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 175: American Dorm
September 02, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 98.5 MBThis is Nassau Hall. When it was built, it was the largest building in colonial America. Anyone walking through it today when visiting Princeton University might have some strange resonance with their own college experience. There are some differences, but...parts of it look amazingly like a late 20th century dormitory. Historians are supposed to be chroniclers of change, and sternly against the claim that things are “always that way.” But American dormitory makes one question historicism. S...
Bonus Episode: The Virus and the Dorm, or, Higher COVIDucation Part One
August 31, 2020 15:46 - 24 minutes - 44.9 MBThis is a bonus episode of Historically Thinking, hopefully the first of several short episodes that will deal with higher ed in the time of COVID. It's changed much else, and it would seem (as the autumn semester of 2020 begins, more or less) that American higher education is going to be very different on the other side of the pandemic. Maybe. I talk with two people of very different perspectives and ways of thinking and seeing. Holly Taylor is a bioethicist at the National Institutes of He...
Bonus: The Virus and the Dorm, or, Higher COVIDucation Part One
August 31, 2020 15:46 - 24 minutes - 44.9 MBThis is a bonus episode of Historically Thinking, hopefully the first of several short episodes that will deal with higher ed in the time of COVID. It's changed much else, and it would seem (as the autumn semester of 2020 begins, more or less) that American higher education is going to be very different on the other side of the pandemic. Maybe. I talk with two people of very different perspectives and ways of thinking and seeing. Holly Taylor is a bioethicist at the National Institutes of He...
Episode 174: Polybius of Megalopolis
August 26, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 90 MB“In terms of time, my work will start with the 140th Olympiad” wrote the historian Polybius at the beginning of his History: Before this time things happened in the world pretty much in a sporadic fashion, because every incident was specific, from start to finish, to the part of the world where I happened. But ever since then history has resembled a body, in the sense that incidents in Italy and Libya and Asia and Greece are all interconnected, and everything tends toward a single outcome. T...
Episode 173: Thinking is Human, or, Lost in Thought
August 19, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 90.8 MBHello, the French thinker Blaise Pascal wrote this when considering the ability of humans to think: Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. A th...
Episode 172: The Last Voyage of the Whaling Ship Progress
August 12, 2020 15:50 - 1 hour - 93.6 MBIn 1892, the whaling ship Progress under the command of Captain Daniel W. Gifford made an unusual voyage, not out to sea for a two to three year voyage, but up the St. Lawrence River and into the Great Lakes—the entire time under tow, rather than under sail. Its destination was Chicago and the great Columbian Exposition of 1893. With me to discuss the last voyage of the Progress, and the decades of experience that led to that voyage, is the great-great-grandson of Daniel Gifford—who is also ...
Episode 171: The Gunpowder Revolution, or, China and the West
August 05, 2020 10:00 - 58 minutes - 79.8 MBIn 1280 a enormous eruption disturbed the peace of the Chinese city of Yangzhou. It was “like a volcano erupting,” wrote one who experienced it, “a tsunami crashing.” Ceiling beams three miles away were thrown down, and tiles rattled on buildings as far as thirty miles away. The reason for this destruction was an explosion of gunpowder in Yangzhou’s imperial arsenal, which killed at least 100 men, and left behind a crater ten feet deep. How did Chinese scholars first develop gunpowder? And w...
Episode 170: Bound by War, or, the Philippines and the United States in the First Pacific Century
July 29, 2020 10:00 - 53 minutes - 72.9 MBMy great-grandfather Louis Corsiglia emigrated to the United States as a boy from Genoa, and he was a lifelong anti-imperialist Democrat. So it followed from those two things that a dictum of his was that “A Sicilian is no more an Italian than a Filipino is an American.” In its way, it’s a phrase from a lost world. If you know that Genoa is in the far north of Italy, and Sicily the uttermost south, then you get the picture. But what’s the connection between Filipinos and Americans? My guest ...
Episode 169: The History of the Future
July 22, 2020 10:00 - 58 minutes - 80.1 MBThis week’s conversation is a rather unusual. There’s one guest, as there usually is, but this time there are two hosts—or, two people asking the questions. The guest is David Staley, whom longtime listeners to the podcast will recognized from Episode 111, where he talked about his book Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education, a collection of ideas about the kind of higher education we might have in America if we wanted to. What I didn’t really appreci...
Episode 168: The History of the Future
July 22, 2020 10:00This week’s conversation is a rather unusual. There’s one guest, as there usually is, but this time there are two hosts—or, two people asking the qeustions. The guest is David Staley, whom longtime listeners to the podcast will recognized from Episode 111, where he talked about his book Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher […]
Episode 167: How Black Americans Created American Citizenship
July 16, 2020 12:16 - 1 hour - 86.8 MBOn January 15, 1817, a group of some of the most prominent African-American leaders called a public meeting at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, which had at that time one of the largest communities of free blacks in the United States. They had intended to support a plan for settling American blacks in Africa. But the audience of supposed supporters vociferously disagreed. They saw themselves as American citizens, and had no desire to go to an Africa which they had ne...
Episode 166: Beauty and Terror, or, the Italian Renaissance Re-envisioned
July 08, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 89.7 MBIn the movie The Third Man, Orson Welles delivered this sensational adlibbed speech: You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. This was unfair to Swabia, which invented the cuckoo clock, and to Switzerla...
Episode 165: Western Civ Has Got to…
July 01, 2020 15:12 - 1 hour - 87.4 MBIn 1728, philosopher, theologian, and Anglican minister George Berkeley wrote these verses: The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime Barren of every glorious theme, In distant lands now waits a better time, Producing subjects worthy fame. Not such as Europe breeds in her decay: Such as she bred when fresh and young, When heavenly flame did animate her clay, By future poets shall be sung. Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four acts already past, A fifth shall close the dr...
Episode 164: The Open Sea, or, the Economies of the Ancient Mediterranean
June 24, 2020 10:00 - 59 minutes - 81.5 MBFor generations historians have talked about "the ancient economy". When they want to be more specific, they have written of "the ancient Mediterranean economy." Given the diversity of the ancient Mediterranean world, that's not much more specific. Indeed, sometimes the search for unity has obscured the beauty of specificity, and even how economies and cultures changed over time. In his book The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of R...
Episode 163: The First Martyr of the American Revolution
June 17, 2020 11:00 - 57 minutes - 78.8 MBOn June 18, 1775, 245 years ago tomorrow, Abigail Adams took up her pen to write to her husband John, far away in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress: The Day; perhaps the decisive Day is come on which the fate of America depends. My bursting Heart must find vent at my pen. I have just heard that our dear Friend Dr. Warren is no more but fell gloriously fighting for his Country—saying better to die honourably in the field than ignominiously hang upon the Gallows. Great is our Loss...
Episode 162: The First Scottish Enlightenment
June 10, 2020 13:51 - 54 minutes - 75.1 MBTypically the "Scottish Enlightenment" is the term for the great burst of intellectual creativity, centered on Edinburgh and Glasgow and beginning in the 1720's. It saw advances made in philosophy, law, economics, medicine, and geology, by such great names as David Hume, Adam Fergusson, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and William Robertson–to name but a few. A typical view sees it as an unlikely event following "a century of relative turmoil" which wa...
Episode 161: In the Matter of Nat Turner
June 03, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 122 MBIn early November 1831, Thomas Ruffin Gray was searching for a publisher. He had been one of those whites who had travelled from his home in Richmond to Southampton County, Virginia, to put down the most effective revolt of enslaved persons in the state's history. Gray later returned to Southampton to serve as defense lawyer for the alleged revolutionaries. From November 1 - 3, he interviewed Nat Turner, leader of the revolt, and supplemented that material with interviews of other participan...
Episode 160: The Original Refugees
May 27, 2020 09:00 - 1 hour - 88.9 MBOn October 22, 1685, King Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, the decree promulgated by his grandfather Henri IV which provided French Protestants with a degree of limited toleration. The choices facing those approximately 700,000 French Protestants were stark: they could renounce their beliefes and convert to Catholicism; resist, which could lead to imprisonment or death; or leave France, which was itself an illegal act. Ultimately some 150,000 made new homes across Europe, from...
Bonus: Okinawa, the Crucible of Hell
May 23, 2020 21:55 - 1 hour - 61.8 MBJust to remind you, this is Memorial Day weekend–do not be alarmed if you have forgotten that it's a weekend, let alone that it's Memorial Day. As Professor Wikipedia might tell you, Memorial Day was instituted to remember the Northern dead of the Civil War. It then in time became a memorial encompassing the Southern dead, and eventually the dead of other wars. In the modern American imagination, it's increasingly hard to tell the difference between Memorial Day and Veteran's Day, especially ...
Bonus Episode: Okinawa, the Crucible of Hell
May 23, 2020 21:55 - 1 hour - 61.8 MBJust to remind you, this is Memorial Day weekend–do not be alarmed if you have forgotten that it's a weekend, let alone that it's Memorial Day. As Professor Wikipedia might tell you, Memorial Day was instituted to remember the Northern dead of the Civil War. It then in time became a memorial encompassing the Southern dead, and eventually the dead of other wars. In the modern American imagination, it's increasingly hard to tell the difference between Memorial Day and Veteran's Day, especially ...
Episode 159: Other People’s Money
May 20, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 104 MBImagine, if you would, a world without either money or banks. How could anyone conduct business? How could anyone procure goods and services? How could you have a diversified economy? How could a person plan for the future? This was the world of early America, prior the Revolution. One of the many changes brought about by that event was the creation of both money and banks. But neither of them worked in the ways that we now expect. With us to explore this strange yet oddly resonant world ...
Episode 158: Priests of the Law
May 13, 2020 10:00 - 53 minutes - 73.6 MBMy guest today is Thomas J. McSweeney, Professor of Law at the William and Mary Law School in Willamsburg, Virginia. He earned both his JD and his PhD in History from Cornell University, and is the author of Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law's First Professionals, which is the subject of today’s conversation.
Episode 157: They Knew They Were Pilgrims
May 06, 2020 10:00 - 53 minutes - 73.7 MBMost Americans think they know something about the Pilgrims, based on a dimly remembered High School textbook, or perhaps from a second-grade Thanksgiving pageant: that the men wore stove pipe hats with brass buckles, and carried blunderbusses; that they were the first settlers in America, had the first Thanksgiving, got on well with the Indians; that they were uniquely tolerant while others all around them were not; that they were the most important settlers of New England, or the most influ...
Episode 155: The Second World War, or, the Napoleonic Wars
April 29, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 122 MBWinston Churchill termed the Seven Years War (what Americans think of as the French and Indian War) the “First World War” since its battles took place from Germany to western Pennsylvania to Manila. If that title is accepted, then the “War of the American Revolution” was the Second World War, stretching as it did from the thirteen British American colonies to Europe to India; and thus the Napeoleonic Wars were the Third World War. But neither of those two previous wars could approach the siz...
Episode 156: Stories Told by Trees
April 22, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 85.1 MBTrees, as you may know, have rings. I don't know about you, but I remember the wonder I first felt when my Dad showed me tree rings. He explained that I could tell about the tree's life from the rings; the wide rings were from years of plenty of rain, and the thin ones from years of drought. Those tree rings turn out to be remarkably useful for not just telling us about a tree’s past, but about that of the world in which it grew. Which means, in a funny way, that trees can tell us something a...
Episode 154: The Cabinet
April 08, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 112 MBThe Presidential Cabinet has, it would seem, been a reality of the American republic since soon after its foundation. Yet while executive departments are mentioned in the Constitution, the Cabinet is not. And while the heads of departments were present—or soon to arrive—in New York City when Washington took the first inaugural oath, they did not function as an institution until later With me today to discuss George Washington’s cabinet, its personalities and personality, its history, and its...
Episode 153: Thinking Historically About the Surveillance State
April 02, 2020 21:27 - 27 minutes - 50 MBMy guest today is Christopher Miller. He’s Assistant Professor of International History at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he is co-director of the school's Russia and Eurasia Program. He is author of the books Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (2018) and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy (2016). He's also the author of a very recent essay in The American Interest, “The False Promise of the Surveillance State.” In it he argues that whi...
Episode 152: Modern Dance and Modern America, or, Martha Graham and the Cold War
March 26, 2020 12:32 - 1 hour - 86.9 MBMartha Graham has been described as the “Picasso of modern dance”; she was and remains an icon of modernist high culture. But she was also received at the White House by every President from Franklin Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush, and was a cultural ambassador sent abroad by the United States to demonstrate, as today’s guest writes, a “freedom of expression that was available only in a democracy in which artists were not tools of the state and thus not subject to totalitarian intervention or ...
Episode 151: Time to Eat the Historically Thinking
March 19, 2020 10:50 - 52 minutes - 71.7 MBThis is a crossover episode of Historically Thinking. That's because my guest today is Michael Robinson. He’s Professor of History at Hillyer College, of the University of Hartford. He’s the author of two books: The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture, winner of the 2008 Book Award from the Forum for the History of Science in America, takes up the story of Arctic exploration in the United States during the height of its popularity, from 1850 to 1910; and The Lost White T...
Episode 150: The Science of History, or, the Thought of Giambattista Vico
March 10, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 124 MBGiambattista Vico first published his masterwork The New Science in 1725. He revised it twice more before he died. It was intended to be nothing less than a reinterpretation of the history of human civilization, resulting in a new science of history. It’s influence was somewhat less than Vico might have hoped; it took more than a century and a half after its first publication, before the book emerged from obscurity. Arguably it was in the late 20th century that Vico’s influence was finally fe...
Episode 149: Edges Are Interesting, or, a History of Eastern Europe
March 04, 2020 13:15 - 1 hour - 99.5 MBWhat is a people? What is a nation? Why do some peoples insist that nations must be synonymous with their particular group of people? And why are others content to be simply part of larger nations composed of many peoples? These are some of the questions that John Connelly addresses in his new book From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, published early this year. Nor are they the only questions with which Connelly is preoccupied. Why exactly is the history of Eastern Europe ...
Episode 148: Land of Tears, or, the Exploitation of the Congo
February 26, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 94.2 MBBetween 1870 and 1900, the Congo River basin became "one of the most brutally exploited places on earth." Traders in slaves and natural resources; explorers; and builders of would-be empires entered it from the west, east, and north. They were Arab, English, Belgian, French, and even occasionally American. What they entered into was an ecosystem and culture dominated by the Congo River and its navigation, a complex world that was soon irreparably destroyed. Robert Harms in his new book Land o...
From the Archives: Episode 92: Blood Letters
February 20, 2020 21:05 - 1 hour - 103 MBGiven events in China, I thought it might be good to go back to the archive and to one of the most important, and also the most moving, conversations I've had. Recorded in Professor Lian Xi's office at Duke Divinity School, he and I discuss Lin Zhao's life and times, the survival of her writings, and her growing influence in modern China. Please listen, and share with others interested in history, China, human rights, and the triumph of the human person over tyranny. In 1960, a poet and jour...
From the Archive: Blood Letters
February 20, 2020 21:05 - 1 hour - 103 MBGiven events in China, I thought it might be good to go back to the archive and to one of the most important, and also the most moving, conversations I've had. Recorded in Professor Lian Xi's office at Duke Divinity School, he and I discuss Lin Zhao's life and times, the survival of her writings, and her growing influence in modern China. Please listen, and share with others interested in history, China, human rights, and the triumph of the human person over tyranny. In 1960, a poet and jour...
From the Archive: Presidential History
February 12, 2020 11:00 - 55 minutes - 101 MBThis is a podcast from deep in the past of this podcast; in fact, it's the second ever episode. It in I talk with my old friend and colleague Michael Connolly about "Presidential History." It's a category I'm not particularly fond of, no more than I am "presidential historians". But Michael pushes back here against me and other skeptics, arguing that given public interest in presidential history, Connolly asserts, historians disregard it at their own risk. He argues that presidential history ...
From the Archives: Episode 2: Presidential History
February 12, 2020 11:00 - 55 minutes - 101 MBThis is a podcast from deep in the past of this podcast; in fact, it's the second ever episode. It in I talk with my old friend and colleague Michael Connolly about "Presidential History." It's a category I'm not particularly fond of, no more than I am "presidential historians". But Michael pushes back here against me and other skeptics, arguing that given public interest in presidential history, Connolly asserts, historians disregard it at their own risk. He argues that presidential history ...
Episode 146: The Historically Informed Investment Portfolio; or, the Historian as Financial Analyst
February 05, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 86.3 MBMy guest is Daniel Peris, a historian trained in the history of modern Russia. But by day he is Senior Vice President and Senior Portfolio Manager at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of three books on investing, the most recent of which is Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors and How You Can Bring Common Sense to Your Portfolio. But he’s also the author of Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless. Yet oddly enough,...
Episode 145: The Newburgh Conspiracy
January 29, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 107 MBOn March 15, 1783, a group of some 100 officers of the Continental Army were gathered in the Temple of Virtue, a meeting hall built in their winter encampment near New Windsor, NY (a reconstruction is pictured above). They were there to “consider the late letter from our Representative in Philadelphia” read an unsigned note that circulated around the army’s camp and “what measure (if any) should be adopted, to obtain that redress of grievances, which they seem to have solicited in vain.” Thi...
Episode 144: The French Revolution
January 22, 2020 12:34 - 59 minutes - 81.8 MBIn 1856, meditating on the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: When I came to gather all the individual wishes, with a sense of terror I realized that their demands were for the wholesale and systematic abolition of all the laws and all the current practices in the country. Straightaway I saw that the issue here was one of the most extensive and dangerous revolutions ever observed in the world. This week we discuss that most "extensive" revolution with Jeremy D. Popkin, the Willia...
Episode 143: Horace Greeley, American Editor, or, the Method in His Madness
January 15, 2020 10:30 - 1 hour - 85.4 MBOn October 30, 1872, the wife of Presidential candidate Horace Greeley died. On November 6, Greeley lost in a landslide to President Ulysses S. Grant, winning only six out of 37 states in the electoral college. By November 13, he entered into an asylum for the treating of “mental and nervous disorders”, where he died on November 29. Yet the last month of his life was probably not the most eventful of Greeley’s life. For decades he had been the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, and ...
Episode 142: Cloak and Gondola, or, on Secret Service for the Republic of Venice
January 08, 2020 10:30 - 1 hour - 94.9 MBApologies for the delayed posting of this podcast. Some of us might not like our siblings, but this is ridiculous: “Your excellences must know that my ill-born brother, whose name will shortly be revealed to you…is a traitor to our motherland; he reveals the most important secrets of the negotiations of our councils to Zuane Pecchi, who lives in calle Sporca, inthe neighborhood of San Luca…and then Pecchi reveals them to his compatriot; who is the servant of the Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassad...
Episode 141: Stolen, or, a Journey on the Reverse Underground Railroad
December 30, 2019 18:00 - 1 hour - 85.2 MBIn late August, 1825, a sloop sailed down the Delaware Bay from the port of Philadelphia, bound for the Indian River in southern Delaware. Chained in its hold were five young African-American boys, the eldest of whom was about 14. They were being taken into slavery, kidnapped from the streets of Philadelphia, destined for the lower Mississippi River four months later. Their story is emblematic of what my guest Richard Bell calls the “Reverse Underground Railroad”, the network of criminals wh...
Episode 140: Christmas Feasting, or, Meat, Sugar, Alcohol
December 23, 2019 10:00 - 1 hour - 88.1 MB“There is a moment that comes to so many of us in the late afternoon on Christmas Day,” writes my guest Madeline Shanahan, “when we look at the postmeal dining table festooned with scrunched paper crowns, splattered with cranberry sauce and gravy, and graced with a half-eaten hacked-up plum pudding, and we are torn be- tween cracking on with the inevitable tidy-up and retreating to the sofa for a double Baileys and a snooze. In this moment we vow that we “will never eat again,” and our resolv...
Episode 139: Dominion, or, How Christianity Changed Everything
December 18, 2019 10:30 - 59 minutes - 81.5 MBIn the introduction to his new book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, my guest Tom Holland writes: “For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of “human nature”, but very distincitvely of that civilizations’ Christian past. So profound has been the im...
Episode 138: Music, a Subversive History
December 11, 2019 10:30 - 54 minutes - 75.3 MB“A recurring phenomenon traced in these pages,” writes Ted Gioia in his new book Music: A Subversive History, “a surprisingly consistent one, despite marked differences in epochs and cultures—finds innovations coming from disruptive outsiders who shake up the very same institutions that later lay claim to them.” This is just one of tens or hundreds of insights in Gioia’s book, scattered across its pages, including the importance of bells to music history; the sacrificial ritual of the musicia...
Episode 137: The Decline and Fall of the Adams Family
December 04, 2019 10:30 - 1 hour - 102 MBHello, on February 21, 1848, Congressman John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts had just cast a “nay” vote on a resolution thanking American officers and soldiers for the victories of the Mexican War. In the next moment he suffered a stroke. Lingering for the next two days in the chambers of the Speaker of the House, he died on February 23rd. His death was, for my guest Douglas Egerton, the beginning of the decline of the Adams family as both a political but also as a moral force in American lif...
Episode 136: Thanksgiving and Terroir, or, the South You Never Ate
November 27, 2019 10:30 - 1 hour - 98.9 MBMy guest today begins his newest book with this declaration of purpose. “This is a book about the taste of place and the styles and stories of cooking that define it. It is a book about how people talk about their lives and their histories through the stories that flow from field, marsh, kitchen, and table. This is a book about tradition—the human process of making sense and discovering invention through experience, lived, remembered, imagined…It is a book about how the taste of place express...
Episode 135: Timefulness, or, Where Geology and History Meet
November 20, 2019 11:00 - 47 minutes - 64.6 MB“Timefulness," writes guest Marcia Bjornerud, "includes a feeling for distances and proximities in the geography of deep time. Focusing simply on the age of the Earth is like describing a symphony in terms of its total measure count. Without time, a symphony is a heap of sounds; the durations of notes and recurrence of themes give it shape. Similarly, the grandeur of Earth’s story lies in the gradually unfolding, interwoven rhythyms of its many movements, with short motifs sampering over tone...
Episode 134: Inventing Disaster, or, the Creation of a Culture of Calamity
November 13, 2019 16:12 - 1 hour - 105 MBCultures give us guardrails for behavior, beyond which we can only pass with difficulty. They also give us what to say in a difficult situation, a script that helps us to get the words out, even gives us a template for how to behave. Sometimes these guardrails shift, and the scripts and templates are rewritten. In her new book, Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity, from the Jamestown Colony to the Jonestown Flood, Cynthia Kierner describes the ways in which people (particularly in Nor...
Episode 133: Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, or, Rabies in the City
November 06, 2019 11:00 - 1 hour - 83.6 MBHello, in antebellum and late 19th century New York City, nothing could clear a street faster than the cry of “mad dog!” Rabies was perhaps the most feared disease of the era; and because animals and humans lived in such close proximity, even as New York was growing into a city of millions, that proximity led people to always have in the back of their mind a dread of what might possibly happen to either them or their children. As Jessica Wang describes in her wittily titled new book Mad Dogs...