The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Joseph J. Ellis, author of “American Dialogue: The Founders and Us.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Wootton, author of Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19....

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and “the American Dream.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https:...

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Levering Lewis, author of “The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Jim Holt, author of “When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Steven Ujifusa, author of “Barons of the Sea: And Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode 31: Roland Philipps by Lapham’s Quarterly See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Catherine Nixey, author of “The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/pr...

One of America’s most enduring myths involves the fledging country’s supposed fortitude in refusing to import the class structures of its forebears. But, historian Steve Fraser says in the latest episode of The World in Time, “right now, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to sustain that delusion.” Or, as he puts it at the beginning of his book Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American De...

Episode 28: Stephen Greenblatt by Lapham’s Quarterly See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Barbara Ehrenreich thought there was something strange going on with the smart middle-aged people she knew. They seemed to be obsessed with their bodies in a novel and unexpected way, exercising frequently, assessing the value of every bite they considered, and obeying every preventive measure offered by doctors. “I did not share this obsession, I will admit,” she says on this episode of The World...

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Susan Dunn, author of A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days That Mobilized America. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#...

“Beyond any doubt the decades from the 1800s to the 1900s witnessed many extraordinary and traumatic challenges and wrenching and disorienting changes,” historian David Cannadine writes in the epilogue of Victorious Century, “as expressed and mediated through (among other things) the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, the paintings of Turner and Landseer, the novels of Dickens and Eliot, and even...

The period of American history that extends from 1865 to 1896, Stanford historian Richard White writes in the introduction to The Republic for Which It Stands, “for a long time devolved into historical flyover country. Writers and scholars departed the Civil War, taxied through Reconstruction, and embarked on a flight to the twentieth century and the Progressives, while only rarely touching down i...

“Two and a half decades after the collapse of the USSR, it seems the strangest of anachronisms that Vladimir Illyich Lenin can continue to draw such crowds,” Victor Sebestyen writes of Lenin’s tomb. “Everyone knows the havoc he wreaked; few people now believe in the faith he espoused. Yet he still commands attention—even affection—in Russia.” That attention also made the historian’s exhaustive new...

“For over two centuries, this topic has been subject to whitewashing and selective remembering and forgetting,” historian Holger Hoock writes. He is referring to the American Revolution, a war sanitized by sentimentality and historical distance but about as bloody as other moments in the past with a “Revolution” appended to its name. The facts Hoock cites are relentless: “More than ten times as ma...

“History does not tell us what to do,” Civil War scholar Eric Foner says, but it does help us understand how the world got this way, as long as you aren’t stuck playing the Great Men greatest hits in your studies. But that’s what most of us learn: a litany of good or important deeds done by familiar names that turns history into a constellation of memorized details instead of a reckoning. This poc...

“The book teaches me things,” Barack Obama explained to his friends when defending his decision to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “about white people…the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world.” In her introduction to The Dawn Watch, Maya Jasanoff writes that she came to agree w...

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826. Reportedly Adams’ last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives”—without realizing his former vice president had predeceased him. Despite the fact that the political colleagues faced off in one of the dirtiest presidential campaigns in American history, the pair ended their lives no...

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Adrian Goldsworthy, author of Pax Romana. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

How do you sift through a place’s past once historical memory has settled? Does that process grow complicated when that place is home, and you have to contend with your own memories too? Roger D. Hodge, national editor of The Intercept, tries to get past the clichés that have piled up around Texas to find something new to say about the place he grew up, which has a story layered with the accumulat...

“World War II exhausted superlatives,” Victor Davis Hanson writes. But despite the global conflict’s ability to stretch our imagination of what warfare could entail, its spark and preambles look familiar, says Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He explains how the war’s ending might have been predictable—and why he decided to go with the plural in his title. Lewis H. Lapham talks w...

The history of paper is a story of technology following a need, argues Mark Kurlansky. The Chinese invented paper to keep records cheaply and easily in a bureaucratic society. It wasn’t until centuries later that the Arabs—adept at mathematics, astronomy, and accounting—had reason to adopt paper. Europeans, plagued by illiteracy, long knew of paper (Arab merchants regularly offered it for sale), b...

Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads looks at the many ways the world connects itself, going well beyond trade routes to tell a story about the energies that shaped the course of history. In moving silk, spices, furs, gold, silver, slaves, religion, and disease on the Silk Road, the West became linked to people and ideas in the region between the Mediterranean and the Himalayas. It’s the origin, argue...