Historically Thinking

This is the second of Historically Thinking’s  yearlong series on the the skills of historical thinking. In our first installment this year, which was Episode 196, we heard cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham explain reading comprehension, without which none of the other skills really work. Today in the podcast's 200th episode we’re going to tackle Connecting. If we put connecting into the form of a question, it would be something like “How does this document [or any other source, from portraits to shoes to stone walls] fit into a bigger picture?” Connecting joins together information from various sources, near and far from each other. It compares & contrasts, it corroborates testimony, it observes interesting links. Connecting introduces the idea that history is first a way of seeing, before it can become a way of thinking. There’s no better way to discuss connecting, or any other skill of historical thinking, than to consider an exemplar of that skill. If you were trying to craft a silver teapot, you wouldn’t want to read a book about it, not even a stack of books. You’d want to watch a master craftsman at work, and be able to ask lots of questions; maybe even have a go at it yourself, under their careful and experienced eye. Today’s exemplar is the book The Ghost of Galileo…in a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War, just published by Oxford University Press. Its author and our guest is John Lawrence Heilbron, Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is also Vice Chancellor Emeritus. Professor Heilbron is a native of the Bay Area, and earned both his AB and MA in Physics from Berkeley, before continuing on at Berkeley to take a PhD Degree in the History of Science under the direction of Thomas S. Kuhn. He has also served as Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Museum for the History of Science, and is an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. His work has ranged across the history of physics and astronomy, from Niels Bohr: A Very Short Introduction (also published by Oxford) to my favorite The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories. He now divides his time between Berkeley and west Oxfordshire, where his local is the Rose and Crown in Shilton.

If you count up all his military service, George Washington was a soldier for about thirteen years. But as an elected representative he served for 26 years, first as a member of the House of Burgesses in Virginia, then as President of the United States. And that's not counting being appointed by Virginia's legislature to the First and Second Continental Congresses, and to the Constitutional Convention. That also passes over his simultaneous service as a Justice of Fairfax County, and member of the church vestry, both of which were important local political roles. Yet for some reason we don't think of Washington as a politician, nor recognize that the use of political power was perhaps his greatest talent. Fortunately David O. Stewart has remedied this deficit with his new book, George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father. There are few better people with whom to talk about George Washington then David O. Stewart. He’s the author of numerous histories, including Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy. For Further Investigation David O. Stewart writes, "I'm a fan of small books on Washington." He suggests: Edmund Morgan, The Genius of George Washington Don Higginbotham, ed., George Washington Reconsidered Paul Longmore, The Invention of George Washington

This bonus episode is with Guy Raffa, last heard in Episode 183 discussing his book Dante's Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy. It was a great conversation about Italy, and the culture and idea of Italy. But then and since I've been wanting to talk about Dante's poetry, particularly about the Divine Comedy. This was my chance to not only do that, but to talk with Guy about how to approach poetry which is notoriously difficult to understand. It's hard enough for us to do that. How does Guy help other people do it? What do we have to do to comprehend difficult things? Here are the passages that Guy and I talk about, with Guy's brief explanations of them: Inf. 34.70-81, 88-93: Virgil’s flip, and the 180 degree change in perspective. Through center of gravity, the world is truly upside down! Purg. 1.1-6, 130-136: Opening verses (poem as voyage, def. of Purgatorio) and final verses of the canto, with the reed of humility (golden bough), Ulysses intratext, main theme—cleansing, renewal, hope—of the entire second cantica. Par. 1.64-72: Blast off from Terrestrial Paradise to the Celestial realm. Glaucus simile (Ovid), neologism (trasumanar)—new language—to represent Paradise,  a place “beyond the human”.. They're conceptually difficult passages, which is why Guy chose them. We recommend that you follow along, either in your own copy made from dead trees, or online at Digital Dante.

"Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born, and never could be extinguished." -Harriet Martineau John C. Calhoun was, for his contemporaries, an unforgettable presence whether they despised or cherished him. Harriet Martineau, an English social theorist and pioneering feminist, made the above unforgettable observation. Compared to others of his opponents, she was positively kind. They saw him as the human embodiment of Milton's Satan, a burning bright Lucifer with magnetic personality and brilliant arguments for evil–in Calhoun's case for the "positive good" of racial chattel slavery. Yet even his supposed followers could recoil from him, or rather resent the strong hands by which he guided them. Calhoun was born of a Scots family in the South Carolina backcountry. Raised a Democratic Republican, he was educated in the Federalist bastions of Yale College and the Lichfield Law School. Within a few short years following his graduation he had become one of the leaders of the House of Representatives, and from 1818 to 1824 he served as one of the most dynamic and effective peacetime American Secretaries of War. A contestant for President in the 1824 election, had he secured that office, the political history of the United States might have been somewhat altered. But as Vice President first to John Quincy Adams, and then to Andrew Jackson, he became enmeshed in South Carolina's struggles against the tariff and the power of the Federal government. For nearly the rest of his life, following his falling out with Jackson and his departure in 1832 from the office of the Vice President, Calhoun would serve as Senator from South Carolina, and leader of the Southern forces arrayed against the Northern forces that were bent on destroying the "Southern way of life"–by which they meant chattel slavery. While Calhoun's arguments might be thought to have died with the last guns of the Civil War, his political theories have had a long and curious afterlife. All of this is made clear by Robert Elder in his new biography Calhoun: American Heretic. Bob is Assistant Professor of History at Baylor University. This is second book, and his second appearance on the podcast.

Eliza Lucas Pinckney was born in 1722 on the island of Antigua in the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, one of the tinier colonies of the British Empire, and she died in 1793 in Philadelphia, the capital of the new American Republic. Those places of birth and death, and the seventy-odd years between the two events, encapsulate a life that not only saw tumultuous change, but helped to create it. For Eliza Pinckney was one of the wealthiest, most respected, and influential women of her era. This was not only through the legacy of her remarkable children, and the labor of those she enslaved, but because of her own intelligence, entrepreneurship, and keen understanding of the world around her in all its diversity and complexity—with one or two important exceptions, as Lorri Glover makes clear in her new biography Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution. Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. Her previous books include Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries, and The Fate of the Revolution: Virginians Debate the Constitution. This is her third appearance on the podcast. (The fabric in the image in the header, and in full beneath, is from Eliza Pinckney's bed canopy which featured a design of an indigo plant. As Lorri wrote me, "I love it that she slept below indigo." The fragment of the canopy now held in the Charleston Museum) For Further Investigation Books and digital resources recommended by Lorri Glover Books "I loved this book on the history of indigo": Andrea Feeser, Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life (2013) "For people interested in women in the Revolution, I suggest this collection of essays": Barbara Oberg, ed., Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World (2019) "A great general overview": Matthew Mulcahy, Hubs of Empire: The Southeastern Lowcountry and British Caribbean (2014) "For capturing the material culture and society of 18th-century Charleston": Emma Hart, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (2010) Digital Resources "For the Pinckneys, the starting point is Connie Schulz's digital projects. Both are behind paywalls, but this is necessary to support the team's important work." The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry  The Papers of the Revolutionary Era Pinckney Statesmen "Here is the entry on Eliza from the South Carolina Encyclopedia." Photos "And here is a link to the Smithsonian's photos of Eliza's dress."

We've just begun a unique experiment, creating a year long series devoted to explain what historical thinking is, why it's important, and how to do it. The series kicked off this week with a conversation I had with Daniel Willingham about "comprehension", the first necessary skill for historical thinking–without understanding what we read, it's very hard to think about the past. When we're done, there will be twelve monthly conversations, eleven devoted solely to one skill. (The twelfth, in case you're wondering, will wrap it up in a bow and put it by the tree, which is an apt metaphor because it will come in December.) Additionally there will be other conversations (most of them short ones, we hope) that you can find on the Historically Thinking website, three or more devoted to each of the skills. It will be we hope an unparalleled resource for students, teachers, and anyone who's interested in history. So it seems useful to moment to bring a golden oldie up out of the archives, a conversation with my friend Lendol Calder in which we discuss the skills of historical thinking. Note that the list could be shorter; it could be longer. But this is a list that he likes, and that I like, and it's what we're sticking with. As I wrote way back when this was the thirty-ninth episode of the podcast, there are few better to discuss history and how to think historically than Lendol Calder, my onetime colleague in Augustana College's department of history, and a recognized authority in the scholarship of teaching and learning. A Carnegie Scholar, and the 2010 Illinois Professor of the Year, Calder shares these insights with history teachers around the country. Today, we're delighted to have him share them with us. An eminent historian once wrote to me "Lendol Calder has done more than anybody else to teach us about what history teaching is, or should be." So give Calder a listen; he has a right to his opinion. For Further Investigation Lendol Calder, "But What is Our Story?" (teachinghistory.org) Sam Wineburg, "Reading Abraham Lincoln: An expert/expert study in the interpretation of historical texts." Cognitive Science, Volume 22, Issue 3, Pages 319-346. –Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of the Teaching of the Past (Temple University Press, 2011. Sam Wineburg, Daisy Martin, and Chauncey Monte-Sano, Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School History Classrooms Paperback (Teachers College Press, 2012).

When I used to grade historical essays, I would provide students with a rubric that I stole from Lendol Calder, and which allowed them to understand how they were being evaluated, and for what. The very first item on the rubric reads as follows: Comprehension:  What do the documents say/mean?  Accurately reconstructs the meaning of documents.  No misreadings, serious misconceptions of authors’ meanings, or relevant documents ignored. Comprehension is not something I had ever given a lot of thought to, until I began to teach. I think that was a mistake, because the more I taught, the more I realized that comprehension was first on that rubric for a reason. Indeed, I have a hypothesis that most academic problems begin with a problem in comprehension–perhaps rooted in the mistaken belief that just because we've read something we have comprehended it. Without appreciating comprehension and how it works it's impossible to teach reading; and without good reading, there is no historical thinking. But historians don't think a lot about comprehension. That's not our fault, it's not something that we should study. We should leave that to those who study the mind and how it works, and that's why in this conversation I talk with Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Dan's research is focused upon the application of cognitive psychol0gy to K-16 education. Today’s conversation is based around the arguments of his book The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Works. You'll hear us talk about why reading is like cooking Chicken Milanese; what task analysis is, and how it can help us break down the act of reading; why background knowledge is indispensable for reading; and why digital devices are not the problem they're often made out to be.

On December 2, 2020, the University of Vermont announced that it would be eliminating the geology, religion, and classics departments, and also eliminating majors in Asian Studies, German, and Italian as part of cuts to programs in the College of Arts and Sciences with less than 25 or fewer students enrolled, or fewer than five graduates per year. The Academic Socal Internet (or at least its humanities sector) predictably exploded, along lines which are pretty familiar by now to those who follow such things, with anger at neo-liberal corporatism, American anti-intellectualism, and so on. Those who mustered a defense did so by proclaiming that the arts and humanities foster necessary critical thinking skills; or that these were necessary parts of general education at the University of Vermont; that the liberal arts are devalued. Incredibly enough, many of these points repeat those made for over a hundred years, as Eric Adler explains in his illuminating book The Battle for the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debates Can Save the Humanities Today. While the book centers upon intellectual debates in late 19th and early 20th century America, it ranges as far back as Marcus Tullius Cicero, and is as contemporary as the news from Vermont of December 2, 2020. Dr. Eric Adler is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland. His scholarly interests include Roman historiography, Latin prose, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of the humanities.   For Further Investigation Charles Francis Adams, Jr. 1884. A College Fetich: An Address Delivered before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa in Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, June 28, 1883, 3rd edition. Boston: Lee and Shepard. Irving Babbitt. 1986. Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities. Washington, DC: National Humanities Institute. Originally published in 1908. Charles W. Eliot. 1969. A Turning Point in Higher Education: The Inaugural Address of Charles William Eliot as President of Harvard College, October 19, 1869. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Roger L. Geiger. 2015. The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Robert E. Proctor. 1998. Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve Our Schools, 2nd edition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

During the American Revolution just about everyone in the thirteen colonies—or, after July 2, 1776,  the new United States—could be justly termed a traitor. For rebellious colonists prior to 1776, it was Parliament who had betrayed the English constitution. For royal officials, resistance and then rebellion was treason to the monarch. After independence, those who Americans identified numerous traitors in their midst—not only those who remained loyal to the old order of things, but even those who persisted a little too long in neutrality, or pacifism. As a legal issue, treason was in practice connected to numerous other things—to the power to arrest and detain; to the authority of the American  military; to the composition of juries; and to the meaning of citizenship. With me to discuss the legal history of treason in the American Revolution is Carlton F.W. Larson, author of The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. It is a legal history, but also a social history of how treason was defined, prosecuted, and adjudicated in the colony, and then the commonwealth, of Pennsylvania. Carlton Larson is Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at the Davis School of Law at the University of California Davis. A leading expert on the laws of treason, he has also just published On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law.

Here's a little lagniappe, a conversation with frequent guest Mark Salisbury of TuitionFit on higher ed headlines of December 2020, and some speculation about the year in higher ed to come. Also contains news you can use!