Historically Thinking

This our fourth episode in our year-long series about the skills of historical thinking, and it’s about that terrifying moment which leads to actually writing about history: the question, and the thesis. When we ask historical questions, we’re first asking a bigger question: What questions make historical sense of these documents? Then, in the thesis, we try to answer it, hopefully with a claim that’s worth making. What good questions are, and what claims are worth making, are some of the things we talk about with Bill Caferro. William Caferro is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he is also Director and Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Studies; and Director of the Economics and History Program in the Department of History. He was last on the podcast in Episode 103 talking about his book Petrarch’s War: Florence and the Black Death in Context. Most recently he has published Teaching History.

In July and August of 1921 a group of young men met in Shanghai to found the Chinese Communist Party. They undoubtedly had great dreams, but even so they might have found it hard to believe that they were initiating the largest revolutionary movement of the 20th century, and that their party would thirty years later rule China.  Certainly they would have scoffed at the idea that, one hundred years after their meeting, their party’s far from doctrinaire Marxist reforms would have not only led to unprecedent economic growth, but to China becoming one of the two great world superpowers. With me to discuss the history of the Chinese Communist Party is Anthony Saich, the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is author most recently of From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party. It is not a book about Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, or any one personality. Nor is it about the Chinese Civil War, or the Great Leap Forward, the Culture Revolution, the economic transformation of the late 20th century, or any one event. It is instead about all those things, as reflected in the one-hundred year life of what is arguably the most powerful and masterful institution anywhere in the world, which has achieved that mastery by being highly adaptable.

Peter the Great is known to history as the ruler who pushed for the westernization of Russia; who defeated Sweden, thereby making Russia a Baltic power; and who then built a great capital on that Baltic Sea to be Russia’s window to the west. Yet on his deathbed Peter was thinking of Asia, dreaming of a passage to China and India through the Arctic Sea. It's with this vignette that Chris Miller begins his new book We Shall Be Masters: Russia’s Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin. As Miller makes clear, Russia has never been constantly interested in Asia, but cyclically interested. The Tsar's colonized Alaska, California, and Hawaii, and abandoned them all. They leveraged the Qing Dynasty to control the Amur River, imagining that it would be an Asian Mississippi–and then lost interest in it. Most Russian attempts to find security, wealth, and glory in Asia end up being half-hearted, and result in failure. What can explain these cycles of fascination and indifference? Chris Miller is Assistant Professor of International History at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He was last heard on Historically Thinking in Episode 153 discussing the Chinese surveillance state.

For Russia the year 1837 began with the death of the poet Alexander Pushkin in a duel, and ended with a fire that destroyed the Czar’s Winter Palace. These two happenstance events in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg frame a series of extraordinary changes that occurred that year throughout Russia. For historian Paul Werth these events amount to a “quiet revolution”, one that changed Russia and provided it with features—religious, cultural, intellectual, institutional, political, and ethnic—that are visible to this day. Paul W. Werth is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The author of numerous studies on religion, religious freedom, and the role of religious institutions in Russian imperial governance, his most recent book is 1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution, now available from Oxford University Press. Twice he has given conference presentations in verse.   For Further Investigation Paul Werth, "To know Russia, you really have to understand 1837" Chaadaev, Peter, translated by Raymond T. McNally. The Major Works of Peter Chaadaev. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969

One California afternoon William Damon received a call from his daughter. A sleepless night had led her to do a little internet sleuthing, and the result was Damon discovering that the father he had thought died in World War II had in fact not only lived, but had a career in the United States Information Agency, before dying in Thailand in 1992 after a long illness. One of the results of that discovery, and the years spent not only learning about his father but reviewing his own life, is Damon’s new book A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present. As one friend of Damon’s has written, it is “a gripping detective story, a deeply touching personal memoir, a critique of developmental psychology, a compendium of life-giving maxims, and a celebration of disciplined life review.” William Damon is Professor of Education at Stanford University, and Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence.   For Further Investigation Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets Joseph Amato, Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History Episode 50: Family History is Knowing Yourself--a conversation with Joseph A. Amato

Throughout human history, we have been deeply affected by our environment, particularly climate. At certain times there have been such alterations in climate that they amount to cultural shocks, resulting not only in famine, disease, and violence, but also in religious changes. That's the argument presented by this week's guest, Philip Jenkins, in his new book Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval. We discuss the mechanisms by which the climate is altered, and then alters human history, particularly religious history. Then we move on to discuss several periods of climatic shock that resulted in religious change; and speculate about how future climate change will change world religion. Finally I ask Jenkins for his secrets of being a highly productive historian, and whether or not all of his books are just chapters in an enormous book. Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, where he is also Co-Director of the Program on Historical Studies of Religion.

Throughout early modern Europe it was expected that neighbor would love neighbor as a spiritual practice, and that this corresponded with a discernible set of rules for everyday living. That's Katie Barclay's argument in her most recent book  Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self. Moreover she also argues that not only was caritas an ethical norm, it was also an emotion that was part of the experience of people of all levels of society. Using Scottish legal records from the 17th and 18th centuries, she studies how this ethic and emotion of caritas shaped relationships between couples, families, and through the surrounding community. Katie Barclay is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions and Associate Professor in History, University of Adelaide. With Andrew Lynch and Giovanni Tarantino, she edits Emotions: History, Culture, Society.

In 1347 the population of England was something on the order of 5.5 million. After the first wave of the Black Death had crashed upon the island’s shores and then receded, that population had been reduced to 2.8 million. Immense tragedy lies behind that number, and immense consequences as well. But the plague would return to England again in 1361, 1369, and 1375, with further human cost. And the climate made war against the English as well, with a cold period that led to crop loss and famine. Investigating the consequences of the Black Death has been one of the major areas of research for historians of medieval England since nearly the creation of modern history. Now Professor Mark Bailey offers us a new interpretation of those consequences, in a deeply researched and thought through study After the Black Death: Economy, society, and the law in fourteenth-century England. Mark Bailey is Professor of Late Medieval History at the University of East Anglia.

In her new book Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue, Emily K. Abel has written the first history of fatigue, one which also contains a memoir of her own experiences as a cancer survivor afflicted with fatigue. In this wide-ranging history, Abel shows how our view of fatigue is intimately connected with our view of work, and how "the American cultural emphasis on productivity intersect to stigmatize those with fatigue...When fatigue limits our ability to work, our society sees us as burdens or worse." Beyond that one of the particular burdens of fatigue is that is has such an immediate effect on one's life that no friend or medical test can confirm. Abel explains how fatigue how it has been ignored and misunderstood by both the general public and medical professionals, but she also shows how we have attempted to treat it through a variety of sometimes terrifying means. Emily K. Abel is professor emerita of public health and women’s studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of several books, including Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940.

A young boy hands out  flags to the public prior to the start of the 1981 Inauguration Day parade. Source: US National Archives “Patriotic history is more suspect these days than it was when I was its young student, 50 years ago,” writes Eliot Cohen. But, he continues, “civic education is also inextricably interwoven with patriotism, without which commitment to the values that make free government possible will not exist” since “civic education depends not only on an understanding of fundamental processes and insttitions, but on a commitment to those processes and institutions…” These are observations contained in Cohen’s contribution to a new title from Templeton Press, How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow's Schools, edited by Michael J. Petrilli and Chester E. Finn, Jr. With me to discuss this essay, civic education, and the possibility of teaching history for the common good are Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of the History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, himself a former public school social studies teacher, and Eliot Cohen, Dean and Robert E. Osgood Professor of the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. We've never tried anything like this on Historically Thinking before--getting together people who disagree about some things, but also respect one another and have a basis from which to reach agreement. But we think that you'll like the result. For Further Investigation Eliot A. Cohen, “History, Critical and Patriotic: Americans need a history that educates but also inspires," Education Next Jonathan Zimmerman, "Civic Education in the Age of Trump: Public schools in the United States Public schools in the United States aren’t teaching students how to engage diverse opinions."