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.

Historically Thinking is a history podcast hosted by Al Zambone, with 300 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Al Zambone hosts Historically Thinking, a history show with 300 episodes published.

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  Historically Thinking

  Trojan War: Barry Strauss on the history behind the epic poetry

  Aug 19, 202627 min

  Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls, great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion feasts for the dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles. Those were of course the opening lines of the Illiad, written by someone who we might as well call Homer. And since in this summer of 2027 it seems that very few people are without an opinion of Homer, or The Odyssey, or how Christopher Nolan may have violated Homer's copyrights, I thought it a good time to talk with Barry Strauss, for among his many books is The Trojan War: A New History . Barry Strauss is Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author most recently of Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire , which he and I discussed in Episode 421. This is his sixth appearance on Historically Thinking.

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  Historically Thinking

  Punctuation Remakes the World: Florence Hazrat on the hidden history of the marks that shape how we read, think, and communicate

  Aug 12, 202631 min

  Even that overlooked yet essential little pinprick at the end of this sentence has a history. For once upon a time, there were no stops or periods. And therefore there were no sentences, at least as we conceive them now. “Changes in punctuation,” writes my guest Florence Hazrat, “like changes in language, are normal, but they’re also important reflections of our values.” They are also, perhaps, indications of how we reframe the realities that we create with words. In her new book On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Changed the World , Hazrat ranges from cuneiform and Cicero to uncial and Shakespeare, and beyond, attending to how we have chosen to shape our sentences, and why. “From neuroscience to law, colonialism to love, punctuation exerts an enormous hidden power over our internal and external lives.” Florence Hazrat is a writer, researcher, and educator fascinated by anything that has to do with language, writing, culture, and society—and by dogs. She is the author of An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! as well as On the Mark . Her research examines how seemingly small features of written language reveal larger changes in society, politics, and human thought.

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  Historically Thinking

  He Has the People: Jonathan Earle on the momentous Election of 1860

  Aug 5, 20261h 4m

  YEAR of meteors! brooding year! I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds and signs; I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;. I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia; (I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch'd; I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal'd wounds, you mounted the scaffold;) That was Walt Whitman, from the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass; and the 19th Presidentiad to which he refers is the election of 1860. No election in the history of the United States can come close to being more confusing, tumultuous and consequential than the election of 1860. Now Jonathan Earle seeks to disclose its mysteries. And in fact in his new book He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860, he reveals that the 1860 contest was even stranger than we might have imagined it to be. Jonathan Earle is Associate Professor of History at Louisiana State University, where he also serves as the Roger Hadfield Ogden Dean of the LSU Honors College.

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  Historically Thinking

  Corn Syrup: Brian Leech does local history, regional history, labor history, technological history, environmental history, and food history

  Jul 29, 202626 min

  In early 1965, three executives boarded a plane in Japan, bound for the United States. “Unbeknownst to the U.S. Customs, they were carrying corporate secrets. Each man had carefully placed two vials of an isomerase enzyme into their pockets before the flight.” With it, they would change the world. For after two arduous years of nearly aerobic chemical engineering, their corporation produced what it called Isomerose 30. We know it, or its technically improved successors, as corn syrup. That’s how my guest Brian Leech begins his intricate, multi-valenced history of what went on in Clinton, Iowa, from the 1960s through the 1980s. It’s food history, it’s labor history, it’s technological history, it’s environmental history, it’s regional history—“and not any single one of them, which is to say,” to quote the great Edmund Morgan, “that it is good history.”

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  Historically Thinking

  Louisiana Purchase: Alexander Mikaberidze on the grand bargain that made continental America

  Jul 22, 202634 min

  Most Americans remember the Louisiana Purchase as a remarkably good bargain: fifteen million dollars for an enormous tract of land that doubled the size of the United States. But that familiar cliché hides a large story. It covers over a lot of things, and suggests a few more that just aren’t so. In his new book The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America , historian Alexander Mikaberidze places the Purchase within a global struggle involving France, Spain, Britain, Haiti, and the Caribbean. The transaction that reshaped the United States was not inevitable. It emerged from failed colonial projects, imperial rivalry, slave revolution, diplomatic improvisation, crafty financing, Thomas Jefferson’s geopolitical cunning, and his willingness to set aside some of his deepest political convictions.

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