Alumni of the University of Virginia enjoy pointing out that while Thomas Jefferson’s tombstone declares his foundation of that university as his third great achievement, it does not so much as mention his presidency of the United States. Jefferson had a vision of what a great university could and should be, and the political talent and allies to see that vision implemented. That vision was an intimate part of his republican political philosophy, and of his hopes and fears for the fate of the republic in whose creation he had participated. As Andrew O’Shaughnessy writes in his new book The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University, “Acknowledging that his ideas were utopian, [Jefferson] regarded himself as an idealist who wanted to benefit humankind, improve society, and offer a happier life.” Andrew O’Shaughnessy is Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, and the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. His most recent book was The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of Empire, which was awarded the George Washington Book Prize.  

Historically Thinking: Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it

Episode 229: Mr. Jefferson and His University

Joseph Wright, a native of the West Riding of Yorkshire, started working in a factory at the age of 6. He did not learn to read until he was 15, inspired to do so by a workmate who read news bulletins about the Franco-Prussian War. Wright was taught by another worker who used the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress as texts. He then attended night school, for six pence a week;  practiced shorthand by taking down sermons in the Methodist chapel his family atteneded; was part of a Sunday school where he organized a lending library; and at the age of 18 started his own night school. But the time time he was 21, he had saved up enough for a term at the University of Heildelberg, to which he walked 250 miles from the port of Antwerp in order to save his money. Eventually he earned  a PhD from Heidelberg in comparative linguistics, and from 1901 to 1925, Joseph Wright was Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford, a pioneer in the study of regional English dialect, and taught among others J.R.R. Tolkein. While his eventual profession might make Wright extraordinary, many of the particulars of his education were absolutely typical, as Jonathan Rose makes clear in his monumental book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Published in 2001, it won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize and the British Council Prize. Its third edition is published this fall by Yale University Press. Jonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. He served as the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and also as the president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association.  

Episode 228: The Intellectual Life in Difficult Circumstances

In the last days of 1358, thousands of French villagers across northern France revolted against a faltering regime, from Normandy in the west, to Picardy and Champagne in the east. Castles and manor houses were burned and looted, noblemen and the families were assaulted, murdered, and possibly raped. Enraged nobles counterattacked, executing rebels, or those they believed to be rebels, and burning whole villages. This was the Jacquerie, taking its name from “Jacques Bonhomme”, the sobriquet given to its participants. It was one of the many calamitous events of that decade, which had begun with the Black Death in 1348. But what is its story? Why did the Jacquerie arise? Who were they? Why did this revolt so quickly end? And were there any lasting effects? With me to describe the story of the Jacquerie is Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Senior Lecturer at the University of St. Andrew’s, and author of The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasant’s Revolt. A former fellow of All Souls Oxford, she is also a general editor of The Medieval Journal, and editor in chief of St. Andrew’s Studies in French History and Culture.

Episode 227: The First French Revolution

Go into an American bookshop, and you’ll get the impression that the only two most important events that ever happened in all of human history were the American Civil War and the Second World War. In England, it's all very different. There the two most important events in human history are the  Tudors (Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess, the Spanish Armada and all that)...and the Second World War. So in the spirit of giving the people what they want, the first two books in Dominic Sandbrook’s new Adventures in Time series–written for children of all ages, but particularly for his son Arthur—are The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Second World War. Dominic Sandbrook has reached Tudor England and Nazi Germany by a curious road that began with his first book, a biography of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, and has wandered through a series of fantastic books on modern Britain after 1957, most recently Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982. He is a columnist for The Daily Mail, and is the co-host with Tom Holland of a charming niche podcast, The Rest is History. Dominic Sandbrook's website Follow Dominic on Twitter Regular listeners of this podcast might recall Tom Holland from Episode 139, in which I persuaded the notoriously reticent Holland to open up about the argument of his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, something that he rarely does. Early in the conversation I mentioned this essay by Jon Zimmerman, Eliot Cohen, and I talked briefly about the Landmark Books in Episode 205, during our discussion of civics and history

Episode 226: Adventures Through Time, with Dominic Sandbrook

Sometimes Americans are pretty sure that they know a few things about the British soldiers who fought in the American Revolution. A list of them probably is something like this: They were the scum of the earth, scraped from the London gutter and the prisons to unwillingly serve in America They were stupid, so stupid that they obligingly wore red coats and stood in long lines, the easier to be shot by clever Americans who hid behind trees and rocks They had no idea how to fire their guns, and when they did they always missed They plundered and looted and deserted as often as they could, when they weren’t drunk As punishment they were flogged until they were dead. Just about every one of those concepts is wrong, as Don Hagist explains in his book Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution. He has written several previous books on the British Army of the American Revolution, as well as The Revolution's Last Men: The Soldiers Behind the Photographs. In addition to writing, and his day job, he is the editor of the Journal of the American Revolution. Don was previously on the podcast to talk about flogging and punishment, in a “Behind the Book” episode of the podcast (Behind the Book 6: The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves), when I sought to discover whether Daniel Morgan could have actually been given the punishment of five hundred lashes, and whether or not that should have been a death sentence.

Episode 225: Noble Volunteers, or, The British Soldier in the American Revolution

Historians are always interested in how things change over time, and it helps for the survival of the profession that most things do. But there are certain moments in history when things don't just change, they change so radically that it feels like going over a waterfall in a kayak. How do these moments of change come about? How can an entire social order change in a decade or two? And how does radical change in the social order not only occur, but succeed? My guest David Potter untangles these questions in his new book Disruption: Why Things Change. David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan, making him a man with at least two chairs in his office. Previously he has written on prophecy and history, the origins of the Roman Empire, on sport in the Greco-Roman world—and many other books.

Episode 224: Disruption

Denali, the mountain formerly sometimes known (but not by Alaskans) as Mt. McKinley, is one of the most impressive mountains in the entire world. It is not only the highest mountain in North America, it is the highest northern-most mountain. That means that the weather at its summit is ferocious and ever-changing. It's height is so great that when that weather clears away, it can be seen across an enormous swathe of Alaska. It is the kind of mountain that challenged Victorians to climb it. By 1913 several attempts had already been made to summit Alaska’s Denali, the highest mountain in North America. That year its peak was finally reached by four men: Harry Karstens, a prospector, hunter, and guide; Walter Harper, a native Alaskan; Robert Tatum, an Episcopalian seminary student; and the Right Reverend Hudson Stuck, missionary archdeacon of the Episcopal Church in Alaska. What that curious group was doing at such an altitude is the story of Patrick Dean's book A Window to Heaven: The Daring First Ascent of Denali: America's Wildest Peak. It’s by turn a biography of Hudson Stuck, a history of religious life in late 19th century America, a history of Alaska at the moment of immense social change, and a story seemingly co-written by Jack London. For Further Investigation Hudson Stuck's books are all open domain and available through archive.org  The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Maria Sháa Tláa Williams Denali: Deception, Defeat, & Triumph–a history of early attempts to summit

Episode 223: Climbing Denali

The wrong food can kill you. The right kind of food can help you live longer. Additives are unnatural. Unnatural food is unhealthy food. These are assumptions that many or most of us have today about the things we eat. That we believe eating to be a matter of life or death is in part due to a man most of us have never heard of, Harvey Wiley. Head of the Division of Chemistry at the Department of Agriculture, and later employed by the magazine Good Housekeeping, Wiley became an advocate of "pure food", and got his ideas out through masterly use of newspapers eager for copy. "You don't understand, sir," said President Theodore Roosevelt to one businessman complaining about Wiley, "that Dr. Wiley has the grandest political machine in the country." Jonathan Rees's new biography of Wiley, The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley's Fight for Pure Food, is not only about Wiley, but about scientific progress, the meaning of food and health, progressivism, the bureaucratic state, and that place where science and publicity meet.  It's a great read. Professor of History at Colorado State University, Jonathan Rees was previously on the podcast in Episode 96 talking about the curious history of keeping things cold.    

Episode 222: The Chemistry of Fear

Carrie Nation was, of course, a prohibitionist. But so was Leo Tolstoy, Czar Nicholas II, and Vladimir Lenin; in fact, the first nation to prohibit the sale of alcohol was Russia. The first Socialist Prime Minister of Sweden was an advocate for temperance, and so was Tomas Masaryk, liberal founding-father of Czechoslovakia.  As Mark Schrad writes in his new book Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, around the globe the “temperance-cum-prohibition movement harnessed the forces of organized religions into a broad-based progressive movement to capture the instruments of legislation and statecraft against powerful, established political actors.” We can only understand American prohibition by realizing that it was just one part of a worldwide movement, advocated by people who often had little in common other than their interest in limiting alcoholism in their society. Moreover, as we discuss in the podcast, "prohibition" is a simple word that conceals much. While some advocates did press for the prohibition of the sale of liquor, others advocated temperance, which might take the form of advocating drinking beer instead of schnapps, or wine instead of brandy. There was never just one approach to dealing with the problems of alcoholism. Mark Schrad is Associate Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. This is his third book touching on some aspect of governmental policies towards alchohol, or networks promoting prohibition or temperance. He also restores old typewriters; that didn't come up in the conversation but, man, he has a very, very impressive collection.

Episode 221: Prohibition Wasn’t American

For many colleges, this is the first week of class. And that means for both new teachers and new students, it's the beginning of one of three weeks that will influence the rest of their year, and their time in college. Believe us, it's science, as you'll hear in this conversation from long ago with our old friend Mark Salisbury. This is one of the many conversations about college that Historically Thinking has done that we think of as Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed. You can find numerous conversations there which will hopefully illuminate areas that for many people are very obscure indeed.  (But why the University of Chicago has bagpipes amongst its traditions...this will forever remain a mystery locked in a closet. We just don't want to know.)

Episode 220: From the Archive, The First Three Weeks of College

Edward Gibbon tells us that it was in the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter while listening to the singing of the barefooted friars that he first began to meditate on a history of the decline and fall of the city of Rome. He was far from the first English visitor to Rome to be deeply and profoundly moved by the ruins of the ancient empire; an early medieval English visitor in the 8th or 9th century wrote a poem describing the “works of giants decaying.” Nor was Gibbon the first to speak of the decline of Rome. As Edward Watts makes abundantly clear in his new book, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea, no one was ever more preoccupied by the decline of Rome than the Romans themselves. Edward J. Watts is Professor & Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair in Byzantine Greek History at the University of California San Diego. The author of numerous books, he was last on the podcast in Episode 93 discussing his book Mortal Republic.

Episode 219: The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome

In 1756 an unmarried Quaker woman wrote “Deborah Morris, her book, 1756” in, of all things, a book entitled The American Instructor, or, Young Man’s Best Companion. That might seem to have been an odd choice. But as my guest Sarah Damiano explains, it was a very useful book for Deborah Morris to have, because Deborah Morris was a landlady, a retailer, and an investor. In this she was far from alone among 18th century American women, as much as that surprise us. Credit was at the heart of the overlapping circles of finance, law, and sociability. Since early America was cash poor, most transactions were based on credit--simply noted in a ledger, until such time as the creditor required hard cash. Sara Damiano explains in detail how free women in Newport, Rhode Island and Boston used credit in pursuit of profits in her new book To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth Century New England.  She shows how women were borrowers, lenders, litigants, and even witnesses in the many, many, many court cases that revolved around credit. Sarah Damiano is Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University, and we hope you'll agree that she shows us a whole new way of looking at early America.

Episode 218: To Her Credit

Those of us who still carry coins or cash—and I notice that I do that less and less—carry around “a pocket guide to world history and culture.” Money, writes Frank Holt, provides us with a historical record “unrivaled by papyrus, paper and parchment. Coins are perhaps the most sucessful information technology ever devised.” In his new book When Money Talks: A History of Coins and Numismatics, Holt briskly and whimsically explores the life of coins; the importance of coins; and how to decode the information that coins provide, as well as providing us with a history of the history of doing that. Frank Lee Holt is Professor of Classical History at the University of Houston, with research emphases on the subject matter of the forgotten peripheries of the classical world and on the methodology of cognitive numismatics—of which much more will be said in this conversation.

Episode 217: When Money Talks

Nearly every introduction to the Appalachian Trail seems to begin by giving its length (about 2,100 miles) and that it goes from Georgia to Maine. Which is strange, when you think about it. No one much talks about I-95, or the I-10, or the I-5—maybe they should—and when they do they don’t tell us about their length, or where they begin and end. Neither really tell us much about the thing itself. Philip D’Anieri has done something different. He has written a biography of the Appalachian Trail (it's called, sensibly enough, The Appalachian Trail: A Biography) and done it by writing about the lives of those involved with it, as creators, hikers, planners, and writers—a wonderfully curious collection of Americans. But in the end, these human lives end up becoming the collective life of that 2,100 mile path that goes all the way from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Katahdin in Maine.   For Further Investigation Here's a helpful collection of web-based resources and books about the Trail, put together by Philip D'Anieri

Episode 216: The Appalachian Trail

Throughout their history Americans have found themselves fighting “unexpected enemies—foes from different cultural backgrounds, who fought in unfamiliar ways, and against whom they were unprepared to fight.” In the new book The Other Face of Battle: America's Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat, a group of military historians has put together three exemplars of such fights, woven together with an analysis of the discontinuity and continuity of the way that Americans have waged such wars. With me to talk about The Other Face of Battle are three of its four co-authors. They are David Silbey, Adjunct Associate Professor and Associate Director of Cornell in Washington; David Preston, General Mark W. Clark Distinguished Chair of History at the Citadel; and Wayne Lee, Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Episode 215: The Other Face of Battle

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