Historically Thinking

Episode 104: An African in Imperial London

In 1919 a man named Ohlohr Maigi died of tuberculosis in London, in deep poverty. He had arrived over a decade before in the imperial capital bearing different name, seeking education, fame and fortune. Some of these he had found, but ultimately he had found much more adversity than success. Ultimately, as Dannel Jones writes, he had spiraled downward on the social ladder, from barrister to worker in a munitions factory, from a satirist of the social order to a tuberculosis patient in a state...

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François Furet, In the Workshop of History Paul Kennedy, "The Nonconformist"  

Commonplace Book for the Week of March 24, 2019

François Furet, In the Workshop of History Paul Kennedy, "The Nonconformist"  

Episode 103: Petrarch’s War

In 1349 the City-Republic of Florence had just endured a horrific epidemic of bubonic plague, that contagion that became known as the Black Death. Nevertheless, despite the effects upon both their population and treasury, they marshaled their resources to fight the Ubaldini clan who dominated the mountain passes through the Appenines to the north of the city. This event my guest Bill Caferro refers to as "Petrarch's War," since the Florentine humanist Petrarch–normally regarded as a promoter...

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Commonplace Book for March 17, 2019

Episode 102: “Object Lesson” is Not Merely a Metaphor

The metaphor “object lesson” is a familiar one, still in everyday use. But what exactly does the metaphor refer to? In her book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World, my guest Sarah Anne Carter reveals that object lessons were a classroom exercise, in wide use during the nineteenth century. She traces them from the Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi, through his English adherents, to seemingly unlikely outposts of educational revoluti...

Commonplace Book for the Week of March 10, 2019

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Episode 101: Yippie-Ki-Yi-Yay

In 1866, a sixteen year old cowboy—the name was literal in his case—named J.M. Daugherty bought 1,000 cattle, hired five cowboys, and headed north for Missouri. In Indian Territory, he took the long way around Cherokee land, to avoid paying them for crossing their lands. As Daugherty told it, some Yankee “Jayhawkers” ambushed him, shot some of his companions, and took him prisoner, accusing him of bringing infected cattle into Kansas. Escaping, the teenager found his cowboys, rounded up the c...

Episode 100: HistoricoThinkaPalooza

It seemed appropriate on the 100th episode to talk with the guest from our first episode, my friend and former colleage and co-writer Lendol Calder. And to make it even better, we’re joined by Sam Wineburg. When Wired magazine first began, on their masthead they listed Marshall McLuhan, the communication theorist, as the magazine’s “patron saint”. If McLuhan was patron saint to Wired, than Sam Wineburg is patron saint of Historically Thinking. In real life, Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks ...

Commonplace Book for the Week of February 25, 2019

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Episode 99: Russ Roberts on the 2008 Financial Crisis, Changing Your Mind, and Intellectual Humility

In an essay on Plato, the German philosopher Josef Pieper suggests that for Plato "the natural habitat of truth is conversation. Truth is enacted in dialogue, in discussion, in discourse: in other words, in language and the word." Russ Roberts is not a philosopher but an economist, as the many listeners to his extremely popular podcast Econtalk can attest. But he strives, I think, to enact truth in dialogue. He is not afraid to proclaim his own opinion, but seeks to understand as best as he ...

Commonplace Book for the Week of January 17, 2019

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Episode 98: A Tour Through the Mind of a Historical Novelist

Christian Cameron has written a lot of novels. A lot. He writes novels faster than some people can read them. He writes so many novels that it's easier to count the series of novels he has written than the number of novels he has written. His are novels of historical action and adventure. Yet, unlike many novels of that sort, Cameron takes a great deal of care to create mentalities and dialogue that are of the eras in which he writes. And, beneath the action, are a number of ideas that Camer...

Commonplace Book for the Week of February 10, 2019

An Inventory of the Skills of Historical Thinking The Essential Skill Comprehension: What do the documents say and mean? Accurately reconstructs the meaning of documents. No misreadings, serious misconceptions of authors’ meanings, or relevant documents ignored.   The Six Core Skills Question to Thesis: What questions make historical sense of these documents? Asks a good historical question, which is then answered in the form of a thesis that makes a significant claim. Connecting: How do...

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An Inventory of the Skills of Historical Thinking The Essential Skill Comprehension: What do the documents say and mean? Accurately reconstructs the meaning of documents. No misreadings, serious misconceptions of authors’ meanings, or relevant documents ignored.   The Six Core Skills Question to Thesis: What questions make historical sense of these documents? Asks a good historical question, which is then answered in the form of a thesis that makes a significant claim. Connecting: How do...

Episode 97: The College Tuition Problem

Well, of course college tuition is a problem--everyone seems to know that. And there are of course lots of reasons why this has occurred. But as with so many matters concerning higher education, it's amazing how poorly understood the problem is particularly by the people who are about to pay the bill. As my guest today Mark Salisbury says, college tuition is like the price of a car–it's not really the actual price, just the beginning of the negotiation. Yet, to continue that metaphor, sometim...

Episode 96: The History of Making Things Cold

Frederic Tudor was the "Ice King" of early nineteenth century America. It was Tudor who realized that ice, harvested from New England ponds and rivers could be shipped to the Caribbean. Shipping was cheap, because ships often went empty to pick up cargo; insulation could be made from sawdust, a waste product of the New England lumber industry. His first shipment was in 1806; after failure and adaptation, he was shipping ice throughout the Caribbean, and using leftover ice to bring back tropic...

Commonplace Book for the Week of January 27, 2019

This is is an artist's imagining of what Washington's second inaugural address was like, not of his only visit to the Senate; if GW had a sword with him on that occasion, he might have thought about using it.  

Episode 95: The Captive Sea

For hundreds of years, people living on the coasts of  the Mediterranean Sea enslaved one another. Moslems from North Africa captured Italians, French, and Spaniards; and North African Moslems were in turn enslaved by those nations. As prisoners, their ransom and redemption became a form of commerce, which in a curious way created communication networks that brought together these different peoples. Captivity integrated the Mediterranean. That is in part the argument of today's guest on Hist...

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Commonplace Book for the Week of January 20, 2019

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Episode 94: The Information-Literate Citizen

Today's guest is Jenny L. Presnell, a Librarian of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Miami University of Ohio. She’s the author of The Information-Literate Historian: A Guide to Research for History Students, the third edition of which was published this year. This gives us both an excuse to talk about how wonderful Zotero is, and the joy of ferreting out primary sources. We also talk about why libraries in the future won't look like Duke Humphrey's Library in Oxford, pictured above. But...

Commonplace Book for the Week of January 13, 2019

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Episode 93: Mortal Republic

When the Greek general Pyrrhus encountered the Roman Republic for the first time, he was deeply confused. Having served with Alexander the Great, and used to the ways of the Eastern Mediterranean, he had never seen anything like Rome. Confused, he legendarily said,"I do not know what barbarians these are." Far from being the "primitive society" that Pyrrhus expected, the Roman Republic was resilient, and implacable in its resistance to external attack—either on the battlefield or from Pyrrhus...

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Commonplace Book for the Week of January 6, 2019

Episode 92: Blood Letters

In 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education. Years before, she had –at approximately the same time– converted to both Christianity and to Maoism. In prison she lost the second faith but clung to the first. She is, judges her biographer Lian Xi, the only Chinese citizen to have openly and steadfastly opposed Mao and his regime–denouncing lies such as those conveyed in the "Great Leap Forward" poster, reproduced...

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This Commonplace Book, and the ideas behind it and for that matter the entire Historically Thinking enterprise, were first written down by Dr. Lendol Calder at Augustana College as part of our "degree specification profile", a document answering the question "What does it mean to have a B.A. Degree in History from Augustana College? Here are the "Purpose" and "Characteristics" sections: PURPOSE A Bachelor of Arts in History prepares students for: Employability in meaningful vocations P...

Commonplace Book for the Week of December 30, 2018

This Commonplace Book, and the ideas behind it and for that matter the entire Historically Thinking enterprise, were first written down by Dr. Lendol Calder at Augustana College as part of our "degree specification profile", a document answering the question "What does it mean to have a B.A. Degree in History from Augustana College? Here are the "Purpose" and "Characteristics" sections: PURPOSE A Bachelor of Arts in History prepares students for: Employability in meaningful vocations P...

Episode 91: Wanamaker’s Temple

On Christmas Eve, 1911, John Wanamaker stood in the middle of his elaborately decorated department store building in Philadelphia as shoppers milled around him picking up last minute Christmas presents. On that night, as for years to come, the store was filled with the sound of Christmas carols sung by thousands of shoppers, accompanied by the store’s Great Organ. Wanamaker recalled that moment in his diary, “I said to myself that I was in a temple,” a sentiment quite possibly shared by the t...

Commonplace Book for the Week of December 23, 2018

The Divine Comedy, Canto 3 A theory as to why Christmas falls on December 25th A History of the Transistor Washington's First Farewell Address–handwritten text and transcription, side by side, from the Library of Congress

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The Divine Comedy, Canto 3 A theory as to why Christmas falls on December 25th A History of the Transistor Washington's First Farewell Address–handwritten text and transcription, side by side, from the Library of Congress

Episode 90: Bourbon Justice

Bourbon whisky has been around since nearly the beginning of the United States. Given that longevity, it has been part of the corporate law of the United States since the beginning of the corporate law of the United States. My guest today Brian Haara traces that interconnection in his new book Bourbon Justice. "Bourbon," Haara writes, "is responsible for the growth and maturation of many substantive areas of the law, such as trademark, breach of contract, fraud, governmental regulation and t...

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Geoffrey Rowell, "Dickens and the Construction of Christmas" John Sutherland, "The Origins of the Christmas Carol" Jon Michael Varese, "Why A Christmas Carol was a flop for Dickens" A brief intro to Leopold von Ranke

Commonplace Book for the Week of December 16, 2018

Geoffrey Rowell, "Dickens and the Construction of Christmas" John Sutherland, "The Origins of the Christmas Carol" Jon Michael Varese, "Why A Christmas Carol was a flop for Dickens" A brief intro to Leopold von Ranke

Episode 89: The Stories in Shoes

"Fashion is universal," writes my guest Kimberly Alexander in her book Treasures Afoot, "enabling historians across time, place, and culture to form an understanding of the people who made clothes and who wore them. But shoes are different. As shoe scholar June Swann opines, 'No other garment or accessory maintains the imprint of its wearer–even over long spans of time.' A shoe molds to the foot and captures a facet of the physical characteristics of its wearer, as well as, by extension, an e...

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights The History of Smallpox, from the Centers for Disease Control Chronology of the League of Nations David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives Pieter Geyl, Napoleon For and Against–in part written during Geyl's imprisonment, containing many of his historiographical reflections

Commonplace Book for the Week of December 9, 2018

Universal Declaration of Human Rights The History of Smallpox, from the Centers for Disease Control Chronology of the League of Nations David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives Pieter Geyl, Napoleon For and Against–in part written during Geyl's imprisonment, containing many of his historiographical reflections

Episode 88: The Great Debate

No, not the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Perhaps even more important than that Illinois contest of 1858 was the Webster-Hayne debate of 1830. Confused? Drawing a blank? Not really your fault. Would you be even more surprised to hear that these were debates held not out in front of voters, but in the Senate? And that debates in the Senate could change public opinion? Build and break coalitions? Redirect political energy? These days when the United States Senate is referred to as “the world’s gre...

Episode 87: Which It’s All About Pirates!

Today I talk with Steve Hahn, Professor of History at St. Olaf's College in Northfield, Minnesota. He's at work on a book about several hundred men who in 1718 sought the King's pardon for piracy at Nassau in the Bahamas. Our fascination with pirates is a little strange, but probably in 200 years there will be little kids walking around in pinstripe suits with Tommy guns pretending to be Al Capone–and while I didn't see anyone dressed like that this Halloween, I did see pirates. This long-te...

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For Further Investigation Jennifer E. Steenshorne, (Fall 2010). "Evacuation Day" (PDF). New York State Archives Blackbeard, the democratic rebel? The "Second Triumvirate" explained, at Livius

Commonplace Book for the Week of November 25, 2018

For Further Investigation Jennifer E. Steenshorne, (Fall 2010). "Evacuation Day" (PDF). New York State Archives Blackbeard, the democratic rebel? The "Second Triumvirate" explained, at Livius

From the Archives: Episode 40: Thinking Historically About Thanksgiving

This is an episode on Thanksgiving recorded two years ago. But it's really ever-green. Safe travels to you and yours. It's Thanksgiving Eve! Which means that at Historically Thinking it's time to think about what the history of Thanksgiving is, and what it can tell us about thinking historically. Our guest today is Tracy McKenzie, professor of history at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Prior to coming to Wheaton he taught history for twenty-two years at the University of Washington, w...

From the Archives: Thinking Historically About Thanksgiving

This is an episode on Thanksgiving recorded two years ago. But it's really ever-green. Safe travels to you and yours. It's Thanksgiving Eve! Which means that at Historically Thinking it's time to think about what the history of Thanksgiving is, and what it can tell us about thinking historically. Our guest today is Tracy McKenzie, professor of history at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Prior to coming to Wheaton he taught history for twenty-two years at the University of Washington, w...