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 248: Athens
In 510 BC, an obscure Greek city located literally on a backwater revolted against its tyrant. This was not extraordinary; such things happened regularly in the many Greek city-states. What followed …
00:59:03 |
Thu 10 Feb 2022
Episode 247: The Greeks
For nearly 3,000 years, the question of what it means to be Greek has been one of perennial interest—and, incredibly enough, not only to the Greeks. How a collection of of small cities and kingdoms a…
01:13:58 |
Mon 07 Feb 2022
Episode 246: The Rule of Laws
For thousands of years, laws have not only been used to impose order by the powerful on the powerless. In the very process of their codification they often became instruments of control by the powerl…
00:57:48 |
Thu 03 Feb 2022
Episode 245: Queens of Jerusalem
For nearly a century after the First Crusade captured Jerusalem, that ancient city became the nucleus of a several kingdoms and principalities established by the crusaders. At the political, social,…
01:02:03 |
Mon 31 Jan 2022
Episode 244: Hitler’s First One Hundred Days
On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany. Occurring simultaneously with Franklin Roosevelt's "One Hundred Days", Hitler's first on…
01:04:47 |
Thu 27 Jan 2022
Episode 243: The Story Paradox
Storytelling, writes my guest Jonathan Gottschall, is the way in which people have for thousands of years not only bound themselves together into communities, but the art which built civilization. Bu…
00:57:21 |
Mon 24 Jan 2022
Behind the Book: Down the Road to the Cedars
This is the first in a new series of podcasts. Long time listeners will remember that when my book Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life was published, I did a number of podcasts with experts delving i…
00:45:51 |
Thu 20 Jan 2022
Episode 242: Was Abraham Lincoln a Racist?
In a eulogy to Abraham Lincoln delivered on June 1, 1865, Frederick Douglass posed the question “what was Lincoln to the colored people or they to him?” His answer was that Lincoln was “emphatically …
01:00:48 |
Mon 17 Jan 2022
Episode 238: Generations of Reason
In February, 1853, Augustus De Morgan, Professor of Mathematics at University College London, drew the last of a series of diagrams illustrating logical syllogisms. A the center of this one was a fac…
01:16:39 |
Thu 13 Jan 2022
Episode 241: Doing the Research
So what does research mean to you? Does it mean looking for someone somewhere on the internet who agrees with you?
Then you should really listen to this podcast.
This is another of our continuing s…
00:49:35 |
Mon 10 Jan 2022
Episode 240: Empire and Jihad
In 1914, at the start of the Great War, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire called for a “Great Jihad” against France, Russia, and Great Britain. It was a logical conclusion to over fity years of confli…
01:10:29 |
Mon 03 Jan 2022
Episode 239: The Chicken and the Egg, or, What Keeps (Some) Historians Awake at Night
This is one of the last in our year-long series about the skills of historical thinking, and today our focus is on one of simplest, but perhaps also the most contentious. It is Change and Causality. …
00:54:23 |
Mon 27 Dec 2021
Episode 237: A Brave and Cunning Prince, or, Following the Evidence Where It Leads
At about 8 in the morning on March 22, 1622, warriors of the chiefdoms making up the Powhatan confederacy attacked the settlements of the colony of Virginia. By nightfall, the devastating attacks had…
01:14:23 |
Mon 13 Dec 2021
Episode 236: Let Me Put That Into Context
Great podcast title, right? Those words still trigger a sort of survival reflex in me, based upon experience with an eminent professor. When he said those very words, you could bet that he would be t…
00:53:12 |
Tue 07 Dec 2021
Bonus Episode: The Higher Ed Scene, with Mark Salisbury
Sometimes, Higher Ed can feel like a battle. But not because of COVID, or CRT, or POTUS, or FL GOV...it's because someone in the administration asked the faculty if they might be so kind as to fill i…
00:58:18 |
Wed 01 Dec 2021
Episode 235: The Great Little Madison
If there’s one thing Americans know about James Madison, it might be that he was the shortest American President, ever–just 5’4”, or that he was married to Dolley Madison, who was not only a first la…
01:37:23 |
Thu 18 Nov 2021
Episode 234: The Fall of Robespierre
“We seek an order of things in which all the base and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions are awakened by the laws; where ambition becomes the desire to merit glory…
00:47:20 |
Mon 15 Nov 2021
Episode 233: Generation Myth
Each year millions and millions of whatever currency you’d care to have are spent explaining generations to one another. Inherent in that expensive explantation is the idea that people born at about …
00:55:15 |
Mon 08 Nov 2021
Episode 232: Talking About Each Other’s Gods
In 1924 the eminent nerve-specialist Sir Roderick Glossop urged Bertie Wooster and his friend Charles “Biffy” Biffen to attend the British Empire Exhibition being held at Wembley. “It is the most sup…
01:05:23 |
Mon 01 Nov 2021
Episode 231: Multiple Perspectives, or, Seeing the Same Thing in Different Ways
This is another episode in our year-long series about the skills of historical thinking, and today our focus is on multiple perspectives. Putting it in the form of a question, it’s when a historian a…
01:04:18 |
Thu 28 Oct 2021
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