Episodi
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In the first months of 1939, before the world changed, Elzbieta Zawacka had an MA degree in Mathematics, and was an enthusiastic instructor in Poland’s “Women’s Military Training” organization, established to prepare women for service in a future war. When that war came, Elzbieta believed from the start that she was a soldier as much as any man. Under Nazi occupation she established espionage networks, and then served as a courier for the Polish Home Army. Sent to England, she there trained as a member of the Polish Special Operations Group known as the “Silent Unseen”; when she returned to Poland she did so as the only woman to arrive during the war by parachute. Elzbieta fought in the Warsaw uprising, and survived its collapse. Following the Soviet takeover of Poland, she became a teacher. But in 1951 she was arrested and tortured by the Security Service, and spent four years in prison before her sentence was commuted. As a consequence her heroism and achievements were erased from national memory, until the fall of the Communist regime.
With me to discuss the life and achievements of this amazing woman is Clare Mulley, whose books have recovered the stories and experience of women who served during the First and Second World Wars. They have included a biography of the founder of Save the Children; the story of a Polish-born British special agent; and the stories of Nazi Germany’s only two female test pilots. Her most recent book is Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter, which is the subject of our conversation today.
For Further Investigation
Cichociemni–The Silent Unseen
Silent Unseen: The Polish Special Forces of Audley End -
In the sixteenth century wealthy men and women began to collect books. With these they began to furnish a new room in the house which they called the studiolo. In the “little study” one could read in happiness and contentment, safe from an external world beset by wars and plague. They could conduct conversations with their contemporaries by letter, and with the dead of past ages through their reading. The studiolo became an extension of their intellect, and of their personality.
But the studiolo was also a place from which those religious and political conflicts were conducted. And the studiolo was, in the contemporary imagination, a place of potential madness. After all, it was reading in solitude that infected the brain of that noble gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha; obsessive reading that undermined the power of Duke Prospero of Milan, and resulted in his exile on a far off island with his daughter Miranda; and reading that turned Dr. Faustus to seek power through a diabolical bargain.
With me to discuss the studiolo in history and literature is Andrew Hui, Associate Professor of the Humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His most recent book is The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, which is the focus of our conversation today.
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Episodi mancanti?
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Many college professors like to remind each other that no other nation on earth has the system of collegiate sports that has developed in the United States, one in which the mishaps of a mediocre football team attract much more attention than what goes on in classrooms, labs, and libraries–and yes, I am thinking of the University of Virginia. These professors love to quote Cornell President Andrew Dickson White refusing to allow the Cornell football team to travel to a game with Michigan: “I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.” They remember that the University of Chicago had a football team and even a stadium, until President Robert Hutchins killed the program, declaring it an “infernal nuisance.”
But they’re less likely to know that it was that same Andrew Dickson White who nourished Cornell intercollegiate athletics, financially supporting the Cornell crew team so that they could beat Harvard and Yale. And professors are even less likely to contemplate an awful historical truth, that college sports have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship to the university that hosts them, and that they have grown and changed in more or less the same way that the American university has grown and changed. Far from being a peripheral accident of history, college sports reveal important insights into American higher education.
Such is the argument of my guests Eric A. Moyen and John Thelin. Eric A. Moyen is a professor of higher education leadership and the Assistant Vice President for Student Success at Mississippi State University. John R. Thelin is the University Research Professor Emeritus of the history of higher education and public policy at the University of Kentucky. Both of them have written numerous books on both American higher education and college sports. Now they have co-written College Sports: A History.
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When did old age in America first begin? That is, when did we first begin to conceive ideas about a stage of life in which older people no longer participated in the labor force, but nevertheless had a meaningful place in the world, deserving of respect, security, and dignity.
My guest James Chappel argues that this is an idea that became prominent in the American consciousness at a certain point in time–namely, the 1935 Social Security Act. It was, he believes, one of the key moments in the cultural transformations of how Americans think about old age, and how we treat the aged. These ideas and moments were shaped by activists, practical politicians, medical advancements, and cultural models ranging from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to the TV show “The Golden Girls.”
James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. The author of Catholic Modern, his interests are in the intellectual history of modern Europe and the United States, focusing on themes of religion, gender, and the family. He lives in Durham, North Carolina. His most recent book is The Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, and it is the subject of our conversation today. -
Many were shocked in February 2022 by the Russian attempt to seize Kyiv and decapitate the Ukranian regime, thereby ending the war begun in 2014. But this was simply the latest in a long series of Russian attempts to “divide and oppress Ukraine.” Since the 19th century, dominating Ukraine has been a cornerstone of Russia’s national identity. To prevent Ukraine from choosing an alternative, Russian rulers of all ideological varieties have used not only history and cultural destruction as their methods, but executions, deportations, and famine. It is not very surprising, argues my guest Eugene Finkel, that these tools of oppression should be so readily picked up by yet another Russian autocrat. What makes this moment different is that for the first time in its history Ukraine has overcome its internal divisions and united in favor of independence from Russia.
Eugene Finkel is Kenneth H. Keller Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. The author or coauthor of three previous books, his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Affairs. He was born in Lviv, Ukraine, and lives in Bologna, Italy. His most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two Hundred Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine.
For Further Investigation
Eugene Finkel's previous books include Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017)
This conversation is related in some way to a surprising number of previous podcasts. One with Chris Miller on the perennial Russian pivot to Asia that always fails; you can hear a little about the Russian wars against the Turks for Ukraine in Episode 284, when I discussed the career of Russia's greatest general with Alex Mikaberidze; something about Ukrainian grain in my conversation with Scott Nelson about his book Oceans of Grain; a long conversation about Josef Pilsudski, founder of modern Poland; and Episode 348, about the Russian Civil War.
And of course my conversation with Michael Kimmage in Episode 354 about the immediate antecedents of the Ukrainian War. Listeners who believe in comparing arguments–and you should all believe in that–ought to listen to Kimmage immediately after digesting this podcast. -
As today’s guest writes in the introduction of her new book Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, “For more than two hundred years, John Dickinson has suffered from an image problem that no one in his day would have thought possible." In Signers’ Hall at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the statue of John Dickinson stands alone in a corner, hand pensively on chin, apart from the action of the Federal Convention…Alternatively, they might imagine him in the manner of the musical 1776, strutting across a stage, ever to the right, never to the left, with ruffles aflutter, singing jubilantly about his conservatism. There he at least possesses the virtue of energy. Or they could imagine him as HBO’s pale, sweaty, scowling disbeliever in the American cause, opposite a stalwart John Adams. But none of these images of him is accurate.”
That is if we have any images of him in our heads at all–which, to be honest, is highly unlikely. This conversation aims to change that.
Jane E. Calvert is Founding Director and Chief Editor of the John Dickinson Writings Project, which under her guidance has produced three of a projected 13 volumes of Dickinson’s prolific output. She is the authority on Quaker political thought, which she has delineated in Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson. Penman of the Founding is now the definitive biography of John Dickinson, and hopefully the basis for much more scholarly work. -
A forensic reconstruction of Saint Rose of Lima
From the early 16th century, and for over two hundred years after that, a series of convulsions within the Christian church of Western Europe led to its splintering, but also to an incredibly rapid movement of ideas and practices to the four corners of the earth. These convulsions—or reformations—were responsible not only for changes in the practice and beliefs of Christianity, but dramatic social and cultural changes everywhere they occurred.
Even though these changes have usually been told as the story of men, women were often at the heart of these reformations. On every continent with the exception of Antarctica—which, to be fair, was undiscovered and therefore unpopulated—women drove forward the transformations of religious life. From royal thrones and the homes of prominent reformers, to the monasteries in Peru and the shores of the southernmost home island of Japan, the stories of how women participated in these reformations gives us not only a fuller picture of these extraordinary events, but a new way of thinking about them and defining them.
My guest Merry Wiesner-Hanks is distinguished professor of history and women’s and gender studies emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author or editor of thirty books, the most recent of which is Women and the Reformations: A Global History, which is the subject of our conversation today.
For Further Investigation
Previous conversations somewhat related to this one are with Ron Rittgers on Luther's reformation; with Tara Nummedal on Anna Ziegelerin and the curious case of the Lion's blood; and with Michael Winship on "the warmer sort of Protestants"
"No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
Herrnhut
Jon Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World -
His lectures at the College de France were so popular that people arrived at the lecture hall at least an hour in advance. When he finally spoke, it was standing room only, with men literally climbing in the windows. During his first visit to New York, his presence on the Columbia University campus caused one of the earliest recorded traffic jams. And when the French government sought to encourage the United States to enter the war in 1917, they chose him as one of their principal emissaries, given his intellectual heft and worldwide celebrity.
This was the philosopher Henri Bergson, and if you are an English speaker you might be forgiven for not knowing about him, or having heard the name once or twice, but not being aware of why. He was in many ways emblematic of the Belle Epoque, and as that era was interred in hastily dug trenches during the autumn of 1914, Bergson’s celebrity and influence seemed to be buried with it. But celebrity was not his goal; philosophy was, and his celebrity often obscured his ideas.
With me to discuss the life, ideas, and world of Henri Bergson is Emily Herring. She received her PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. The focus of our conversation today is her new book Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, which is the first English-language biography of Bergson.
For Further Investigation
An earlier philosopher who once lived in Clermont Ferrand
Zeno's paradoxes
An essay explaining some of the mysteries of French higher education
An introductory essay by Emily Herring to Henri Bergson
I was ready and waiting for a book on Henri Bergson because of my conversation with Michael Rapport about Paris in Episode 360 -
For nearly five centuries Madrid has been the capital of Spain, and the focus of frequent contempt by foreign visitors, as well as the scorn and hatred of Spaniards. Prime Minister Manuel Azaña Díaz, born just 31 kilometers from Madrid, would write that in “Madrid there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to see. Madrid is a town without history. In Madrid, nothing has happened because in two centuries almost nothing has happened in Spain, and the little that has occurred has done so elsewhere.”
But as my guest Luke Steggeman writes, “Madrid is both heart and head [of Spain], as per the custom of medieval manuscripts where countries were sometimes drawn as bodies with heads and hearts and limbs.” Moreover, “The story of Madrid is the story of power: royal, military, religious, and secular, cultural and economic.” It is also the story of power gained, power lost, power regained, power seized, and occasionally power unused.
Luke Stegeman is a writer and cultural historian. Unlike any previous guest on this podcast, he is not only a self-described rural Australian, but a boxing referee. His most recent book is Madrid: A Biography, which is the subject of our conversation today.
For Further Investigation
San Lorenzo de El Escorial
Museo Nacional del Prado
Captain Alatriste: I don't often link to Wikipedia, but you should read the section "Adaptations", about why Pérez-Reverte wrote this series of historical novels.
Benito Pérez Galdós
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It is no longer the largest city in America, or the second largest, or even the fifth largest, but there are still those of us who love it. While modern American cities are all racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, it has always been so, from before it was even a city. Modern American cities, simply because of size, are also stages for a variety of conflicts, and this city has from its beginning enjoyed a good conflict. Modern American cities boil with debates over planning and land use, and such debates have always been a part of its history; as has been a perennial American suspicion towards the very existence of cities. Modern American cities are also places where the past is paved over, and oddly enough, given the depth of its history, this city has also made a habit of forgetting its past.
This city is Philadelphia. From before the founding of the city by William Penn, the region that would become Philadelphia was diverse, and also in conflict. Penn famously designed it to be a “green country town”, but that design has gone through many alterations and changes. And while Philadelphia hosts some of the most significant spots in American history, it has also been good at eliminating and forgetting its own history.
With me to discuss the history of the city of Philadelphia, what makes it like other American cities, and what makes it different from them, is Paul Kahan. A historian and graduate of Temple University–the most Philadelphian of educational institutions–Paul Kahan is author most recently of Philadelphia: A Narrative History. It is his seventh book. -
For a few hundred years, the New World of the Americas was thought to be genuinely new. But in the course of the nineteenth century, Americans became increasingly uncertain about the ground beneath their feet. Canal building uncovered strange creatures like enormous crabs; seams of coal were determined to be fossilized forests. And while no living mammoths or mastodons were discovered in the lands west of the Mississippi, their bones were; and so were the bones of still stranger creatures, some of them just a few miles from Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
These and many other discoveries led to a still greater discovery, not simply of dinosaurs, or geological ages, or even of evolutionary biology, but a concept that lies beneath all of them, what the writer John McPhee has called “Deep Time.” In her new book How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution, Caroline Winterer roams about the continent, from Haddonfield, New Jersey, to Yosemite, uncovering how Americans began to realize that their continent and world was very, very old indeed.
Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas, political thought, and the history of science. Her previous books include American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason.
For Further Investigation
I note with pleasure that How the New World Became Old has blurbs from past HT guests Marcia Bjornerud, Suzanne L. Marchand, and Adrienne Mayor
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983; repr. 2003).
Martin Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (1992).
Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (1998).
Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (1987) -
This podcast originally dropped on December 17, 2015.
If we had the reverb and the talent, we'd introduce this week's podcast like one of those guys touting a monster truck event on "SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY." Because this week we're talking about Big History–and calling it Big is actually kind of an understatement.
That's because practitioners of Big History, like today's guest Craig Benjamin, begin a history survey not with Mesopotamia, or ancient China, or even homo sapiens squeaking past homo neanderthalis. No, they begin with the Big Bang...which happened quite some time before there were any humans around to enjoy the show. Big History says that, to understand human history--and humanity--it's first necessary to begin appreciating the size and complexity of the entire universe. In doing that, the argument goes, we will begin to improve ourselves morally and spiritually; or, failing that, we'll have a really fantastic general education course. Please note that these are two very different outcomes.
With us to talk about these outcomes, and to give a lightning fast overview of Big History "from the Big Bang to you" is Craig Benjamin. He is associate professor of history at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan Craig is president (for just one-and-a-half more weeks, he tells me) of the World History Society; he's also a charter member of the International Big History Association. In fact, he's probably the second person ever to teach a course on Big History. As you'll hear, he's a great person to have a chat with; hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
For Further Investigation
The Big History Project: if you take the tests, you'll get a sticker.
David Christian presents the history of the world in 18 minutes
A definitive Big History Course, taught by Dr. David Christian
Or how about these for a Christmas gift or two?
Big History: Between Nothing and Everything
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Generations of college students have probably imagined that his first name was Venerable, and his family name Bede. But Bede–that’s B-E-D-E–was his only name. He was a native of Northumbria, in the north of what we now think of as England. Apparently never going abroad, his life was spent within a few miles of his monastery, and probably just a few miles from where he was born. Yet this seemingly narrow and circumscribed life was full of intense intellectual activity. Bede authored dozens of works: teaching texts to be used for young boys entering the monastery, as he had done; biblical commentaries; arithmetical works; sermons and homilies; and lives of Northumbrian saints. Yet when he is remembered by historians, it is for his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, An Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
With me to discuss Bede as historian is Rory Naismith, Professor of Early Medieval History and Fellow of Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. This is his third appearance on the podcast; he was last on Historically Thinking in Episode 343 discussing whether we should talk about the Anglo-Saxons.
For Further Investigation
This is one of our occasional podcasts on important historians. For others, see this one on Polybius, and this on another medieval historian, Princess Anna Komnene
The remnants of the monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow
The historical site formerly known as "Bede's World": now Jarrow Hall Anglo-Saxon Farm Village and Bede Museum, reopened after a short closure.
FYI, in contemporary Britain it's probably true that Jarrow is best known for the "Jarrow Crusade" rather than for Bede
A good companion to Bede is, amazingly enough, J. Robert Wright, A Companion to Bede: A Reader's Commentary on The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Rory Naismith also suggests:
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People/Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: "This is available in very many translations, including those of Bertram Colgrave and D. H. Farmer. A scholarly edition, with facing-page Latin and English, is available from Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors."
J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 1–48
G. Hardin Brown, A Companion to Bede (Woodbridge, 2009)
P. Hunter-Blair, The World of Bede (Cambridge, 1970)
H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (London, 1991)
R. Shaw, The Gregorian Mission to Kent in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History: Methodology and Sources (London, 2018)
A. Thacker, ‘Bede and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. S. DeGregorio (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 170–89
A. Thacker, ‘Bede’s Ideal of Reform’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. P. Wormald et al. (Oxford, 1983), pp. 130–53 -
It is the most influential book in the history of the world, a book that in many ways set the standard for what books would become, but it is also the book at the heart of a world spanning religion. It has never purported to be the words of God, but the result of a complex partnership between God and his creation, the result being a “divine words written by human hands.”
This book is of course the Bible. On the grounds of sales and publications alone, it has been astonishingly successful. Due to a Niagara of translations and editions, dating back to the first centuries of the Christian religion, it has been a remarkably adaptive host for the ideas and emotions contained within it. My guest Bruce Gordon has written a biography of the Bible that focuses on its flow from the eastern Mediterranean into the farthest corners of the world, writing what he calls “the story of humanity’s grasp for the impossible: the perfect Bible.”
A native of Canada, Bruce Gordon is the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School. Among his many publications are biographies of the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli, and of the Genevan reformer John Calvin, as well as a “biography” of the life of Calvin’s most important production, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. His most recent book is The Bible: A Global History, which is the subject of our conversation today. -
In his long short story or very short novella entitled “The Man Without a Country,” Edward Everett Hale describes his protagonist Philip Nolan as a young man from the Mississippi Valley who “had grown up in the West of those days, in the midst of ‘Spanish plot’, ‘Orleans plot’, and all the rest. He had been educated on a plantation where the finest company was a Spanish officer or a French merchant from Orleans.” Nolan was, in other words, a young man who was used to foreign serpents in the western Eden. Little wonder, then, that in the story he participated in a conspiracy against a United States that he barely knew.
In his new book Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison's America, Tyson Reeder shows the reality behind a story published in 1863. For over forty years, James Madison was near the heart of American politics, perhaps entitled to be called the chief architect of both the Constitutional system and then of the party system that he had just a few years before decried. Intimately linked with both of these innovations were the influences of Spain, Great Britain and France, all eager to direct the young republic in ways that would benefit their interests in the Americas.
Tyson Reeder is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He was previously an editor of the Papers of James Madison at the University of Virginia, and author of Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (2019).
For Further Investigation
This episode is connected to a great many other episodes in the last year, in one way or another. See Episode 366 with Andrew Burstein; Episode 352, on Tecumseh as a great American strategist; and Episode 344, on America's founding scoundrels -
In Early Modern Europe, spying was not really a profession but it certainly was a verb. At times it would seem, from the dark suspicious years at the end of Henry VII’s life, to Cromwell’s protectorate and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, that it was a game that everyone was playing. And in an era in which anyone with a modicum of political power was, figuratively speaking, always looking over their shoulders for rivals, they were literally driven to read each other’s mail.
But reading the mail has its difficulties. How to unseal and reseal a letter so that no one knows that you have opened it? And when you discover the letter is encoded, how to decipher it? And so the game of spy vs. spy went on in the seventeenth century, pretty much as it does now, save for a few technological developments.
With me to discuss the world of early modern spycraft, mostly in Britain, are Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman, coauthors of Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration. Nadine Akkerman is professor of early modern literature and culture at Leiden University, and author of the acclaimed Invisible Agents. Pete Langman is an Oxford English Dictionary bibliographer, author of Killing Beauties, and a cricketer.
For Further Investigation
For more on early modern espionage, but conducted on highly professional basis, see my conversation with Ioanna Iordanou in Episode 142
Letterlocking
How to open a locked letter without opening it
How to hide a message in an egg
"Making a wax seal, how hard can it be?"
Cryptiana: Articles on Historical Cryptography
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Colonel John Trumbull, Artist
John Trumbull must be one of the only artists in the history of American art to insist upon being addressed by his military rank; he was Colonel Trumbull until he died. But it was not John Trumbull’s feats in battle or in managing administrative correspondence that won him fame among his contemporaries, but what he painted on canvas. Hanging in the rotunda of the US Capitol are four of the paintings in which he sought to preserve memories and paint a history of the American Revolution, but also teach something of the ethics appropriate to war; of democratic and republican virtue; of political power flowing from a sovereign people; and of the need to relinquish that power when called to do so. To this day some of the most recognizable images of the Revolution are almost certainly something painted by Trumbull–most likely either The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, or the painting known simply as The Declaration of Independence. If occupying space rent-free in posterity's imagination is ever the ambition of an artist, then Trumbull succeeded, and then some.
With me today to discuss the life, art, and civic teaching of John Trumbull is Richard Brookhiser. Beginning with his 1997 book Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, Richard Brookhiser has written a shelf of books on the American founders, the most recent of which is Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution.
For Further Investigation
Highly recommended: "Let This Be a Lesson: Heroes, Heroines, and Narrative in Paintings at Yale," a brilliant series of lectures on history painting by John Walsh, from which I've learned a lot. See particularly Lecture 7, on Benjamin West, and Lecture 8, on John Trumbull, focusing on his painting of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
There are many HT episodes on related issues. You might be interested in Episode 163, on Joseph Warren, the first martyr of the American Revolution, whose death is the focus of Trumbull's first history painting; or Episode 176, which focuses heavily on the images of revolutionary victors created by Trumbull and his contemporaries (some of whom were his friends and acquaintances) -
Maritime plundering, or piracy, has happened in nearly all regions of the world, in most ages of human history. Yet the image that we have of "a pirate" in our collective imagination comes from one period in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. So "why has that one relatively short moment come to stand for all sea raiding across time and space?"That is the question with which Richard Blakemore begins his new book Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Piracy. To answer it he not only surveys decades of plundering and combat at sea and on land, but also interprets court cases, parliamentary legislation, imperial administration or the lack of it, and the slave trade. For the “golden age of piracy”, like a conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, at times seems to be connected to pretty much everything else going on at the same time. Except that in the case of piracy from 1650 to 1722, it actually was.Richard Blakemore is Associate Professor of Social and Maritime History at the University of Reading. Enemies of All is his second book.For Further Investigation We've talked about pirates of the "golden age" with Steve Hahn in Episode 87; and they came up again in, of all places, in the history told by trees in Episode 156 Probably the previous single best book about pirates in the "golden age", both factual and fictional, was David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (Random House, 1995) Marcus Rediker provides a view of pirates as proto-Bolsheviks in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age; Peter T. Leeson describes them as highly rational market actors in The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates And for more on one of the most curious episodes we talked about, see Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates–a great book There are a lot of bad editions of Charles Johnson, General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, but this is the best one until we can convince Richard Blakemore to produce an edited and annotated version.
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How can a new nation establish itself amidst the networks and intrigues of a very old part of the world, while at the same time trying to be different from everyone else? Are these inherently contradictory aims? And how can either–or none–of these objectives be achieved by civil servants who are engaging in, at best, on the job training?
These are some of the questions that are prompted by studying the First Barbary War, fought by the young United States from 1801 to 1805 along the coast of North Africa. Far from being a story simply of simple and straightforward naval derring-do, it is one of strategic ambiguity, diplomatic finesse, and the ideological aspirations of a new nation set against the backdrop of world war and millennia old customs.
With me to discuss the First Barbary War is Abby Mullen, Assistant Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy. She is also the impresario of not one but two podcasts: Consultation Prize, a limited run series about US diplomacy from the ground-eye viewpoint of American consuls, and Big If True, a podcast for kids which is co-hosted with her daughter. But today we are (mostly) talking about her new book To Fix a National Character: The United States in the First Barbary War, 1800–1805.
For Further Information
William Eaton is the subject of the portrait above; for a little something about the "Burr Conspiracy", in which Eaton may have participated and against which he then gave evidence, see Episode 344
As mentioned in the podcast, Daniel Herschenzohn in Episode 95 explained the complex economy in the Mediterranean that centered on the redemption of prisoners. But the only time that consuls have shown up was very recently, in Episode 359.
Here's a link to Abby Mullen's Consolation Prize, a limited series podcast "about the history of the United States in the world through the eyes of its consuls." And one to Big If True, "a podcast for kids exploring the truth about big things" co-hosted with her daughter, but which is now alas lapsed into a podcast doze.
For on the American wars on the Barbary coast, see Frank Lambert's The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World; for a now very old book full of swashbuckling derring-do, and not very many strategic complications, see Fletcher Pratt, Preble's Boys: Commodore Preble and the Birth of American Sea Power. -
More than any other creature, it has proven itself over millennia to be man’s best and most useful friend. At first it was just another prey animal, but eventually it became such a close companion and coworker that it seems impossible for many of us to imagine ever eating one–although probably a billion people around the world do so on a regular basis. For thousands of years it remade cultures and societies, even creating new languages. Then, at the moment of its greatest societal impact, it was quickly replaced by the internal combustion engine.
I am of course referring to the horse. And with me to talk about the immense importance of the horse in human history is Timothy Winegard, heard last week explaining the horrible effects of the mosquito in human history. He is Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, where as a Canadian expat he is by Colorado law also required to coach the college hockey team–which he does. More importantly for our purposes today he is author of The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity.
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