Historically Thinking

In 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 th...

Hello, 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...

You might as well admit it; you’ve always wondered how you would do in a vicious struggle for power. Those thoughts might be prompted by an over-long project planning meeting for a new software produce, an angry meeting of a humanities department with an associate dean, or from binge-watching Game of Thrones one too many times. But for high-ranking officials in authoritarian regimes, such thoughts...

Some 5,000 years ago nomadic peoples of central Asia settled on the Iranian plateau. Their descendants would be the nucleus of an extraordinary empire that reached north to the lands of their ancestors, eastwards to India and China, and west as far as the Libyan desert and the Aegean Sea. These were the Persians, who not only created the first of the world-empires, but also brought about the first...

This is the second and final part of my conversation with Olivier Zunz about his new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, The Man Who Understood Democracy, just published by Princeton University Press. When last we left Tocqueville, he had just experienced a brilliant success with the publication of the first volume of Democracy in America. In this conversation, we will as promised discuss Tocquevi...

In 1835 a young French author on the verge of publishing his first book wrote “the best thing that can happen to me is if no one read my book, and I have not yet lost hope that this happiness will be mine.” But Alexis de Tocqueville’s hopes were not fulfilled. Although the first printing was just 500 copies, Tocqueville almost immediately became an intellectual celebrity. When he heard people spea...

For most of human history, the wealthy of any given society have been those who owned land. Therefore to change concepts of property ownership has been to change concepts of society itself. In her new book The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights, Jo Guldi focus on land and its distribution as an overlooked engine driving politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of co...

Richard Cohen begins his new book Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past with two particularly appropriate epigrams. First, from the historian E.H. Carr: “Before you study history, study the historian.” Second, the historical novelist Hilary Mantel: “Beneath every history, there is another history—there is, at least, the life of the historian.”  The life of historians is the subject ...

The sociologist Edward Shils said or wrote somewhere that one of the three principle means of education were bookstores—preferably a used bookstore. Shils, for two generations a student and then faculty member at the University of Chicago, spent a lot of time in bookstores, and particularly in the Seminary Co-operative Bookstore, of which he was the 8,704thmember. Jeff Deutsch is the director of C...

Britain in the 1840s should have been, observes Simon Heffer, a time of great social improvement. Instead it was a country that was beset by poverty, unrest, assassination attempts on young Queen Victoria and her Prime Minister, and fears of revolution. Yet just forty years later, it was as if none of that had ever happened. It had become a prosperous and progressive nation, transformed by advance...

In 1814, representatives of the grand coalition that had defeated Napoleon gathered in Vienna. There in meetings and balls–interrupted only by Napoleon’s 100 days after his return from exile on Elba–they developed a new order for Europe that connected peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights. These ideas, writes Glenda Sluga, came not only from male aristocrats and diplomats,...

On the coast of Greece there is an ancient monument that no-one pays very much attention to; and yet it marks one of the most consequential battles in the history of Rome, or really all of Europe. It was ordered to be built by Augustus, first Emperor of Rome, to mark his victory at Actium. At that place a fleet loyal to him defeated one commanded by Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The result determined...

On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey was hung for attempting to lead a slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina. Also executed that day were five of his supporters. Over the next month, a total of 35 men were hung in public executions for their involvement in Vesey’s plot—on one day, 22 were killed in a mass execution. Both “Vesey’s prosecutors and his allies”, writes my guest Jeremy Schipper “appeale...

In 1871 an expedition entered the territory now encompassed by Yellowstone National Park. Led by doctor and self-taught geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, it was to be the first scientific expedition into that mysterious place. But it was also, says my guest Megan Kate Nelson, part of a larger struggle over the expansion of federal power during Reconstruction. Hayden would be one of the three m...

“The story of beer,” writes John Arthur, “is a chronicle about how we as a species have interacted with each other, created prosperous societies, survived difficult and challenging times, and ended up where we are today. Beer continues to be a critical food source for millions of Indigenous people today, providing a fulfilling and nutritious meal. After water and tea, it is the most consumed bever...

From the first weeks of the Great War, in August 1914, medical practice was overwhelmed, not simply by the mass casualties produced by the war, but the types of trauma to which human bodies were being subjected. The result was a transformation over four years not just of warfare, but of medicine. Ideas and hypotheses that had been developed in the thrilling decades of laboratory discovery prior to...

“My underlying goal,” writes my guest Tom Misa, “has been to display the variety of technologies, to describe how they changed across time, and to understand how they interacted with diverse societies and cultures. There’s no simple definition of technology that adequately conveys the variety of its forms or sufficiently emphasizes the social and cultural interactions and consequences that I belie...

Grain traders wandering across the steppe; boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the first fast food breakfast; and war socialism. It's all crammed into this discussion of wheat, and what it wrought, with Scott Nelson. Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Georgia Athletics Association Professor of the Humanities at the University of Georgia. Author of numerous books, his latest is Oceans of Grain...

The Howe famly was at the heart of Britain’s long eighteenth century. Connected to the Hanoverian ruling family by blood, they were addicted to Whig politics, high society, warfare and statecraft, and writing letters. In no less than four wars, Howe men bled and died for Britain, leading ships, regiments, fleets, and armies from Savoy and the western approaches of the Atlantic, to Quebec, India, a...

“Postcards,” writes today’s guest Lydia Pyne, “have left an indelible imprint on the history of human communication, unmatched by any other material medium. They owe their success to the decentralization of their manufacture as well as the physical material connection they created between sender and recipient. Postcards and their digital descendants continue to be about personal connections…We rec...

In 510 BC, an obscure Greek city located literally on a backwater revolted against its tyrant. This was not extraordinary; such things happened regularly in the many Greek city-states. What followed however was extraordinary, and even world-changing. Athens became a democracy. Then just seventeen years after that, Athens and its tiny ally  of Plataea defeated a raid by the mighty Persian Empire. T...

For nearly 3,000 years, the question of what it means to be Greek has been one of perennial interest—and, incredibly enough, not only to the Greeks. How a collection of of small cities and kingdoms around the northeastern Mediterranean Sea laid down precepts for science, the arts, politics, law, and philosophy is one of the great historical stories. Their influence would eventually reach far beyon...

For thousands of years, laws have not only been used to impose order by the powerful on the powerless. In the very process of their codification they often became instruments of control by the powerless, the expression of their hope for a better world. The "common people", not only the rulers, used laws to define their communities, regulate trade, and build their civilization. What truly unites hu...

For nearly a century after the First Crusade captured Jerusalem, that ancient city became the nucleus of a several kingdoms and principalities established by the crusaders.  At the political, social, and cultural heart of their subsequent history were a series of remarkable women who exercised power and influence in a way nearly unknown in western Europe at that time. Katherine Pangonis is the aut...

On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany. Occurring simultaneously with Franklin Roosevelt's "One Hundred Days", Hitler's first one hundred days were even more dramatic and consequential–the most sudden change, Peter Fritzsche writes, in all of German history. "A very partisan and divided society, fragmented between left and righ...