Historically Thinking
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.
- Update frequency
- every 6 days
- Average duration
- 62 minutes
- Episodes
- 312
- Years Active
- 2019 - 2025
Episode 402: Broken Altars
“For many educated Westerners,” writes today’s guest, “ the idea that religion promotes violence and secularism ameliorates the problem is a settled certainty, a doxa, an unstated premise of right th…
00:56:45 |
Mon 31 Mar 2025
Episode 401: Rot
In 1845 a water mold named Phytophthora Infestans which afflicts potato and tomato plants began to spread across Europe, killing potatoes from Sweden to Spain. “The potato blight caused crisis everyw…
01:09:06 |
Sun 23 Mar 2025
Episode 400: Talking Cure
This is the 400th episode of Historically Thinking. And while it’s a podcast that focuses on history, and how historians and everyone else think about the past, I do that each week through conversati…
01:04:01 |
Mon 17 Mar 2025
Episode 399: Replicating History
This is Episode 399 of Historically Thinking. And whenever the dial turns to 100, my thoughts turn towards what this podcast is about. So it seemed to me a good time to talk with Anton Howes.
Anton …
01:03:05 |
Mon 10 Mar 2025
Episode 398: The Celts
During the age of the European Renaissance, a new people was discovered. Not the Aztecs, or the Maya, or the Inca, but a mysterious people with an intriguing language who had once dominated Europe it…
01:01:49 |
Mon 03 Mar 2025
Episode 397: Mutiny on the Black Prince
In April 1769 a small British vessel sailing along the southern coast of Hispaniola discovered a shipwreck near the current border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. An investigation found no survi…
01:07:26 |
Mon 24 Feb 2025
Episode 396: Obscure Important Historian
Lists of important Roman historians would certainly include cerebral Polybius (who, to be fair, was also Greek); the friend of Augustus, Titus Livius; the austere Tacitus; and the gossipy Suetonius,.…
00:55:12 |
Mon 17 Feb 2025
Episode 395: Summer of Fire and Blood
It was the greatest popular uprising in western Europe prior to the French Revolution. By spring 1525, across regions of what are now Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and France, armed bands of peasant…
01:10:09 |
Mon 10 Feb 2025
Episode 394: Greek Revolution
If English speakers—or French speakers, or Spanish speakers, or really most any speaker of any language other than Greek…or Turkish—think about the Greek Revolution at all, then that’s amazing. If th…
01:14:44 |
Mon 03 Feb 2025
Episode 393: Lawless Republic
Marcus Tullius Cicero lived from 106 BC to his murder in 43 BC. He was a writer, a philosopher, a traveller, a consul of the Roman Republic, and perhaps one of the last people to take the Roman Repub…
01:10:07 |
Mon 27 Jan 2025
Episode 392: Papa von Ranke
He was and has been criticized as a “mere burrower into archives”; as a dry man without any ideas; as a painter of miniatures rather than of broad portraits; as a conservative by liberals, and insuff…
00:55:22 |
Mon 13 Jan 2025
391: Roman Roads
Listeners to this podcast are certainly aware of the saying that “all roads lead to Rome”; and, given this audience, you might even be aware that this probably derived from the observation mīlle viae…
Tue 07 Jan 2025
Episode 390: Atlantic Ocean
“He was a bold man who first ate an oyster,” observed Jonathan Swift; and in fact the first human interaction with the Atlantic Ocean was probably eating shellfish, traces of which can be found along…
Mon 30 Dec 2024
Episode 389: Indian Religions
“India has 2,000,000 million gods, and worships them all,” wrote Mark Twain, following his 1896 speaking tour of British India. “In religion other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire…
01:06:01 |
Mon 23 Dec 2024
Episode 388: Agent Zo
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, estab…
01:13:58 |
Mon 16 Dec 2024
Episode 387: The Study
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…
01:06:54 |
Mon 09 Dec 2024
Episode 386: College Sports
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 foo…
01:08:37 |
Wed 04 Dec 2024
Episode 385: Golden Years
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 ha…
00:55:33 |
Mon 25 Nov 2024
Episode 384: Intent to Destroy
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 Ru…
01:12:58 |
Fri 22 Nov 2024
Episode 383: Quaker Founder
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 …
01:12:06 |
Mon 18 Nov 2024
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