology, religion, and classics departments, and also eliminating majors in Asian Studies, German, and Italian as part of cuts to programs in the College of Arts and Sciences with less than 25 or fewer students enrolled, or fewer than five graduates per year. The Academic Socal Internet (or at least its humanities sector) predictably exploded, along lines which are pretty familiar by now to those who fol...
Episode 194: If This Be Treason, Make the Most of It
January 13, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 109 MBDuring the American Revolution just about everyone in the thirteen colonies—or, after July 2, 1776, the new United States—could be justly termed a traitor. For rebellious colonists prior to 1776, it was Parliament who had betrayed the English constitution. For royal officials, resistance and then rebellion was treason to the monarch. After independence, those who Americans identified numerous traitors in their midst—not only those who remained loyal to the old order of things, but even those...
Bonus: Mark Salisbury on Higher Ed at the End of 2020, or Continuing Higher COVIDucation
January 12, 2021 14:27 - 40 minutes - 73.6 MBHere's a little lagniappe, a conversation with frequent guest Mark Salisbury of TuitionFit on higher ed headlines of December 2020, and some speculation about the year in higher ed to come. Also contains news you can use!
Bonus Episode: Mark Salisbury on Higher Ed at the End of 2020, or, Continuing Higher COVIDucation
January 12, 2021 14:27 - 40 minutes - 73.6 MBHere's a little lagniappe, a conversation with frequent guest Mark Salisbury of TuitionFit on higher ed headlines of December 2020, and some speculation about the year in higher ed to come. Also contains news you can use!
Episode 193: The Plot to Bring Down the Soviet Revolution
January 06, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 99.6 MBIn the spring of 1918, a young Scottish diplomat began to put together a plot that was intended to change the entire direction of the Great War, and save the Allies from defeat. As Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart began making his plans, Germany’s Operation Michael was threatening to break the western front open before American troops arrived in full strength. Lockhart thought that he could bring Russia back into the war that it had abandoned the year before. He would do this by killing Vladimi...
Episode 192: Distracted, or, How to be Attentive
December 30, 2020 15:01 - 57 minutes - 79.5 MBAnyone who has been in a classroom in the last 25 years has heard someone—perhaps themselves—worry about the effects of “digital distraction” on students’ attention span–perhaps even on their minds. In the 90's there were arguments about whether professors should allow laptops for note-taking, which now seems very quaint. Now we’re wondering if Zoom turns us into Zombies. (Or should that be Zoombies?) My guest Jim Lang has written a book that takes that fretful conversation in a different di...
Episode 191: Pacifist Prophet
December 23, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 92.5 MBIn 1775 Johannes Papunhunk died in a Moravian village in Ohio. He was not a Moravian, or any other kind of European, but a member of the Munsee tribe who had been born some seventy years before. In his long life he had been a prophet, preacher, reformer, and diplomat, dedicated to finding a home where his people could live in peace. As Richard Pointer observes, Papunhunk bewilders us because he breaks apart our categories. He was a prophet who inspired peacemaking not war; a nativist reformer...
Episode 190: Porcelain
December 16, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 98.5 MBIn 1709, one of the great European technological achievements of the 18th century was realized—the reverse engineering of a formula for porcelain that the Chinese had used for almost two millennia. That this recipe was recreated in Saxony, in the heart of middle Europe, meant that porcelain would have a special place not merely in the technology, business, industry, and culture of the German states, but at the center of their political economy and in their relation to an ever-globalizing capi...
Episode 189: Keeping in Time
December 09, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 90.6 MBBeginning in the Middle Ages, western culture became increasingly interested in regulating society through the precise, accurate measurement of time. “By the late fourteenth century,” writes my guest Ken Mondschein in his new book On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping, “mechanical clocks controlled the bells in medieval towns…These regular bells arguably produced a change in time consciousness at a general level: a device for measuring abstract time began to be used to regulate both perso...
Episode 188: The Amateur Hour, or, A History of Why College Professors Can’t Teach
December 02, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 98.2 MBIn 2008 when Jonathan Zimmerman received a teaching award, his dean introduced him by telling the assembled audience what he books and scholarly articles he had written. He writes, “I don’t begrudge her for that, at all. What else could she go on, really? She had never been to one of my classes. And even if she had, how would a single visit—or two—help her say anything meaningful or important about my instruction? What other evidence could she invoke? What did she know about me as a teacher, ...
From the Archives: Episode 40: We Gather Together, or, The History of Thanksgiving
November 26, 2020 14:38 - 51 minutes - 47.6 MBOn a day of tradition (or maybe not; more about that in a bit), we brush the dust off an old HT tradition. Back in the day, to be honest, we used to do a lot of "From the Archive" episodes mostly because we were pressed for time. Five years and almost two hundred episodes and bonus episodes later, we've got bigger archives, and listeners who might not have gone as far back as Episodes 1 through 50. (I mean, who does that?) So here's a personal favorite, a conversation with Dr. Tracy McKenzie...
From the Archive: We Gather Together, or, The History of Thanksgiving
November 26, 2020 14:38 - 51 minutes - 47.6 MBOn a day of tradition (or maybe not; more about that in a bit), we brush the dust off an old HT tradition. Back in the day, to be honest, we used to do a lot of "From the Archive" episodes mostly because we were pressed for time. Five years and almost two hundred episodes and bonus episodes later, we've got bigger archives, and listeners who might not have gone as far back as Episodes 1 through 50. (I mean, who does that?) So here's a personal favorite, a conversation with Dr. Tracy McKenzie...
Episode 187: The Light Ages
November 25, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 90.5 MBHello, in 1951 a young historian of science named Derek Price was examining a medieval manuscript in the library of Peterhouse College in Cambridge. When the pages of parchment were unbound from their 19th century binding, to his delight he saw the name “Chaucer”. But this was not a manuscript copy of the Canterbury Tales, or even a letter, but an instruction manual for a scientific instrument. In the end, as my guest Sebastian Falk explains, the manuscript turns out to have been authored no...
Episode 186: Think More Like Shakespeare
November 18, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 113 MBBased simply on the title, I never would have thought I would be recording a conversation with someone who wrote a book titled How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education. It might sound like that book from a couple of decades book which encouraged readers to become like Leonardo—I have to admit that I never did learn to write with my left hand as a way of becoming ambidextrous and thus much more creative. But Scott Newstok is not just writing a self-help book. It's...
Episode 185: The Anvil and Forge That Created the Modern World
November 11, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 93.1 MBFor generations, both Asians and Europeans have thought of the Silk Road has been thought of as a highway connecting east to west. But what if both Asians and Europeans have gotten the whole point of the Silk Road wrong. What if instead of connecting the two important ends of Eurasia by bridging the empty central bit, the whole point of the Silk Road was that it was really a network that connected the heart of Eurasia to its distant peripheries. And what if it was thanks to the influences tha...
Episode 184: This is Sparta
November 04, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 103 MBὮ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. Stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, obedient to their words So read, Herodotus tells us, an engraving on a memorial commemorating the Spartans who died at Thermopylae, fighting a Persian Army that ridiculously outnumbered them. It has become probably the best known battle of the ancient world. Napoleon, it must be said, could never understand why; after all, he pointed out, it was a defeat. Bu...
Episode 183: Dante’s Bones, or, A History of the Idea of Italy
October 28, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 116 MBIn 1321 Dante Alighieri died in the city of Ravenna, near the shores of the Adriatic. In the years since his perpetual exile from his native Florence, he had lived in a variety of places in Italy. Now he was at rest. But in future centuries even his bones would continue to move, although not so far as his body had moved in life. And, as his body diminished, his influence and legacy grew and grew, sometimes appearing in the oddest of places. Ultimately, the history of Dante’s bones is the hi...
Episode 182: Philip of Macedonia, and Son
October 21, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 99.8 MBWhen Alexander of Macedonia took the throne of his father Philip, he inherited an expansive and wealthy kingdom; a hardened and meticulously constructed army; and a cadre of aristocrats and nobles who were used to victory, and wanted more of it. Moreover, Alexander was well-educated—in part by none other than Aristotle himself—and a military veteran. But when Philip took the throne he possessed none of these advantages. It is impossible to understand the campaigns of Alexander against Persia...
Episode 181: Westward to Zion
October 14, 2020 19:09 - 42 minutes - 58.9 MBEach year tens of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints visit sites across the United States, like the recreated town of Nauvoo on the Mississippi River, or to "This is the Place" Heritage Park, just outside Salt Lake City. Thousands of young church members push handcarts across the plains, or up over the highest nearby hill, dressed in 19th century clothes. Sara Patterson argues that “as the Latter Day Saints community globalized in the late twentieth an...
Episode 180: Great State, or, China and the World since 1250
October 07, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 85.4 MBIn Xanadu, Kublai Khan had a leopard. Well, it wasn’t a leopard really, it was a cheetah. And upon that fact, and upon many other anecdotes and material objects, Timothy Brook builds a bridge that connects the history of China to the history of the world around it. He demonstrates in overwhelming and fascinating detail that far from cut off from the world, China has always been in and of the world, and the world has always been coming to China. Timothy Brook is the Republic of China Chair in...
Episode 179: What’s the Good of Ambition, or, Socrates and Alcibiades
September 30, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 114 MBIn 415 BC, Athens sent a fleet of over 100 ships and 5,000 hoplites to attack the city of Syracuse, in Sicily, an expedition that would result in catastrophe. The philosopher Plato writing decades later described a drinks party, held perhaps a few months or weeks before, given by the poet Agathon to celebrate his winning first prize in the Lenaia festival not long before. Among Agathon’s famous guests was philospher and Athenian gadfly Socrates; and coming unvited to the feast later on in Pla...
Episode 178: Medieval Mediterranean Slavery
September 23, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 120 MB“Medieval Mediterranean slavery” is a phrase that might seem a bit puzzling to some listeners—surely there wasn’t slavery in the medieval Mediterrean? Was there? Indeed there was. For hundreds of years a slave trade existed throughout the Medieval Mediterranean world, taking captives from the shores of the Black Sea to Egypt, and to Italy. The slave traders were from the Republics of Venice and Genoa, and the Mameluk Sultanate. “Late medieval slavery was not an afterthought or an aberration...
Episode 177: The Forgotten City
September 16, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 121 MBIn the history of ancient Greece, three cities dominated its politics, society, and culture. Of these, Athens and Sparta are now best known. But set in the plains of central Greece was the third apex of this “fateful triangle”, the city of Thebes. Dismissed by both Spartans and Athenians as rustics, clods, and peasants–“Boeotian swine” according the Athenians–Thebes was nevertheless deeply consequential to the life of those two rival cities. Its myths and legends became the topics of some of ...
Episode 176: Men on Horseback, or, What Charisma Has To Do With It
September 09, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 96 MBIn 1763, James Boswell was accompanied by his new friend Samuel Johnson to Harwich, from which the young Scot then travelled to Utrecht in the Netherlands. There he was supposed to study law, which he did with great energy. But he also energetically whored, proposed marriage to eligible young ladies of fortune, and traveled about Europe making the acquaintance of the great and good. One of these was Rousseau; and it was he who suggested that Boswell travel to Corsica, and visit the Corsican r...