The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. In a new book Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stephen Greenblatt takes up the tale of Adam and Eve, the world’s most famous origin story. Greenblatt tracks the tale from its creation, perhaps as a response to the Jews’ Babylonian exile, through its varied interpretations, from the time it was viewed symbolica...

In France the period from the summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871 has come to be known as the terrible year: France suffered a humiliating defeat in its war against Prussia, with Paris sieged and the capture of Emperor Napoleon III. Citizens of Paris who refused to capitulate to a new national government in Versailles formed the Paris Commune, which was brutally repressed. One Parisian tryin...

The northernmost Civil War battle was fought in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and though Confederate soldiers never came within three hundred miles of Manhattan, New York City was far from untouched by the conflict—the ships dispatched by President Lincoln to quell the rebellion’s beginning at Fort Sumter, for example, sailed from New York harbor. Rebel sympathizers, abolitionists, immigrants, and fre...

Until the fifteenth century the only sea that mattered (politically, socially, and economically) was the Mediterranean. As sixteenth-century European explorers set sail in search of land and opportunity, it was the Atlantic that carried them from old worlds to new. Since the middle of the twentieth century, argues Simon Winchester, it’s been the Pacific Ocean that dominates trade, travel, and scie...

Why did World War I begin? Why did America enter the conflict? What place does the war hold in American historical memory? These are questions historian Michael Kazin asks his Georgetown University students, and many of them are stumped. When Woodrow Wilson plunged the country headfirst into its first European fight, he was met with resistance from nearly every corner of American society—in New Yo...

The life and thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has been badly misunderstood, argues historian Erica Benner. Far from his usual depiction as a politically amoral henchman, Machiavelli was in fact a prescient critic of princely power and religious zealotry. He lived the problems of government and fought to change a corrupt world. Lewis H. Lapham talks to Erica Benner, author of Be Like the Fox: Machiav...

Lexicographers write and edit dictionaries, and while they’re becoming a rare breed, language—ever evolving—is a growth industry. There are only some fifty full-time lexicographers in the U.S. They spend their time reading, writing, and synthesizing the words we use, eschew, and transform. Lewis Lapham talks with Kory Stamper, lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and the author of Word by Word: The Se...

Every man is an ecosystem, ejecting some of the 39 trillion microbes each person on earth contains. While microbes are among the oldest living organisms on earth, it wasn’t until 1675 that scientists began to understand their existence—or their scope. Lewis Lapham talks with Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, about discovering communities of...

How do you measure change? It is often said that the twentieth century saw more change than any other period. But today’s interest in modern technology obscures the massive changes the world has undergone over the past millennium. Lewis Lapham talks with Ian Mortimer, author of Millennium: From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization Has Changed Over a Thousand Years, about the history of change...

In 1791 an American military expedition led by General Arthur St. Clair to assert U.S. claims in the region north and west of the Ohio River was attacked by a confederation of Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware Indians that hoped to stop the country’s westward expansion. With nearly one thousand U.S. casualties, the American defeat was the worst the country would ever suffer at native hands. Americans w...

In the sixteenth century 300,000 people lived in the imperial quarter of Beijing, which housed the bureaucracy of the Chinese state. At the time Europe had only three cities—London, Naples, and Paris—with as many residents. European governments were by contrast small and static. Over the past five hundred years, partly in response to the grand scale of government power in Asia and the Islamic worl...

From the end of World War II to 1980 virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Middle East; since 1990 virtually no American soldiers have been killed anywhere except the Middle East. Lewis Lapham speaks with Andrew J. Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, about America’s shift from the Cold War to war in the Middle East....

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, about the language of poverty and American myths about class, work, and equality. 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:/...