Historically Thinking

In 1914, at the start of the Great War, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire called for a “Great Jihad” against France, Russia, and Great Britain. It was a logical conclusion to over fity years of conflict between European and indigenous powers in the Middle East and North Africa, a conflict that eventually became a radical Islamic insurgency supporting an ancient slave trade against Western colonialism that exploited “coolie capitalism”. This is the complex story that Neil Faulkner tells in his new book Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920. Ranging from the Congo basin to the deserts of North Africa, he traces the complex interweaving of humanitarianism, colonialism, nationalism, and Islamism—arguing that Jihad was a reactionary response to modern imperalism. Neil Faulkner is an archaeologist and historian, who works as a lecturer, writer, excavator, and occasional broadcaster. He is editor of Military History Matters, and the author of fifteen books. For Further Investigation Neil Faulkner, Lawrence of Arabia's War: The Arabs, the British and the Remaking of the Middle East–the precursor to Empire and Jihad Neil Faulkner, A Radical History of the World–there's much of this previous book also to be found in Empire and Jihad Last year in Episode 148 we discussed the exploitation of the Congo with Robert Harms, an intimately related topic to this. Together they're really a matching set of conversations.

This is one of the last in our year-long series about the skills of historical thinking, and today our focus is on one of simplest, but perhaps also the most contentious. It is Change and Causality. Defined in the form of a question it’s to ask “What has changed, and why?” Among other things, it’s the skill that allows us to recognize and sometimes even explain notable change over time.  It’s attentive to multiple causations, and thereby avoids simplistic monocausal explanations. (As faithful listeners know, monocausal explanations are very, very, very bad.) With me to discuss change and causality are Pamela Crossley, Charles and Elfriede Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth College, a specialist in modern China, last heard on this podcast in Episode 185 describing what the Central Asians did for us; and Suzanne L. Marchand, Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State, who joined us in Episode 190 to explain the importance of porcelain in European history.

At about 8 in the morning on March 22, 1622, warriors of the chiefdoms making up the Powhatan confederacy attacked the settlements of the colony of Virginia. By nightfall, the devastating attacks had killed between a quarter and a third of the English settlers, destroyed many settlements and farms—including their food supplies, and forced the survivors to take shelter in fortified locations where they were unable to grow their food because of groups of warriors who continued the attack. Suddenly, just when Virginia seemed to be on the verge of success, it was thrown back into the position where it had been 13 years before when it was just a few hundred people within the palisade surrounding the settlement of Jamestown—under attack, and on the verge of the starvation. It was the beginning of a brutal war that would last for years, the second fought between the native of Virginia and the English interlopers. With me to explain the long life of the man who planned the attack of 1622 is James Horn, President and Chief Officer of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, which is affiliated with Preservation Virginia, a private non-profit organization and a leader in historic preservation. Horn is the author of numerous books, from Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake, to his most recent A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America. While this is conversation will be about one of the most critical moments in the history of North America, and about one of its most fascinating unknown personalities, it’s also a conversation in our continuing series on historical thinking. As you’ll see, James Horn’s book deals with many questions of evidence. And evidence is the answer to the question “How do I know what I claim to know about my question?” As you’ll hear, that is a question that James Horn had to ask himself many times as he worked on this book. For Further Investigation A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America  A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy Opechancanough--his biography in the Encyclopedia Virginia Historic Jamestowne

Great podcast title, right? Those words still trigger a sort of survival reflex in me, based upon experience with an eminent professor. When he said those very words, you could bet that he would be talking for at least the next ten minutes, seemingly without commas, certainly without periods. By minute five you began to wonder if it was really possible to sleep with your eyes open; by minute eight you began to suspect that words could beat you to death. Detail of " Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555" (oil on canvas) by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525-69) Today in our continuing series on historical thinking we're talking with David Staley about what “context” actually means.  The official podcast definition of context, which as always is in the form of a question, is “what background knowledge helps us understand these documents?” For example, a sentence in a memoir reading “After our wedding, my husband travelled alone to California” has different weight if it was written in 1850, then if it was written in 1935—the difference between the California Gold Rush, and the Dust Bowl; or to be literary, between Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. David Staley is an associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, where he also holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Design--where he has taught courses in Design History and Design Futures--and Educational Studies. His research interests include digital history, the philosophy of history, historical methodology, and the history and future of higher education(following him on Twitter @davidstaley8). This is his third appearance on the podcast; he has previously been on to talk about alternative universities, and the history of the future—wherein we talked with my friend Brent Orrell about life after COVID, four months after COVID hit the United States.   For Further Investigation  Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America Crane Britton, The Anatomy of Revolution David Bell, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution  David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich

Sometimes, Higher Ed can feel like a battle. But not because of COVID, or CRT, or POTUS, or FL GOV...it's because someone in the administration asked the faculty if they might be so kind as to fill in for cafeteria staff. Now that's going too far. That makes Hulk want to smash.   For Further Investigation Historically Thinking's Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed. Prime Salisbury steak can be here, in our last conversation about Higher Ed during COVID. Charlie Munger's simple plan for USCB; and what it's like to live in a Mungerbox TuitionFit...which could really improve its twitter game, if you ask us.

If there’s one thing Americans know about James Madison, it might be that he was the shortest American President, ever–just 5’4”, or that he was married to Dolley Madison, who was not only a first lady but the baker of snack cakes. If they know a little bit more about James, then they know that he is remarkably, even dangerously, contradictory: an author of The Federalist Papers, the “Father of the Constitution”, who also penned the dangerous doctrine of nullification, and opposed his friend Alexander Hamilton at every step of the way; a creator of political parties who as a practical politician was one of the worst presidents in history, presiding over the half-baked disaster of the War of 1812 before slinking off the executive stage. With us to demonstrate how a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing—indeed, perhaps one of the most dangerous things of all–is Jay Cost, author of James Madison: America’s First Politician, a book which is not only about Madison, but about the political culture that he more than anyone else put into place, the ideas he set in motion—and those that he ignored. Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford Nonresidential Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is his fourth book.

“We seek an order of things in which all the base and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions are awakened by the laws; where ambition becomes the desire to merit glory and to serve our country; where distinctions are born only of equality itself; where the citizen is subject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, and the people to justice; where our country assures the well-being of each individual, and where each individual proudly enjoys our country's prosperity and glory…” These are the words of Maximilien Robespierre, delivered on 5 February 1794. It all sounds very good, if you’re not a monarchist. Yet later in this speech, sometimes labeled “On Political Virtue”, Robespierre also makes his clearest call for terror as the means with which to save the future of the republic from the enemies within as well as those without. In the end, he would himself be identified as one of those internal enemies, and be himself eliminated. This is the subject of Colin Jones’ new book The Fall of Robespierre: 24 hours in Revolutionary France. It is an hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute chronicle of Robespierre’s last full day. But it is also more than that. It is a day in the life of the French Revolution, in which not only Robespierre crosses the stage, but journalists, the public executioner, shopkeepers, laborers, and all the faces of the crowd. Colin Jones is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London, a fellow of the British Academy, past president of the Royal Historical Society, and currently visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Among his previous books is The Smile Revolution: In Eighteenth-Century Paris; yes, even smiles have a history.

Each year millions and millions of whatever currency you’d care to have are spent explaining generations to one another. Inherent in that expensive explantation is the idea that people born at about the same time are basically alike, and very different from people born at other times. But, as Bobby Duffy explains in his book The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think, while this can be the case, it ain’t always necessarily so. Generational identities are not fixed, but fluid. They change over time. And beware of those who try to sell you simplistic—or simply false–concepts like generational warfare, or inevitable social decline; that only the kids care about the environment, or that Gen Z is “the suicidal generation”. Bobby Duffy is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London. Formerly director of research at the public opinion firm Ipsos MORI, his most recent book was published in the United States under the title Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything.

In 1924 the eminent nerve-specialist Sir Roderick Glossop urged Bertie Wooster and his friend Charles “Biffy” Biffen to attend the British Empire Exhibition being held at Wembley. “It is the most supremely absorbing and educational collection of objects,” Glossop enthused, “both animate and inanimate, gathered from the four corners of the Empire that has ever been assembled in England’s history.” After arrival at Wembley, Bertie’s genius-level manservant Jeeves shimmered off, and the heat, exertion, and education of it all became so overwhelming that Bertie and Biffy sought solace inside an ice-cold glasses of Green Swizzle, served up by a bartender in the Jamaican Tent. Perhaps Jeeves, who was known to curl up with a volume of Spinoza in his off-hours, attended the principal intellectual attraction at Wembley, the Conference on Some Living Religions within the Empire. This awkwardly named meeting of world religions is one of several chronicled by my guest Tal Howard in his new book The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue. In doing so, he traces how inter-religious dialogue was defined; how it in turn defined religion; and how it reflected and reinforced ideals and concepts such as pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and orientalism—not always in the ways one might expect. Tal Howard is Professor of History and Humanities, and Richard and Phyllis Dusenberg Chair of Christian Ethics, at Valparaiso University. This is his second appearance on Historically Thinking; he was previously on the podcast talking about the historian Jakob Burckhardt.

This is another episode in our year-long series about the skills of historical thinking, and today our focus is on multiple perspectives. Putting it in the form of a question, it’s when a historian asks herself How might others plausibly interpret this evidence differently?  To do that, we must consider more than one point of view, and then either refute or concede objections to our argument. The theme of “multiple perspectives” takes us into a strange and interesting landscape where history, logic, phenomenology, and ethics meet—and hopefully assist one another. Touring that landscape with me today are two frequent guests of the podcast. Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. Her last appearance on the podcast was in January when she talked about her most recent book Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution. Bob Elder is Associate Professor of History at Baylor University, and we most recenlty talked about his book Calhoun, American Heretic. It should be noted that neither of them are from South Carolina.