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 307: Eisenhower’s Guerrillas
In August 1944, Fred Bailey jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, landing in a disused brickyard. Growing up he had been a sickly child with a heart condi…
01:07:06 |
Mon 13 Mar 2023
Episode 306: Long Walk
In October 1569, a captain of a French ship off the northern coast of Nova Scotia was summoned on deck. Alongside was a canoe, and in it were three Englishmen–David Ingram, Richard Browne, and Richar…
01:04:28 |
Mon 06 Mar 2023
Episode 305: Degrading Equality
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 co…
01:18:55 |
Mon 27 Feb 2023
Episode 304: Mass Expulsion
“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 evi…
01:03:56 |
Mon 20 Feb 2023
Episode 303: Victorian Jacobites
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…
00:53:39 |
Mon 13 Feb 2023
Episode 302: Tudor England
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 a…
01:02:37 |
Mon 06 Feb 2023
Episode 301: Wandering Army
On May 11th, 1745, the British Army went into battle against the army of France near the village of Fontenoy, in what is now Belgium. 15,000 British soldiers marched forward bearing not only their m…
01:08:43 |
Mon 23 Jan 2023
Episode 300: Wild Problems
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…
01:08:42 |
Mon 09 Jan 2023
Episode 299: The Good Country
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 co…
01:07:42 |
Thu 05 Jan 2023
Episode 298: How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon
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 alread…
01:03:14 |
Mon 19 Dec 2022
Episode 297: Reign of Arrows
If the Parthian Empire is known at all, it’s by students of Roman history who see it pop up from time to time, before disappearing once again. Marcus Licinius Crassus, a member of the first triumvira…
01:17:40 |
Mon 12 Dec 2022
Episode 296: Mercy
I can't introduce Cathal Nolan's book Mercy: Humanity in War any better than he does himself, with these words:
This is not a book about war. It is about mercy and humanity… Mercy happens in a micros…
00:57:48 |
Mon 05 Dec 2022
Episode 295: New England Fashion
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 wel…
01:27:53 |
Mon 28 Nov 2022
Episode 294: Black Suffrage
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 t…
00:54:38 |
Mon 21 Nov 2022
Episode 293: Brilliant Commodity
At the end of the 19th century, Amsterdam was home to nearly seventy diamond factories, in which were 7,500 steam-powered polishing mills. The workers who cut and polished the diamonds, brought there…
00:57:17 |
Mon 14 Nov 2022
Episode 292: Mutiny!
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 o…
01:02:57 |
Mon 07 Nov 2022
Episode 291: True Blue
In late November, 1864, David R. Snelling visited his uncle, who then lived in Baldwin County near Milledgeville, Georgia. As a boy, he had worked in his uncle’s fields alongside those his uncle ensl…
01:04:26 |
Mon 31 Oct 2022
Episode 290: Oh, Dakota!
My guest today is Dr. Ben Jones, Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society and the South Dakota State Historian.
Ben Jones served for 23 years in the United States Air Force, attaining …
00:53:14 |
Thu 27 Oct 2022
Episode 289: Peace and Friendship in the American West
For over a generation the history of the American West has been described by scholars as one of violence, including genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and settler colonialism. While it replaced an older his…
01:02:25 |
Mon 24 Oct 2022
Episode 288: The American Revolution in Hapsburg Lands
In 1780, captured American naval officer Joshua Barney escaped from prison in Plymouth, made his way to London, and with the help of some English sympathizers to the American Revolution was able to t…
01:03:02 |
Thu 20 Oct 2022
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