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Historically Thinking

Al Zambone

We believe that when people think historically, they are engaging in a disciplined way of thinking about the world and its past. We believe it gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense; and that it cultivates not only intellectual curiosity and rigor, but also intellectual humility. Join Al Zambone, author of Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, as he talks with historians and other professionals who cultivate the craft of historical thinking.

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Yesterday · 32 min
Hidden Terrors: Paul Kelton on cholera and moral judgment in Jacksonian America
The disease cholera first arrived in North America in 1832, at the ports of Quebec and Montreal. From there it spread along the waterways of the continent, reaching great cities, small towns, and isolated farms. It killed more quickly than any disease Americans had yet endured, and it killed horrifically. Its victims vomited, suffered from explosive diarrhea and terrible spasms, turned blue, and finally entered the coma that preceded death. A healthy man at breakfast could be a corpse at midnight—or even sooner. In this conversation, Paul Kelton explains how newspapers allowed Americans to watch the pandemic approaching; why medical authorities blamed alcohol, diet, poverty, race, and supposed moral failure; and how public-health measures intensified the danger for Irish immigrants, impoverished workers, incarcerated people, enslaved African Americans, and Indigenous peoples forced westward. Cholera’s movement through Jacksonian America initially followed its waterways. It then benefited from its systems of confinement, enslavement, human trafficking, and dispossession. Paul Kelton is Professor and Robert David Lion Gardiner Chair in American History at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on Indigenous North America, early American history, and the relationship between colonialism, medicine, and epidemic disease. His latest book is Hidden Terrors: The Scourge of Cholera in Jackson’s America.
October 28 · 53 min
Episode 482: First Research University
At his death on December 24, 1873, the Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins left $7 million. which established both a hospital and the first American research university bearing his name. From its beginning Johns Hopkins pursued a distinctive and often eccentric course, moving from early dominance and innovation to decline and then renewal, all amidst recurring debates over what direction the university should take. Those debates concerned questions that remain unsettled. Should a university emphasize advanced research or undergraduate education? Should research be pursued wherever an investigator’s curiosity leads, or directed toward practical ends? How much influence should donors, foundations, corporations, and governments possess? And what happens when an institution created to be different becomes the model everyone else follows? In this conversation with Andrew Jewett, author of Johns Hopkins: The First 150 Years, we see that Hopkins’s history is more than its own. It is also the story of the creation of the American research university and its development into one of the most powerful—and increasingly uneasy—set of American institutions of the twenty-first century.
October 23 · 1 hr
The Bookshop: Andrew Pettegree on six centuries of booksellers seeking readers
Since the invention of the printing press, printers have published books. And ever since books have been published, they have been sold. Yet today’s guest observes that, remarkably enough, there is a “paucity of literature on the history of the buying and selling of books.” While there have been plenty of studies of publishing and reading, “the commercial transactions that allowed books to pass from the producer to the reader are seldom explored.” In his new book, The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century, my guest Andrew Pettegree attempts to remedy that deficiency. In his large net he captures such specimens as self-publishing, book pedlars, publishers’ representatives, printing on speculation, paperbacks, bookstore chains, and book clubs—nearly all of which turn out to be much older than one might expect. At the heart of his story is the intertwining of publishing and bookselling, which remained merged into the middle of the twentieth century and has, in many ways, become entangled once again in the era of digital books. Andrew Pettegree is Bishop Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews. Trained as a historian of the European Reformation, he is now one of the leading historians of communication, printing, publishing, and the book trade. As part of this study, he is the founder and director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a free resource that now describes more than 1.6 million editions published between 1450 and 1700, and has located almost seven million surviving copies in libraries, archives, and museums around the world.
October 21 · 30 min
Political Appetites: Nancy Siegel on liberty tea, election cakes, mammoth cheeses—and how Americans made politics in the kitchen
Published October 21, 2026 (Episode 480) During the era of the American Revolution, food and drink had political meanings and could express what Americans thought their government should be. Protests over tea—and the brewing of tea alternatives—mammoth cheeses delivered to Thomas Jefferson and mammoth cakes baked for Election Day; from planting gardens to setting tables: all of these could be statements of political purpose. And these were activities and practices engaged in not only by white men with sufficient property to qualify them to vote, but by poor white men, women, enslaved people, and Native Americans. Through growing, preparing, serving, and eating food, they too could participate in nation-building. In this conversation, Nancy Siegel explains how ordinary foods became instruments of protest, persuasion, satire, commemoration, and political participation—and why the history of democracy can be found in kitchens and gardens as well as legislatures and battlefields. Nancy Siegel is Professor of Art History and Culinary History and Assistant Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication at Towson University. Her new book, Political Appetites: The Power of Food in Revolutionary America, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press on October 13, 2026. It inspired the WMHT Public Media documentary Feeding the American Revolution, hosted by Siegel and premiering December 8.
October 20 · 32 min
Charlemagne's Dream: James T. Palmer on the Carolingians and the Dark Side of Empire
Apologies for neglecting to drop this episode last week; on the bright side, you'll get this week's episode just a few hours from now. To always get an episode, and much else besides, subscribe to the Historically Thinking Substack. The story of the Emperor Charles the Great, or Charlemagne, and his wider family is often told as one of glorious triumph followed by unfortunate decline. Emerging in more or less the 750s in what is now France, the Carolingians were part of a religious, political, social, and cultural order that was still haunted by the passing of the Western Roman Empire three centuries before. While many Roman practices endured, as did trade in the Mediterranean basin, institutional life had deteriorated in nearly every respect. Into this disorder came Charles, and following him an ever-growing host of clerics, bureaucrats, and soldiers, who reordered alphabets, liturgies, and borders, leaving behind a legacy that lasts until this very moment. But what if, my guest James Palmer suggests, there was always a dark side to this success that haunted all its protagonists? What if that process of ordering and tidying could often look—on not very close inspection—very disordered and messy itself? And how might we then think differently about the early Middle Ages? James T. Palmer is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The author of four previous books on the early Middle Ages, his latest is Charlemagne’s Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Carolingian Empire, and it is the subject of our conversation today.
October 7 · 34 min
The Great Horse Flu: Thomas Andrews on the “Great Epizootic of 1872”, and the Fate of Reconstruction America
In September 1872, in the countryside north of Toronto, horses began to fall ill. Their noses ran, they coughed, and their breathing became “labored and severe.” In the worst cases, the sufferers could do nothing other than stand in their stalls “as if benumbed and paralyzed.” Eventually, an increasing number of them began to die. Within days of the illness being identified, it was spreading throughout the new Canadian Confederation. By mid-October it had invaded New England and upstate New York; by late October it had nearly ended traffic on the Erie Canal. In early November it reached New York City and Boston. Eventually, it would spread through nearly every corner of North America and into parts of the Southern Hemisphere. Thomas G. Andrews is professor of history and faculty director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research and teaching encompass environmental, animal, Indigenous, labor, and western American history. He is the author of Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the George Perkins Marsh Prize, and Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies. His latest book reconstructs the extraordinary equine influenza outbreak of 1872–73 and uses it to reconsider capitalism, urbanization, animal labor, Reconstruction, and the Panic of 1873.
September 30 · 29 min
Librarian's War: Molly Guptill Manning on Ray Trautman and the Army of Readers
On December 16, 1944, as American troops retreated or fled before advancing German soldiers on the first day of what is now known as the Battle of the Bulge, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Love Trautman found himself leading an ad hoc formation of stragglers and stranded soldiers. This might not seem strange—that’s a lieutenant colonel’s job, isn’t it? But while Ray Trautman had the rank of a lieutenant colonel, his training was that of a librarian. He was, to be sure, the Army’s chief librarian, but that was hardly preparation for combat. This is just one of the many amazing revelations in Molly Guptill Manning’s new book, A Librarian’s War: The Man Who Fought World War II with Books and Brought the Joy of Reading to Millions. She tells the story of how Trautman, having earned a degree in library science at Columbia, joined the Army, created the largest library system in the world, and championed the Armed Services Editions of books and magazines. This is not simply a biography of Trautman. It is also a history of the Second World War as a war of ideas, of intellectual life under some of the most difficult imaginable circumstances, and—maybe—of the future of reading. Molly Guptill Manning is a historian, curator, and professor of law at New York Law School. Her scholarship examines legal history and the intersection of law and culture, with particular interests in freedom of expression, censorship, voting rights, and access to books.
September 23 · 34 min
Glorious Fate: Kevin Levin on the short life and complicated afterlife of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts
On July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts—one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army, and the first raised in the North—led an assault on Fort Wagner, one of the fortifications defending Charleston, South Carolina. Their attack was preceded by an eight-hour bombardment that did little damage to the fort’s walls or defenders. Moving through heavy Confederate small-arms fire, with their commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, at their head, the 54th made their way up the walls and into hand-to-hand combat, but were bloodily repulsed. By the end of the action, Shaw and some 250 men had been killed, wounded, or captured. With his death, Robert Gould Shaw became a hero of the abolitionist movement, eventually memorialized in bronze at the head of his regiment on Boston Common. But as my guest Kevin Levin argues in his new book, A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, he was a much more complicated and ambiguous person than even his contemporaries claimed him to be. Kevin M. Levin is an award-winning historian and educator based in Boston. His work explores the history and memory of the Civil War, particularly the ways Americans have remembered slavery, emancipation, Black military service, and the Confederacy. His books include Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder, and now A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. He has written about Civil War history and memory online since founding Civil War Memory in 2005 and is an honorary fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
September 16 · 34 min
Justice for Jehanne: Sara McDougall on a medieval survivor, a criminal investigation, and the limits of justice
Content Warning: This episode contains frank discussions of rape, sexual assault, and physical violence and is not suitable for children. On a winter morning in 1472, an investigator arrived at a poor widow’s home in the St. Nicholas district of the city of Dijon. He was there to interview a tenant, a pregnant woman named Jehanne, an immigrant from the county of Lorraine. She had reportedly been abducted and sexually assaulted by several men, and Jacques Borestal--the substitute prosecutor of Dijon–began his investigation by taking Jehanne’s testimony. This was far from the first such case that Borestal had investigated. For about thirty years he had investigated dozens of allegations of rape, as well as dozens more of theft, violence, assault and abduction. Many times his investigations of rape ended when, asking the victim if she wished make a criminal complaint, she declined to do so. But Jehanne said that she did. This decision is at the heart of Sara McDougall’s new book Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of Medieval Survivor. It is a window into a world of cruelty and repentance, of heart-stoppingly casual violence in which “safety and security remained impossible dreams”, and in which nearly everyone in society had extraordinarily limited options for justice and restitution. Sara McDougall is Professor of History at John Jay College of the City University of New York, and a member of the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She studies gender and justice in the Middle Ages, with particular attention to women’s encounters with legal and religious institutions in medieval France. Her previous books are Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late-Medieval Champagne.
September 9 · 34 min
Pericles of Athens: Paul Cartledge on the statesman, demagogue, and eccentric
Pericles of Athens was a complicated man, a man of twists and turns. Born into a lineage of Athenian aristocrats, he became a champion of democracy and indeed a masterful demagogue. A teenager by the end of the Persian Wars, he was one of the architects of an Athenian empire designed to ensure that Persia never again advanced westward. Possibly his earliest public act as an Athenian citizen was to sponsor four plays by Aeschylus, beginning a lifelong association with the artistic life of the city. And while he married as an Athenian aristocrat was expected to marry, his later domestic life proved, by Athenian standards, strikingly unconventional. These are only some of the many facets of Pericles that Paul Cartledge examines in his new book Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric. Along the way he also traces the afterlife of Pericles himself—from the hostile portrayals of his contemporaries to Victorian admiration and even the appropriations of twentieth-century dictators. Paul Cartledge is A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge. One of the world’s leading historians of ancient Greece, he has written extensively on Sparta, Athens, Alexander the Great, and Greek political thought. His many books include Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, discussed on Historically Thinking in Episode 177, and his newest work, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric.
September 2 · 26 min
Out of Chaos: Jon Wilson on how the Second World War led to the Nation-State
At the beginning of the twentieth century many thinkers, activists, and politicians would have been astonished if you told them that at the end of that century the nation-state would be the prevalent form of government throughout the world. After all, the previous fifty years had seen a revival of empires, and by 1900 everyone was living in a world of empires. The nation-state was not an obvious next step. But following 1945, argues my guest Jon Wilson in his new book Out of Chaos: How the Nation-State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II, the nation-state was the only kind of political organization that could gain universal support and become a vehicle for national liberation. The nation-state transcended postwar ideology: communists, capitalists, and nationalists of every stripe could agree to a world of sovereign states. “One can’t understand the political crises and tendencies from the late 1960s to the early 1980s,” writes Wilson, “without understanding the history of the nation-state and the very particular way it emerged.” Jon Wilson is Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. A historian of empire, decolonization, and South Asia, he is the author of The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India. His latest book, Out of Chaos: How the Nation-State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II, offers a sweeping reinterpretation of the emergence of the modern nation-state after the Second World War.
August 26 · 33 min
Ortiz's War: Nicholas Reynolds on the exploits of Peter J. Ortiz, a US Marine in occupied France
Peter J. Ortiz was one of the most decorated United States Marines of the Second World War—and he served in the European Theater. In fact, his service was almost entirely within occupied France, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services as the manager of a resistance network and later as the leader of a (sort of) Jedburgh Team. The stories of his exploits are legendary, though admittedly legendary among a much smaller circle of people than they deserve to be. One that can be verified is the time that, in a French bar, Ortiz ordered a round of drinks for a group of German officers, opened his raincoat to reveal his Marine uniform, drew two pistols, and ordered the Germans to drink toasts to President Roosevelt and the United States Marine Corps. That and many other tales of his winding career are to be found in Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France, a new book by Nicholas Reynolds and Katie Sanders.
August 19 · 27 min
Trojan War: Barry Strauss on the history behind the epic poetry
Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls, great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion feasts for the dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles. Those were of course the opening lines of the Illiad, written by someone who we might as well call Homer. And since in this summer of 2027 it seems that very few people are without an opinion of Homer, or The Odyssey, or how Christopher Nolan may have violated Homer's copyrights, I thought it a good time to talk with Barry Strauss, for among his many books is The Trojan War: A New History. Barry Strauss is Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author most recently of Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, which he and I discussed in Episode 421. This is his sixth appearance on Historically Thinking.
August 12 · 30 min
Punctuation Remakes the World: Florence Hazrat on the hidden history of the marks that shape how we read, think, and communicate
Even that overlooked yet essential little pinprick at the end of this sentence has a history. For once upon a time, there were no stops or periods. And therefore there were no sentences, at least as we conceive them now. “Changes in punctuation,” writes my guest Florence Hazrat, “like changes in language, are normal, but they’re also important reflections of our values.” They are also, perhaps, indications of how we reframe the realities that we create with words. In her new book On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Changed the World, Hazrat ranges from cuneiform and Cicero to uncial and Shakespeare, and beyond, attending to how we have chosen to shape our sentences, and why. “From neuroscience to law, colonialism to love, punctuation exerts an enormous hidden power over our internal and external lives.” Florence Hazrat is a writer, researcher, and educator fascinated by anything that has to do with language, writing, culture, and society—and by dogs. She is the author of An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! as well as On the Mark. Her research examines how seemingly small features of written language reveal larger changes in society, politics, and human thought.
August 5 · 1 hr 4 min
He Has the People: Jonathan Earle on the momentous Election of 1860
YEAR of meteors! brooding year! I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds and signs; I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;. I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia; (I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch'd; I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal'd wounds, you mounted the scaffold;) That was Walt Whitman, from the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass; and the 19th Presidentiad to which he refers is the election of 1860. No election in the history of the United States can come close to being more confusing, tumultuous and consequential than the election of 1860. Now Jonathan Earle seeks to disclose its mysteries. And in fact in his new book He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860, he reveals that the 1860 contest was even stranger than we might have imagined it to be. Jonathan Earle is Associate Professor of History at Louisiana State University, where he also serves as the Roger Hadfield Ogden Dean of the LSU Honors College.
July 29 · 26 min
Corn Syrup: Brian Leech does local history, regional history, labor history, technological history, environmental history, and food history
In early 1965, three executives boarded a plane in Japan, bound for the United States. “Unbeknownst to the U.S. Customs, they were carrying corporate secrets. Each man had carefully placed two vials of an isomerase enzyme into their pockets before the flight.” With it, they would change the world. For after two arduous years of nearly aerobic chemical engineering, their corporation produced what it called Isomerose 30. We know it, or its technically improved successors, as corn syrup. That’s how my guest Brian Leech begins his intricate, multi-valenced history of what went on in Clinton, Iowa, from the 1960s through the 1980s. It’s food history, it’s labor history, it’s technological history, it’s environmental history, it’s regional history—“and not any single one of them, which is to say,” to quote the great Edmund Morgan, “that it is good history.”
July 22 · 33 min
Louisiana Purchase: Alexander Mikaberidze on the grand bargain that made continental America
Most Americans remember the Louisiana Purchase as a remarkably good bargain: fifteen million dollars for an enormous tract of land that doubled the size of the United States. But that familiar cliché hides a large story. It covers over a lot of things, and suggests a few more that just aren’t so. In his new book The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, historian Alexander Mikaberidze places the Purchase within a global struggle involving France, Spain, Britain, Haiti, and the Caribbean. The transaction that reshaped the United States was not inevitable. It emerged from failed colonial projects, imperial rivalry, slave revolution, diplomatic improvisation, crafty financing, Thomas Jefferson’s geopolitical cunning, and his willingness to set aside some of his deepest political convictions.
July 15 · 27 min
Offa the King: Rory Naismith writes the life of a great English king who has no biography
Running for about 177 miles along the Welsh-English border is the remains of an earthwork, a fortification over a hundred miles longer than Hadrian’s Wall. Built sometime in the eighth century, it is known as Offa’s Dyke, one of the few surviving reminder of one of the most formidable kings in English history. “As a man,” writes my guest Roy Naismith, “Offa is effectively lost.” Winston Churchill framed the issue thus: “In studying Offa we are like geologists who instead of finding a fossil find only the hollow shape in which a creature of unusual strength and size undoubtedly resided.” Or as the historian Kenneth Sisam observed, Offa “seems to have had all the attributes of a great ruler except a contemporary historian.” But if he is effectively lost, then how can Naismith have written a new book titled Offa: King of the Mercians? Because he has, to paraphrase modern terminology, historyed it. This is a conversation about a great English king; but it’s really a master class in the careful and demanding work of historical inference.
July 3 · 32 min
When the Declaration of Independence Was News: Emily Sneff on how people first encountered independence
"There was a time when the Declaration of Independence was news. Most books written about the Declaration have pursued questions about its precedence and authorship as well as its legacy. In 1776, when the Declaration was news, it was part of an ever-changing and circulating amalgam of accurate and inaccurate information, gossip, military intelligence, speculation, and opinion. At approximately one thousand three hundred and twenty words from ‘When in the Course of Human Events’ through ‘Our Sacred Honor,’ the Declaration took fewer than ten minutes to read and filled only one or two columns of a typical newspaper. This was a text that could be communicated swiftly, but it was also a text for which the context in which it was communicated mattered. The questions of who experienced the news of independence and when and how they did so reveal a critical, overlooked history of the American Revolution.” Those are the words of my guest Emily Sneff in her new book When the Declaration of Independence Was News. It is a book that reframes the Declaration and enables us to see it in a new way: at a moment when the success of the Revolution was far from inevitable, and when the mere existence of the Declaration forced people to choose sides—or to reconsider everything they had previously believed about authority, loyalty, and politics. Emily Sneff is an independent historian specializing in the history and memory of the American Revolution. Her research has focused particularly on the Declaration of Independence and its transmission, reception, and preservation. When the Declaration of Independence Was News is her first book.
July 1 · 33 min
National Treasure: Michael Auslin on the Declaration of Independence's two simultaneous lives
The Declaration of Independence has had two simultaneous lives. One is the life of its ideas, the life that scholars pay the most attention to: a life of fits and starts, surprisingly forgotten in the first years after the Revolution, then returning with a vengeance amid sectional conflict in the 1830s, during the Progressive Era, and again during the Civil Rights Movement. Its second life is as a material document. It is an engrossed parchment rushed away from advancing British troops twice in its life, carried by carriage and train across the United States, tucked away in archives and cellars, displayed in patent offices and libraries, and eventually enshrined in a helium-filled case under carefully controlled conditions. As Michael Auslin argues in National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, these two lives cannot be separated. Americans did not merely preserve the Declaration because of what it said. They preserved it because the physical document itself became a national relic—an object that connected generations of Americans to the Revolution and to one another. Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of numerous books on American and international history and writes The Pawtomack Packet, a Substack devoted to the history of Washington, D.C.

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