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
Intellectual Humility and Historical Thinking: Jonathan Zimmerman
This is the first of my interviews with historians touching on questions of intellectual humility and historical thinking. Today conversation is with Jonathan Zimmerman. He is the Judy and Howard Ber…
00:24:21 |
Thu 21 Dec 2023
An Introduction to Disorder
We’re going to do something a little differently in today’s episode of Historically Thinking, in that it's not an episode of Historically Thinking.
Instead I wanted to share with you a teaser of a p…
00:15:30 |
Mon 11 Dec 2023
Episode 344: Founding Scoundrels
“Founders” is a term that we typically use to refer to just a few men–usually the first four Presidents of the United States, plus Ben Franklin and–nowadays–Alexander Hamilton. We think of them as ty…
01:06:43 |
Mon 04 Dec 2023
Episode 343: Talking Anglo-Saxon
In his Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755, Samuel Johnson did not define the words Saxon, Angle, or Anglo-Saxon. But Noah Webster in his 1828 American Dictionary defines Ang…
00:53:52 |
Tue 28 Nov 2023
Episode 342: Fish Market
From its opening in 1822, the Fulton Market was an essential part of life in old New York, selling vegetables grown on Long Island, fruit harvested in Cuba, lobsters taken from the waters of Maine, c…
00:59:57 |
Mon 13 Nov 2023
Episode 341: The Forgers
Beginning in 1940 a group of Polish diplomats based in Bern, Switzerland, orchestrated a program of forging passports and identity documents from Latin American countries. These were then smuggled in…
01:00:59 |
Mon 06 Nov 2023
Episode 340: Price of Collapse
“We live in a world that feels as though it is in the grip of rapid and capricious change. To rescue ourselves from the distress and dismay that change can induce, we tell ourselves that flux is the …
00:51:13 |
Mon 30 Oct 2023
Episode 339: Hollow Crown
The plays of William Shakespeare contain within them a whole world of human action and purpose. They are, said Samuel Johnson, "a faithful mirror of manners and of life." We seem to watch over Shakes…
01:02:03 |
Mon 23 Oct 2023
Episode 338: Rivals
“The scientific community is by any measure a very strange kind of community”, writes my guest. “For starters, no one knows who exactly belongs to it... Its members are a miscellany of individuals bu…
01:03:26 |
Mon 16 Oct 2023
Episode 337: Disorder
"Today’s international system is like a ship adrift during a pandemic. With the captain lost to the virus, and the most capable and conscientious members of the crew self-isolating in their cabins, t…
01:04:05 |
Tue 10 Oct 2023
Episode 336: Tory’s Wife
In 1785, Jane Welborn Spurgin of Abbots Creek in Rowan County, North Carolina petititioned the North Carolina Legislature, attesting her right to 704 acres of land so that she might provide for her f…
01:01:35 |
Mon 02 Oct 2023
Intellectual Humility Series: What’s Historical Thinking Got to Do With It?
Way back in April, I dropped the first two podcasts in what are intended to be a series on historical thinking and intellectual humility. They were designed to introduce the concept to an audience wh…
00:44:22 |
Thu 28 Sep 2023
Episode 335: PAX
‘If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed …
00:58:19 |
Mon 25 Sep 2023
Episode 334: Civic Bargain
In 2016, Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk published a chilling essay based on extensive survey data in the Journal of Democracy. It discovered that there was a growing desire for non-democratic alternati…
00:55:47 |
Mon 18 Sep 2023
Episode 333: City of Echoes
An Ambassador from the Kingdom of the Kongo to the Papal Court
On July 20, 817, Pope Paschal began a project to transform the Church of Santa Prassede, the resting place of the sisters and martyrs, …
01:12:13 |
Mon 11 Sep 2023
Episode 332: Rome v. Persia
A Sassanid cataphract in Oxford–fortunately a re-enactor
From the Ionian revolt of the 490s, through the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, the vastAchaemenid Persian Empire wa…
01:17:36 |
Tue 05 Sep 2023
Episode 331: Red Hotel
From 1941 to 1945, a platoon of Anglo-American reporters (and one or two Australians and Canadians) were housed in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. They were there to report on the defense of the Soviet Unio…
01:10:24 |
Mon 28 Aug 2023
Episode 330: His Majesty’s Airship
Hello, at 2:09 in the morning on October 5th, 1930, the British airship R-101 crashed some 90 miles northwest of Paris. It was just a few hours into a journey that was supposed to take it to Karachi,…
00:56:03 |
Mon 21 Aug 2023
Episode 329: Nature’s Messenger
On two separate trips, he traveled throughout the southeastern corner of the North American continent. He collected plants, and seeds, which he sent to interested amateur plantsmen and gardeners, as …
00:56:11 |
Mon 14 Aug 2023
Episode 328: Making Medieval Money
In the early 11th century, an English monk wrote an imaginary conversation between two men haggling over the price of a book. After finally agreeing to a price, they then “needed to establish what me…
01:00:13 |
Mon 07 Aug 2023
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