Historically Thinking

In 1609 a free man of African and European ancestry, Juan Rodriguez, left the Dutch ship Jonge Tobias anchored off Manhattan Island with “eighty hatchets and some knives” to set himself up in trading with the local Indians. Ashore in coming years he fought off Dutch rivals, married an Indian woman, and started a family, all the while prospering by trading in bear and beaver pelts. His is one of the many stories presented by David Hackett Fischer in his new book African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, which examines nine Afro-European regional cultures in North America. Following in the footsteps of his previous books Albion’s Seed, Liberty and Freedom, and Champlain’s Dream, in African Founders, Fischer seeks to determine in this case how individuals both free and enslaved within these cultures “acted with purpose and resolve to change the ways that free and open systems worked in what is now the United States.” David Hackett Fischer is University Professor and Warren Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. Author of numerous books in addition to those already mentioned, his Washington’s Crossing won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Hello, when Samuel Townsend died in 1856 near Huntsville, Alabama, he was the era’s equivalent of a multimillionaire. He had thousands of acres of cotton-land, and hundreds of enslaved people who planted, harvested, and processed that cotton to make him rich. Like many other parents, he left it all to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces. But in this case all of them were slaves. And that crucial event is not even the beginning of the intricate, horrible, thrilling, and ennobling story of the Townsend family, which Isabela Morales tells in her new book Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom.  R. Isabela Morales is the Editor and Project Manager of the Princeton & Slavery Project and the Digital Projects Manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum. She received her PhD in history from Princeton University. Happy Dreams of Liberty is published by Oxford University Press. For Further Investigation For more on the internal slave trade, and the kidnapping of free blacks in the north for enslavement in the South, see Episode 141; for a discussion on American slavery, see Episode 25 The Septimus D. Cabaniss Papers at the University of Alabama–Isabela writes "The full collection has been digitized, so you can explore the actual letters and other sources I use in the book." Direct link to the 1856 will of Samuel Townsend Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (W. W. Norton, 2006) Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (University of California Press, 2005) Daniel Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: Three African American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (The Penguin Press, 2011)

You might as well admit it; you’ve always wondered how you would do in a vicious struggle for power. Those thoughts might be prompted by an over-long project planning meeting for a new software produce, an angry meeting of a humanities department with an associate dean, or from binge-watching Game of Thrones one too many times. But for high-ranking officials in authoritarian regimes, such thoughts are simply part of careful and judicious Thinking Ahead. In his new book Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, Joseph Torigian anaylyzes four power struggles in Leninist regimes, arguing that party institutions did not prevent power struggles from being shaped by “the politics of personal prestige, historical antagonisms, backhanded political maneuvering, and violence.” If he’s right, then we might even be able to learn something about the future from studying the past. Joseph Torigian is an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. For Further Investigation Some of the same events discussed here  with Tony Saich, when in Episode 213 we discussed the one-hundred year long history of the Chinese Communist Party. Another conversation in which historical knowledge is applied to political possibilities.

Some 5,000 years ago nomadic peoples of central Asia settled on the Iranian plateau. Their descendants would be the nucleus of an extraordinary empire that reached north to the lands of their ancestors, eastwards to India and China, and west as far as the Libyan desert and the Aegean Sea. These were the Persians, who not only created the first of the world-empires, but also brought about the first period of significant and continuous contact between the east and the west.  What is typically known about the Persians comes from Herodotus, who in his Histories told the story of how Persia came to invade Greece, and how the Greeks were able to repel the greatest empire yet known to mankind. But what is the Persian version of the story? What would the Persians have said about themselves? With me to discuss the Persian Empire of the Achaemenid Kings is Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, chair of ancient history at Cardiff University, and director of the Ancient Iran Program for the British Institute of Persian Studies. His latest book is Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, and it is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation Early in the conversation, when discussing the importance of the Persian's nomadic past, I made reference to a conversation with Pamela Crossley. This was Episode 185; her book on the importance of nomadic thought and culture for all of Eurasia is Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World. Lloyd had some tough things to say about Herodotus; for a different perspective, see my conversation in Episode 116 on "The First Historian" with Jennifer Roberts, a Herodotus scholar.

This is the second and final part of my conversation with Olivier Zunz about his new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, The Man Who Understood Democracy, just published by Princeton University Press. When last we left Tocqueville, he had just experienced a brilliant success with the publication of the first volume of Democracy in America. In this conversation, we will as promised discuss Tocqueville’s formative trip to Britain, and how it influenced his writing of volume II of Democracy; his political career; his experiences of the revolution of 1848, and the Second Empire; his great work The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution; and his death at a moment when it seemed that in both France and America the experiment to which he had devoted his life was on the point of failure. Olivier Zunz is the James Madison Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author, most recently, of Philanthropy in America: A History (also published by Princeton University Press ). He has edited the Library of America edition of Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels, all in collaboration with the translator Arthur Goldhammer. He has also co-edited The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics. For Further Investigation Exploring American Democracy with Alexis de Tocqueville as Guide: a 2015 seminar led by Olivier Zunz and Arthur Goldhammer at the University of Virginia still has a website, with an unparalleled collection of resources, including bibliographies of magnificent detail. Arthur Goldhammer describes his collaboration with Olivier Zunz: a "harmonious collaboration" that became an "intellectual friendship" The benchmark historical-critical edition of Democracy in America by Eduardo Nolla

In 1835 a young French author on the verge of publishing his first book wrote “the best thing that can happen to me is if no one read my book, and I have not yet lost hope that this happiness will be mine.” But Alexis de Tocqueville’s hopes were not fulfilled. Although the first printing was just 500 copies, Tocqueville almost immediately became an intellectual celebrity. When he heard people speaking about his book, said Tocqueville, he wondered “whether they are really talking about me.” Olivier Zunz argues in his new biography The Man Who Understood Democracy: A Life of Alexis de Tocqueville that Tocqueville was a passionate advocate for democracy, judging it the only system that could provide both liberty and equality. He did this both as a scholar and a politician, dying at a moment when it seemed that in both France and America the experiment to which he had devoted his life was on the point of failure. In the first of two conversations, Zunz and I discuss Tocqueville's family; his early life and intellectual development; his unhappy attempt at a legal career; and his famous journey to the young United States. We conclude this conversation with the moment described above, when the publication of the first volume of Democracy in America led to Tocqueville's instant intellectual celebrity. In our second conversation, we will discuss his turn to political action, and its outcomes. Olivier Zunz is the James Madison Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author, most recently, of Philanthropy in America: A History (also published by Princeton University Press ). He has edited the Library of America edition of Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels, all in collaboration with the translator Arthur Goldhammer. He has also co-edited The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics. For Further Investigation Exploring American Democracy with Alexis de Tocqueville as Guide: a 2015 seminar led by Olivier Zunz and Arthur Goldhammer at the University of Virginia still has a website, with an unparalleled collection of resources, including bibliographies of magnificent detail. Arthur Goldhammer describes his collaboration with Olivier Zunz: a "harmonious collaboration" that became an "intellectual friendship" The benchmark historical-critical edition of Democracy in America by Eduardo Nolla

For most of human history, the wealthy of any given society have been those who owned land. Therefore to change concepts of property ownership has been to change concepts of society itself. In her new book The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights, Jo Guldi focus on land and its distribution as an overlooked engine driving politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of course, the history of land reform is far older "strategies for turning the land over to the poor date as far back as ancient Canaan or the Roman empire; and yet, modern proposals for state-engineered 'land reform' appeared for the first time in nineteenth-century Britain, and the first “rent control” law dates from Ireland in 1881." From land reform policies in nineteenth century Ireland and India, to post-colonial Africa, Guldi's study ranges the globe. She argues that land redistribution is crucial to understanding the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, and internationalism, as well as the spread of information technology and free-market economics. Jo Guldi is associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches courses on the history of Britain, the British Empire, modern development policy, and property law. She describes herself as a "historian of capitalism [whose] interests have ranged widely over problems of the past and methods for knowing the truth." For Further Investigation You might be interested in reading some of Jo's many essays. They can be found here, on her excellent website. I learned about Jo's book from Scott Nelson, who was on to talk about grain and history. You can listen to that conversation here, if you haven't already heard it. In our conversation about his book Petrarch's War: Florence and the Black Death in Context, Bill Caferro offered some criticisms of "the long view" and some reasons why focusing on the "short view" is a good thing.

Richard Cohen begins his new book Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past with two particularly appropriate epigrams. First, from the historian E.H. Carr: “Before you study history, study the historian.” Second, the historical novelist Hilary Mantel: “Beneath every history, there is another history—there is, at least, the life of the historian.”  The life of historians is the subject of Cohen’s book, and he ranges from Herodotus and Thucydides in the Very Long Ago, to Ibram X. Kendi and the 1619 Project of Just Yesterday. Since this is a book about how historians make make history, it is therefore a book about how historians see the past, and think about it.   Richard Cohen is the author of By the Sword,Chasing the Sun, and How to Write Like Tolstoy. The former publishing director of two leading London publishing houses, he has edited numerous prize-winning and bestselling books, and written for most UK quality newspapers. He is a Fellowof the Royal Society of Literature.   For Further Investigation The podcast now has several conversations devoted to the subject of "Historians and Their Histories". To mention two historians of Rome who were also men of action, here's one with Adrian Goldsworthy on Julius Caesar, and another with Steele Brand on Polybius, onetime soldier, Greek, and historian of the Roman Republic. A site devoted to Shakespeare and history, which is suitably named shakespeareandhistory.com Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford: the house that historical novels built David Irving, mentioned in the podcast conversation, became notorious as Holocaust denier. In turn denying this charge, he sued historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel, the stakes of which were "not only Irving's contention that his reputation and livelihood had been harmed, but also a bitter argument about the nature of historical evidence and its interpretation." You can read more about the result of the trial in a contemporary source here.

The sociologist Edward Shils said or wrote somewhere that one of the three principle means of education were bookstores—preferably a used bookstore. Shils, for two generations a student and then faculty member at the University of Chicago, spent a lot of time in bookstores, and particularly in the Seminary Co-operative Bookstore, of which he was the 8,704thmember. Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which in 2019 he helped incorporate as the first not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling. (You can get some idea of the range of the Co-Op's enterprises from Jeff's annual letter.) He is the author of In Praise of Good Bookstores, which is the subject of our conversation today. It is not only a loving tribute to an endangered civic institution, but an imagining of a future in which bookstores not only endure but thrive. Jeff and I talk about many things, including his grandfather and my great-grandfather; how to arrange your books; types of browsing; and the need for getting lost in a bookstore. For Further Investigation At the back of Jeff's book, you'll find a QR code that takes you to this site: Princeton University Press has set up a page through which you can find an independent bookstore near you. New Dominion Books: the closest independent bookshop to my house City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg, SC

Britain in the 1840s should have been, observes Simon Heffer, a time of great social improvement. Instead it was a country that was beset by poverty, unrest, assassination attempts on young Queen Victoria and her Prime Minister, and fears of revolution. Yet just forty years later, it was as if none of that had ever happened. It had become a prosperous and progressive nation, transformed by advances not only in industrialization, but also in politics, science, religion, and education. That Britain had become such a society was not an accident, but the result of intelligent and directed purpose The story of that purpose, and what it wrought, is the subject of Heffer’s book High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. It is an investigation not simply of political, social, or cultural change, but of a change of mind—by which I mean not merely changing ideas, like changing clothes from season to season, but of changing the way things are seen Simon Heffer is an eminent British journalist, essayist, historian, and author of numerous books, including lives of the 19th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle and 20th century politician Enoch Powell, and a series of histories of Britain of which High Minds is the first. For Further Investigation In our wide-ranging conversation we touched on topics covered in previous episodes of the podcast. If you haven't already, then listen to Jonathan Rose talk about the intellectual life of the British working class; or Will Hay describe the importance of an obscure Prime Minister. High Minds was published in 2013 in Britain, but is only now being published in the United States by Pegasus Books. It has been followed by The Age of Decadence–A History of Britain: 1880-1914, which was confusingly published in the United States before High Minds. Staring at God: Britain in the Great War has not been published in America; you'll need to order it from Britain along with the good Cadbury's chocolate they keep for themselves. The final volume in the series, now being written, will end the story in 1939.