Episoder
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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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Mangler du episoder?
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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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It is without question the most lethal predator in the history of the planet. It has killed more humans than any other single cause of death—something around 52 billion over the course of 200,000 years of human history. In 2022 alone, it probably killed 680,000 people—a number much reduced from the carnage it has caused in past centuries. This super-predator is the mosquito, which has since the time of the dinosaurs carried diseases in its tiny body that have destroyed nations and cultures, and altered the destinies of those who survived.
With me to describe the immense historical impact of the mosquito is Timothy C. Winegard. He is Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, and author of the 2019 bestselling book The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator.
For Further Investigation
A review of The Mosquito in Emerging Infectious Diseases
The CDC Guide to Mosquitoes
One of the earliest works of animation: How a Mosquito Operates, from 1912
Two videos related to William Crawford Gorgas: one, from the Gorgas House Museum in Alabama, highlights his contribution to the building of the Panama Canal; the other is a one minute clip of a silent movie of Gorgas traveling on a train through the Canal Zone.
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Just before 10 AM on Tuesday, June 9th, 1964, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, hundreds of people were gathered in First African Baptist, prepared to march to the new Tuscaloosa County Courthouse where they planned to drink from water fountains and use restroom facilities that were supposed to be only used by whites. Around the church were gathered hundreds of police, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and other deputized whites. At 10:15 AM, after the arrest of Reverend T.Y. Rogers, the pastor of First African Baptist, the police attacked the church. They beat those who attempted to leave with clubs and cattle prods. Then, the door being closed and locked, they brought up a fire truck, and blasted away the stained glass windows, filling the sanctuary in some places ankle-deep with water. Then they fired tear gas canisters through the windows, driving those within outside, where they were beaten, and over a hundred were hauled off to jail.
This was Bloody Tuesday, now a nearly forgotten inflection point in the Civil Rights struggle, overshadowed by the concurrent campaign then ongoing in St. Augustine, by national events in the weeks to come, and by the violence of Selma in 1965. John M. Giggie had preserved the memories of Bloody Tuesday, and complex struggle of justice in Tuscaloosa in his new book Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa.
John M. Giggie is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. He is creator of "History of Us," the first Black history class taught daily in a public school in Alabama. Giggie is also director of the Alabama Memory Project, which seeks to recapture and memorialize the over 650 lives lost to lynching in Alabama, and a founding member of the Tuscaloosa Civil Rights History and Reconciliation Foundation.
For Further Investigation
Three short essays on Bloody Tuesday by John Giggie:
“How Tuscaloosa’s Bloody Tuesday Changed the Course of History,” Time.com, June 7, 2024
Remembering Bloody Tuesday, Alabama Heritage, June 2024
The Tuscaloosa Campaign and Bloody Tuesday, Encyclopedia of Alabama
Books on the Civil Rights movement on Tuscaloosa, related to subjects in the podcast, or mentioned in the podcast:
Clark, E. Culpepper. The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at The University of Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.
Hollars, B.J. Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013.
Wendt, Simon. The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2007.
Cobb, Charles E. Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Marsh, Charles. God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Chappell, David L. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. -
Does knowing a lot of facts about the historical past – say, of early America – make us feel closer to it? Or is something else required? How can we–as my guest puts it, “appreciate a bit better what it felt like to be alive then. Naturally,” he continues “we can’t teach emotions to any who weren’t alive to experience them how Pearl Harbor felt in real time – let alone Fort Sumter or Lincoln‘s assassination – is not transmissible. The historian can only do so much.“ But how to convey not merely the intellectual weight but the emotional burdens that humans once carried–and that we might no longer understand?
My guest Andrew Burstein has done what he can to credibly bring early America closer to us in his new book Longing for Connection: Entangled Memories, and Emotional Loss in Early America. It is a work of history that is intricately plotted, connecting personalities and themes in a sort of great circular panopticon of early America, in which the reader sits at the orbital center of continual swirl and movement.
Andrew Burstein is the Charles Phelps Manship Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at Louisiana State University. Longing for Connection is the latest member of a large-and hopefully happy- family of books.
For Further Investigation
You really should read some Alexander Pope. Find more about him, and some of his poems here.
Poor Edward Everett. No one ever reads his Gettysburg address.
Some of the more closely related members of the Burstein family of books, many of them mentioned in the conversation, listed in order of publication: The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist; Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image; The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving; and Lincoln Dreamt He Died: The Midnight Visions of Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud
For an intro to cultural history, you should listen to Episode 32
Past episodes with a connection to this one are Episode 163: The First Martyr of the American Revolution; and Episode 344: Founding Scoundrels -
In 1978, along the shoreline of the Potomac River in Westmoreland County, Virginia, people began to see…something…out in the water. Whatever it was, it seemed snakelike. But then all such sightings ended–until, over a period of years in the early 1980s, sightings proliferated around Kent Island, situated in the very middle of the Chesapeake, the eastern end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The “monster” was soon named “Chessie”, and perhaps because of the cute name was characterized as being a friendly monster; and while no biological traces of it were ever discovered, “Chessie” became an icon of the environmental movement to save the bay.
But what was the context for Chessie’s sightings? What might suburbanization and taking recreation as seriously as labor have to do with seeing monsters in the water? And why did so many (including, as best as I can remember, myself) need to believe that Chessie was real?
With me to discuss Chessie, and her life and times is Eric Cheezum, an independent historian, a resident of Maryland’s eastern shore, and the author of Chessie: A Cultural History of the Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster, which is–not surprisingly–the subject of our conversation today.
For Further Investigation
David Halperin, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO
James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing
Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West
WBAL-TV: "The legend of 'Chessie' is alive and well 35 years later"
The Chesapeake Conservation Partnership on the sightings and importance of "Chessie: The Chesapeake Bay Sea Monster" -
From 987 to 1328, the Capetian family ruled France without interruption. Except that they weren’t really called the Capetians, and France was not yet really…France. And therein lies a story. Through the ingredients of ruthless high mindedness; enlightened guile; excellent marriages and often lots of them; and sheer dumb luck, this one family created out of very uncertain beginnings the most powerful kingdom in Christendom. In the process they created institutions that lasted to the French Revolution, and sometimes beyond; instituted symbols and styles that epitomize Medieval Europe to subsequent generations; turned a small town at a river crossing into one of the most fabled cities in human history; and in the process created France.
With me to discuss the Capetians is Justine Firnhaber-Baker, most recently author of House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made France. Justine Firnhaber-Baker is Professor of History at the University of St. Andrew’s. She was last on the podcast in Episode 227, when she described and explained the Jacquerie, the French peasant’s revolt of 1358–which remains one of the most popular episodes of this podcast.
For Further Information
Speaking of medieval queens, we've talked with Catherine Hanley about Matilda, arguably the one woman to rule England in her own right before Elizabeth I; and with Katherine Pangonis about the Queens of the Kingdom of Jerusalem
And for the other half of the story, including more on Louis VII and Blanche of Castile, see my conversation with Catherine Hanley on the intertwining of the English and French dynasties
The expulsion of the Jews was mentioned, so that means I should link to my conversation with Rowan Dorin on expulsion as a matter of medieval policy
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On June 24th, 1947, a private pilot and fire suppression equipment manufacturer named Kenneth Arnold was flying south of Mount Rainier, bound for Yakima, Washington. At about 3 PM he saw a flash of light in the air to the north of the mountain, and subsequently he saw a long chain of flying objects passing in front of the mountain. He described them as having convex shapes, and this was soon changed to the term “flying saucer".
Arnold’s was in fact not the first UFO sighting following the Second World War; nor was it even part of the first wave of sightings of strange things in the sky. Yet something unprecedented did happen after 1947, not only in the United States, but around the world–not necessarily involving aliens, but very much involving humans. As Greg Egighian observes in his new book After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon, UFO sightings “have made people wonder, fret, question, probe, and argue. In that regard, they have revealed more about human beings than about alien worlds. And that is a story worth investigating.”
Greg Eghigian is a Professor of History and Bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth Century Germany and the editor of The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, among other works.
For Further Investigation
Greg Egighian suggests the following books for your UFO history reading list:
Matthew Bowman, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill
David Clarke, How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth
D.W. Pasulka, American Cosmic
Sarah Scoles, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers
Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here – and Out There
Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs
From the HT archives, if you haven't heard them, then give a listen to somewhat related episodes: Iwan Rhys Morus on "How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon," and Tom Misa on the "History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet"
D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?
Peter Berger on Secularism and Relativism; and a full-length video of the same lecture -
Sometime around two and half millennia ago, a cluster of cities and states around the northeastern Mediterranean began to do amazing things. For some reason they began to spread out, establishing towns and outposts around the fringe of both the Mediterranean and the Black Seas. And as they sailed and traded in the outer world, they also began to explore with ever-increasing rigor their inner world, with a series of big questions which remain important to us even to this day. All the while, they competed feverishly with one another: in athletics, in war, in trade, in sex, in the arts, and in all the varieties of social life.
These were the people we call the Greeks. But how did such a diversity of people gain a common title, or come to represent a common culture? Amongst their commonalities, what were their differences? And despite their often uncanny ability to think and act in ways that still make us feel a deep connection to them, how were they very different from us, and very similar to others of their own world?
With me to survey the unities and diversities of the ancient Greeks is Jennifer Roberts, Professor of classics and history at the City College of New York and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her many books include The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece and Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction, both of which were the subject of previous conversations on this podcast. Her most recent book is Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture, which is the subject of our conversation today.
For Further Investigation
Jennifer Roberts previous episodes were on the Peloponnesian War, and on the historian Herodotus.
We've done a lot of episodes on Ancient Greece, enough for a mini-curriculum. Here is Paul Cartledge on Thebes; Andrew Bayliss on Sparta; and Bruce Clark on Athens (though admittedly little of that conversation was about ancient Athens).
Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color
I referred to my two conversations with Tom Holland, the first one concerning his book Dominion, and the second and most recent conversation about his book PAX.
Hunter Rawlings, classicist and expert on Thucydides - Se mer
