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 193: The Plot to Bring Down the Soviet Revolution
In the spring of 1918, a young Scottish diplomat began to put together a plot that was intended to change the entire direction of the Great War, and save the Allies from defeat. As Robert Hamilton Br…
01:12:31 |
Wed 06 Jan 2021
Episode 192: Distracted, or, How to be Attentive
Anyone who has been in a classroom in the last 25 years has heard someone—perhaps themselves—worry about the effects of “digital distraction” on students’ attention span–perhaps even on their minds. …
00:57:53 |
Wed 30 Dec 2020
Episode 191: Pacifist Prophet
In 1775 Johannes Papunhunk died in a Moravian village in Ohio. He was not a Moravian, or any other kind of European, but a member of the Munsee tribe who had been born some seventy years before. In h…
01:07:20 |
Wed 23 Dec 2020
Episode 190: Porcelain
In 1709, one of the great European technological achievements of the 18th century was realized—the reverse engineering of a formula for porcelain that the Chinese had used for almost two millennia. T…
01:11:41 |
Wed 16 Dec 2020
Episode 189: Keeping in Time
Beginning in the Middle Ages, western culture became increasingly interested in regulating society through the precise, accurate measurement of time. “By the late fourteenth century,” writes my guest…
01:05:55 |
Wed 09 Dec 2020
Episode 188: The Amateur Hour, or, A History of Why College Professors Can’t Teach
In 2008 when Jonathan Zimmerman received a teaching award, his dean introduced him by telling the assembled audience what he books and scholarly articles he had written. He writes, “I don’t begrudge …
01:11:26 |
Wed 02 Dec 2020
Episode 187: The Light Ages
Hello, in 1951 a young historian of science named Derek Price was examining a medieval manuscript in the library of Peterhouse College in Cambridge. When the pages of parchment were unbound from thei…
01:05:50 |
Wed 25 Nov 2020
Episode 186: Think More Like Shakespeare
Based simply on the title, I never would have thought I would be recording a conversation with someone who wrote a book titled How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education. I…
01:22:24 |
Wed 18 Nov 2020
Episode 185: The Anvil and Forge That Created the Modern World
For generations, both Asians and Europeans have thought of the Silk Road has been thought of as a highway connecting east to west. But what if both Asians and Europeans have gotten the whole point of…
01:07:44 |
Wed 11 Nov 2020
Episode 184: This is Sparta
Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.
Stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that
we lie here, obedient to their words
So read, Herodotus tells us, an engravi…
01:14:56 |
Wed 04 Nov 2020
Episode 183: Dante’s Bones, or, A History of the Idea of Italy
In 1321 Dante Alighieri died in the city of Ravenna, near the shores of the Adriatic. In the years since his perpetual exile from his native Florence, he had lived in a variety of places in Italy. No…
01:24:14 |
Wed 28 Oct 2020
Episode 182: Philip of Macedonia, and Son
When Alexander of Macedonia took the throne of his father Philip, he inherited an expansive and wealthy kingdom; a hardened and meticulously constructed army; and a cadre of aristocrats and nobles wh…
01:12:37 |
Wed 21 Oct 2020
Episode 181: Westward to Zion
Each year tens of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints visit sites across the United States, like the recreated town of Nauvoo on the Mississippi River, or to "…
00:42:49 |
Wed 14 Oct 2020
Episode 180: Great State, or, China and the World since 1250
In Xanadu, Kublai Khan had a leopard. Well, it wasn’t a leopard really, it was a cheetah. And upon that fact, and upon many other anecdotes and material objects, Timothy Brook builds a bridge that co…
01:02:09 |
Wed 07 Oct 2020
Episode 179: What’s the Good of Ambition, or, Socrates and Alcibiades
In 415 BC, Athens sent a fleet of over 100 ships and 5,000 hoplites to attack the city of Syracuse, in Sicily, an expedition that would result in catastrophe. The philosopher Plato writing decades la…
01:23:09 |
Wed 30 Sep 2020
Episode 178: Medieval Mediterranean Slavery
“Medieval Mediterranean slavery” is a phrase that might seem a bit puzzling to some listeners—surely there wasn’t slavery in the medieval Mediterrean? Was there?
Indeed there was. For hundreds of y…
01:27:41 |
Wed 23 Sep 2020
Episode 177: The Forgotten City
In the history of ancient Greece, three cities dominated its politics, society, and culture. Of these, Athens and Sparta are now best known. But set in the plains of central Greece was the third apex…
01:28:14 |
Wed 16 Sep 2020
Episode 176: Men on Horseback, or, What Charisma Has To Do With It
In 1763, James Boswell was accompanied by his new friend Samuel Johnson to Harwich, from which the young Scot then travelled to Utrecht in the Netherlands. There he was supposed to study law, which h…
01:09:54 |
Wed 09 Sep 2020
Episode 175: American Dorm
This is Nassau Hall. When it was built, it was the largest building in colonial America. Anyone walking through it today when visiting Princeton University might have some strange resonance with thei…
01:11:42 |
Wed 02 Sep 2020
Bonus Episode: The Virus and the Dorm, or, Higher COVIDucation Part One
This is a bonus episode of Historically Thinking, hopefully the first of several short episodes that will deal with higher ed in the time of COVID. It's changed much else, and it would seem (as the a…
00:24:32 |
Mon 31 Aug 2020
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