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Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it
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27 FEB 2023 · In 1835, Oberlin College in Ohio determined that it would admit black students. A very few other colleges did at the time, but Oberlin was unique in that it chose to do so as an explicit matter of college policy. At Oberlin, and a few other places both before and after the Civil War, black and white students were allied first in the cause of emancipation, and then for civil rights. Yet following the end of Reconstruction, even once revolutionary campuses like Oberlin and Berea College in Kentucky began to have color lines drawn across them. As John Frederick Bell demonstrates in his new book, Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race, while blacks remained in the classroom at Oberlin and Berea, they were gradually discriminated against in every other aspect of college life. Given that these colleges had been established to shape not the mental so much as the moral community on its campus, this amounted to a counter revolution that overthrew the ideals upon which Oberlin and Berea College had been established. John Frederick Bell is Assistant Professor of History at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Degrees of Equality is his first book. Erratum: At 34:30, John Chapin was named as the fundraiser for New York Central College; John Bell says he should have said William Chaplin. (About whom you can read here on Professor Wikipedia.) For Further Investigation In the course of asking "why" I mentioned my conversation with Doug Egerton on the decline and fall of the Adams family; and I should also note an even older conversation with Doug about the history of Reconstruction The featured image is a late 19th century stereoscope of the campus of Oberlin College Berea College, according to Professor Wikipedia; and Adam Harris, "The Little College Where Tuition Is Free and Every Student Is Given a Job". The Atlantic (October 2018) Nat Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War: The True Story of the Community That Stood Up to Slavery–and Changed a Nation Forever Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America Ronald Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning ,and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876 Christi Smith, Reparation & Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education John Frederick Bell, “Early Black Collegians and the Fight for Full Inclusion” Black Perspectives (May 24, 2022)
20 FEB 2023 · “At the start of the twelfth century,” writes Rowan Dorin, “western European rulers almost never resorted to the collective expulsions of wrongdoers from their domains; ecclesiastical authorities evinced little concern about the Jewish communities living under Christian rule; and the church’s efforts to repress usury focused largely on clerics who engaged in money lending. By the late thirteenth century, expulsion had become a recurring tool of royal governance in both England and France; bishops across Latin Christendom were advocating for harsh restrictions on Jewish life; and Popes, theologians, and canon lawyers had recast usury as menacing the whole of society…” Why and how this dramatic change comes about is the focus of Dorin’s new book No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe. There is much in it which will overturn casual assumptions, and provoke new perspectives on the present–for if the use of expulsion by governments has a beginning, its ending has certainly not yet occurred. Rowan Dorin is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. No Return is his first book. (Below are his wonderful suggestions for further reading, complete with Rowan's own summaries.) For Further Investigation Robert Chazan, Refugees or Migrants: Pre-Modern Jewish Population Movement (2018)–"A wonderfully readable overview of Jewish migrations during antiquity and the Middle Ages that overturns many widespread assumptions about the dynamics of the Jewish diaspora." Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Expulsion as an Issue of World History,” Journal of World History 7, no. 2 (1996), 165-180–"A provocative and insightful article that outlines the emergence of mass expulsion as a historical phenomenon." R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (1987; 2nd ed. 2007)–"The book that launched a thousand dissertations - still essential reading for anyone interested in how medieval authorities came to see deviance as dangerous." Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages, trans. Patricia Ranum (1988)–"A brilliant account of the growing concern with usury and moneylending in medieval Europe, written by one of the twentieth century's greatest historians." Miri Rubin, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (2020)–"For anyone wondering what life was like for foreigners or Jews living in a medieval city, this collection of lectures is the place to start." Daniel Lord Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (2016)–"A wide-ranging exploration of debt and debt collection in the medieval Mediterranean world." Francesca Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (2019)–"The histories of Jews and Lombards continued to be intertwined even after the Middle Ages, as Trivellato shows in this masterful study of early modern commercial culture."
13 FEB 2023 · On a January night in 1897, a crowded Episcopal church in Philadelphia was the stage for a curious ceremony. In the Church of the Evangelists, located in south Society Hill just ten or so blocks from Independence Hall, a gaggle of clerics unveiled a life-size painting of Charles I, King of England and–so far as the clerics were concerned–saint and martyr. Then Williams Stevens Perry, the Episcopal Bishop of Iowa, ascended to the pulpit to explain to the assembled multitude how Charles I, far from being an absolutist and enemy of liberty, had laid the foundations of American political order. This striking scene begins Michael Connolly’s description of a curious moment in the history of Anglo-American political thought and sentiment, a resurgent Jacobite movement that championed the cause of the Stuart monarchs as a means of opposing the corruptions of the modern age. It begins his new book Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880-1910. Michael Connolly is Professor of History at Purdue University Northwest; this is his third time on the podcast. For Further Investigation Michael Connolly has previously talked on the podcast about American presidents, way back in Episode 2 (!!!) and then in Episode 60 We touched on the execution of Charles I in Episode 127, which focused on the escape of two of the men who signed his death warrant into the wilds of Connecticut
6 FEB 2023 · On 11 October 1537, Henry VIII finally received the son for which he had been waiting for decades. The day before the future Edward VI was born, friars, priests, livery companies, and the mayor and aldermen of London all processed through the city streets, praying for the Queen’s safe delivery. With his birth te deums were sung in London’s churches, bells were rung, fires were lit in every street, and volleys of gunfire resounded from the walls of the Tower of London It was a classic Tudor event, combining as it did fears of a failed royal secession; civic drama; at times contradictory religious impulses and emotions; thrusting military power; and seemingly endless classical images and allusions. Tudor England is not composed simply of the reigns of the Tudor monarchs but by “decades of war and poverty, disease and destruction…a subtle but strong transformation in the nature of government, and complex shifts within economy and society… an outpouring of words [and] an ideological revolution in religious belief…” With me to touch on some of the characteristics of this tumultuous era is Lucy Wooding, Langford fellow and and Tutor at Lincoln College in the University of Oxford, and author of Tudor England: A History. For Further Investigation Scott Newstok in Episode 186 on how Shakespeare benefited from an English grammar school education If you can't get enough of Henry VIII, then travel through time with Dominic Sandbrook in Episode 226 Stephen Berry in Episode 279 explains why he think constant deaths took their toll Robert St. George, ed., Material Life in American, 1600-1860, for all your atropopaeic needs.
9 JAN 2023 · Welcome to Episode 300 of Historically Thinking! Design theorists popularized the idea of “tame problems” and “wicked problems.” “Tame problems” are answers to questions like how to get to Chicago, or how to increase the battery life of a cell phone. As in mathematics and chess have clarity in their aims and their solutions. “Wicked problems” have neither clarity in their aims or in their solutions. But what about wild problems? By wild problems, my guest Russ Roberts refers to the problems of who to marry, whether to have children, where to move, how to forge a life well-lived. These are problems that can’t be solved by calculation; in fact, argues Roberts, they are in parts of life that are “outside the reach of science or the scientific mind.” But wild problems are not wicked problems, which are very nearly impossible to solve. Wild problems are the most important struggles of each and every life. They are also, not too surprisingly given the title, the subject of Roberts' most recent book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Russ Roberts is the President of Shalem College in Jerusalem, and John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and host of the podcast EconTalk. This is his second appearance on Historically Thinking; he previously appeared in Episode 99, when we discussed his essay Gambling with Other People’s Money: How Perverse Incentives Caused the Financial Crisis, and what thinking through the 2008 financial crisis had taught him about intellectual humility. For Further Investigation To see if there is any editorial theme at work in this podcast, we suggest you listen to Episode 100 and to Episode 200, after finishing this one of course. Send notes! You might have noticed that Shalem College doesn't sound much like any college you know about in the United States. But you might also notice that it's beginning to seem that colleges in the United States increasingly resemble one another. Why might this be the case, and how we can do things differently, was the topic of an old conversation with David Staley in Episode 111: Alternative Universities, or, Thinking Way Outside the Box
5 JAN 2023 · What lover of American literature doesn’t remember these haunting lines: “Tell about the Midwest. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” Of course that was, as some of you quickly recognized, a deliberate mangling of a famous passage from William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom. It’s more than a little disconcerting, as I hope you noticed, to substitute Midwest for South. The South is haunted, and mysterious, and interesting. The Midwest…isn’t. But the charge that Shreve McCannon laid upon Quentin Compson can be laid upon any historian of any place in any era. Even the Midwest, as Jon Lauck would certainly agree. He’s the author of The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900. The last time he was on the podcast was way back in Episode 13, when we talked about his manifesto The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History. For Further Investigation We haven't had that many talks about the Midwest, or its people; but recently we talked about South Dakota with Jon Lauck's friend and neighbor Ben Jones. Much farther in the rear view mirror is a conversation with Jane Simonsen about Black Hawk, chief of the Saux and Meskwaki tribes, which involved the forced removal of those people from the lands in the Midwest. The Midwestern History Association The Midwestern History Association has a journal, the Middle West Review; and a podcast, Heartland History Was the Midwest the American Boeotia? There's a comparative history question for you. Episode 294: Black Suffrage The Town That Started the Civil War was mentioned in the course of the conversation; the book for children or teens I was thinking of is The Price of Freedom: How One Town Stood Up to Slavery One book to read about Oberlin, Ohio as a utopian community that failed is Elusive Utopia, which focuses on Oberlin after the Civil War I was trying to remember Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, which focuses on Villisca's Company F (which is the only company in the Iowa National Guard to build its own armory with funds raised from the local community) as well as other units from southwest Iowa that served in the battles for North Africa. Know Your Memes: "This is Fine"
19 DEC 2022 · The Victorians didn’t actually travel to the moon. But they were the first people, observes my guest Iwan Morus, to think that travel to the Moon was not only possible, but that “their science already possessed – or would soon possess – the means of getting there.” This confidence was based on the cascades of “new technologies, new ways of making knowledge and new visions about the future came together during the nineteenth century to create a new kind of world.” In an important sense, then, it was indeed the Victorians who took us to the moon. Iwan Rhys Morus is professor of history at Aberystwyth University in Aberystwyth, Wales. Among his recent books are Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (20127) and Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future (2019); his most recent book is How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon. For Further Investigation For a related conversations, see Episode 251 on the history of technology, from the early modern world to the present; and Episode 258 with Simon Heffer on the early Victorian era as the "pursuit of perfection" The Public Domain Review offers "A 19th Century Vision of the year 2000" An excellent website devoted to the Wright brothers and their achievement Collections at the Oxford History of Science Museum "On Verticality": a blog about "the innate human need to leave the surface of the earth"
28 NOV 2022 · When the Massachusetts Historical Society was founded in 1791, its august members probably did not anticipate that one day its archives would contain not only family papers, but family dresses–as well as waistcoats, wigs, and at least two scarlet cloaks worn by fashionable men in the late eighteenth century. Kimberley Alexander (who is Director of Museum Studies and Lecturer at the University of New Hampshire) was last heard on the podcast talking about shoes, but more recently curated a 2018 exhibition "Fashioning the New England Family." Our conversation is about the book that eventually accompanied that exhibition, also titled Fashioning the New England Family. In it, with the help of an able supporting cast, Alexander describes the history of New England in what some New Englanders wore over three centuries, from the first English settlement, to the beginning of the twentieth century. For Further Investigation A New York Times article on cochineal Priscilla Mullins and John Alden A swatch from the dress of Priscilla Mullins Alden's dress The tracing of a quilted petticoat pattern from the Leverett family John Leverett's buff coat Two waistcoats: one from the wardrobe of Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor William Tailer (d. 1732), and a truly incredible one worn by Andrew Oliver, Jr. (1731-1799) Henry Bromfield's wig; and a short history of the rise and fall of the wig Two crimson cloaks: one belonging to Peter Oliver (1713-1791) and another belonging to Henry Bromfield (1727-1820), described as "the last gentleman in Boston to cling to old fashioned styles of the 18th century" Abigail Adams, painted by Gilbert Stuart, an exemplar of how to modulate the latest French fashion in a way that suits you; and a more billowing style, from c. 1830
21 NOV 2022 · On April 11, 1865, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd gathered outside the White House. He spoke not of recent victories, or those to come, but to the shape of the peace that would follow. Now that the Thirteenth Amendment had been passed by Congress, he urged that it be ratified. Moreover, it seemed to him, Lincoln said, that it was necessary for “the colored man” to have the right to vote. “I myself,” Lincoln told the crowd, “would prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” That might now seem like a timid suggestion, but not to one man then standing in the listening crowd. When John Wilkes Booth heard Lincoln’s words, he turned to a companion and vowed “That’s the last speech he will ever make!” It was not the fall of Richmond, the flight of the Confederate government, or the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s army that finally made Booth decide to act, but the threat of black suffrage. With me to discuss the cause of black suffrage in the weeks, months, and years following Lincoln’s death is Paul D. Escott, Reynolds Professor of History Emeritus at Wake Forest University. He is the author of numerous books, including Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives; The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North; and most recently Black Suffrage: Lincoln’s Last Goal. For Further Investigation Many previous conversations on this podcast are related to this one. For an overview of Reconstruction, see my conversation with Douglas Egerton in Episode 67; how Black Americans created American citizenship was the focus of a conversation with Christopher Bonner in Episode 167; and most recently my conversation with Clayton Butler discussed Unionism as an ideology, and in part how it explains part of the mentality of Andrew Johnson. For a different take on Lincoln than that held by Paul Escott, see my conversation with Michael Burlingame in Episode 242; Burlingame would argue that Lincoln was never interested in colonization prior to the war, and never serious about colonization during the war.
7 NOV 2022 · It is perhaps the greatest scandal and sea-story of the first half of 19th Century America that nearly everyone has forgotten. It led to a court martial, endless headlines, a fistfight in a meeting of the President’s cabinet, and quite possibly to the foundation of the United States Naval Academy. And given that nearly everyone who went to see in the early American republic seemed to know one another, there was one degree of separation between this story and James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, and future Confederate naval captain Raphael Semmes. It was nothing less than an attempted mutiny aboard the USS Somers in November 1842, led by–of all the people in the United States of America—the son of the United States Secretary of War who supposedly wanted to become a pirate. With me to discuss this incredible story is James Delgado, historian and underwater archaeologist, whose new book is The Curse of the Somers: The Secret History Behind the US Navy’s Most Infamous Mutiny For Further Investigation James Fenimore Cooper: proud of his four years a merchant sailor and then a midshipman in the United States Navy, Cooper's fourth novel was The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea, probably the first American nautical novel. Richard Henry Dana, Jr.: now curiously forgotten, Dana was a Harvard dropout who enrolled as a merchant seaman, sailed to California and back, wrote about it in a bestseller titled Two Years Before the Mast, and then went on to become a prominent lawyer. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry: young brother of naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry, "Old Bruin" became one of the most prominent officers of the US Navy between 1814 and 1861, most famously leading the expedition that forced Japan open to trade and international interaction Raphael Semmes: once commander of the USS Somers, he became an officer in the Confederate Navy, and most famously commanded the CSS Alabama Herman Melville: elements of the Somers mutiny can be found in both White Jacket and Billy Budd
Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it
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| Author | Al Zambone |
| Organization | Al Zambone |
| Categories | History |
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