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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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Intellectual Humility and Historical Thinking: Mark Carnes

Today’s guest is Mark Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College. His academic speciality is modern American history and pedagogy. Among his many books are an edited volume, Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (Yale University Press, 1989). An interest in how history appears ...

351: Pox Romana

By the reign of Marcus Arelius, Rome seems to be unquestioned in its reach of its power, its wealth, and its cultural and intellectual sophistication. The Pax Romana stretched from Britain and Portugal to Syria and Egypt. Yet at the moment of its seemingly greatest achievements, Rome was struck by a disease that annihilated its legions and ravaged its cities. ...

Episode 350: Revolutionary Age

From the 1760s into the 1830s, waves of revolutions rolled up upon the shores of the Atlantic World, confusing or destroying entrenched political and social hierarchies, and ushering in a new era of democratic rule. These of course were headlined by the American and French Revolutions, but there were no less important ones that quickly followed: not only the Haitian ...

Intellectual Humility and Historical Thinking: Leah Shopkow

Today’s guest in our series of conversations on intellectual humility and historical thinking is Leah Shopkow, Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is a historian of the Middle Ages, specifically of medieval France, and she began her career by studying the history written by medieval chroniclers, which led to her book History and Community: Norman Historical Writing ...

Episode 349: Fallingwater

Fallingwater, perched above Bear Run in southwestern Pennsylvania is Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, a house perhaps as recognizable as any other in the United States–and it's not even on the nickel. Less known is that it was designed and built at the end of decades of despair and seeming futility in the architect's life, a series of circumstances that would ...

Episode 348: Nasty Little War

In the summer of 1918, hoping to somehow re engage the Russians in the First World War as the Allied offensive on the western front began, thousands of Allied troops began to land in ports in Russia’s far north, far east, and far south. It was the beginning of one of the most ambitious military ventures of the twentieth century. ...

Intellectual Humility and Historical Thinking: Suzanne Marchand

In our latest in the series of conversations on intellectual humility and historical thinking, my interlocutor is Suzanne Marchand. She is Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. Her interests are within the realm of European intellectual history, but she has ranged more widely than that. Her books include Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton, UP, 1996); German ...

Episode 347: Abolitionist Civil War

Following the outbreak of the American Civil War, the abolitionist movement underwent an “astonishing transformation”, which would in time alter the direction of the war, the shape of the postwar settlement, and destroy the abolitionist movement itself. As the movement’s moral outsiders found themselves becoming interest group insiders, not only their approach but also their message and ultimately their goals ...

Episode 346: The World That Wasn’t

 Henry Wallace was an Iowan, an accomplished geneticist who hybridized corn; an entrepreneur who co-founded Pioneer Hi-Bred to produce seed, still an agricultural behemoth; the third-generation of editors of an influential American newspaper; a mystic who had a mysterious guru; and a “liberal philosopher”, according to no less an authority than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  He was also at various times ...

Episode 345: Ecology of Nations

Some animals—like beavers, nesting ants, bees, and humans—actively reshape their environments to make them more favorable for their own species.  My guest today believes that the same is also true of nations. This, he argues,  is the true meaning of Woodrow Wilson’s phrase “to make the world safe for democracy.”  But animals also change as they are adapting their own ...