Historically Thinking

In the spring of 1918, a young Scottish diplomat began to put together a plot that was intended to change the entire direction of the Great War, and save the Allies from defeat. As Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart began making his plans, Germany’s Operation Michael was threatening to break the western front open before American troops arrived in full strength. Lockhart thought that he could bring Russia back into the war that it had abandoned the year before. He would do this by killing Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, overthrowing the Bolshevik government, and installing a new regime that would attack Germany and reestablish an eastern front. This plot, and the extraordinary personalities and stakes involved in it, are recounted in Jonathan Schneer’s new book The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia, which among other things demonstrates the truth of the moldy old cliché that fact is stranger than fiction. Jonathan Schneer is Professor of Emeritus of History at Georgia Tech in the School of History and Sociology. A specialist in the history of modern Britain, his books include London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis, The Thames: England’s River, Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet, 1940-45, and The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of Arab-Israeli Conflict, which won a 2010 National Jewish Book Award.  He is currently working on a book about the British General Strike of 1926.

Anyone who has been in a classroom in the last 25 years has heard someone—perhaps themselves—worry about the effects of “digital distraction” on students’ attention span–perhaps even on their minds. In the 90's there were arguments about whether professors should allow laptops for note-taking, which now seems very quaint. Now we’re wondering if Zoom turns us into Zombies. (Or should that be Zoombies?) My guest Jim Lang has written a book that takes that fretful conversation in a different direction. Rather than worrying about distraction, he argues that we should be increasing our students’ (and children’s) ability to properly attend to things. James M. Lang is Professor of English and director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts . Among is previous books is Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. His most recent book is Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It.

In 1775 Johannes Papunhunk died in a Moravian village in Ohio. He was not a Moravian, or any other kind of European, but a member of the Munsee tribe who had been born some seventy years before. In his long life he had been a prophet, preacher, reformer, and diplomat, dedicated to finding a home where his people could live in peace. As Richard Pointer observes, Papunhunk bewilders us because he breaks apart our categories. He was a prophet who inspired peacemaking not war; a nativist reformer who embraced Christianity; a critic of white practices admired by leading Pennsylvanians; a war refugee, protected by some whites against other whites.  Papunhunk refuses to be who we think he ought to be. In his complicated life, we can find a different way of seeing early America. Dr. Richard Pointer is Emeritus Professor of History at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He has previously written Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion and Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Religious Diversity.

In 1709, one of the great European technological achievements of the 18th century was realized—the reverse engineering of a formula for porcelain that the Chinese had used for almost two millennia. That this recipe was recreated in Saxony, in the heart of middle Europe, meant that porcelain would have a special place not merely in the technology, business, industry, and culture of the German states, but at the center of their political economy and in their relation to an ever-globalizing capitalist economy. With me to discuss this fascinating history is Suzanne L. Marchand. She is Boyd Professor of History at Louisana State University, with a particular focus on European intellectual history, and the history of the humanities in modern Europe. But her most recent book is Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, western culture became increasingly interested in regulating society through the precise, accurate measurement of time. “By the late fourteenth century,” writes my guest Ken Mondschein in his new book On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping, “mechanical clocks controlled the bells in medieval towns…These regular bells arguably produced a change in time consciousness at a general level: a device for measuring abstract time began to be used to regulate both personal and public activities.” Ultimately, Mondschein argues, without clocks the western world as we know it would not exist. Ken Mondschein is a historian of the middle ages, with a particular interest in technology and the arts of warfare. He is also credentialed as a master of historical fencing by the United States Fencing Coaches' Organization, and is the translator of several historical fencing treatises.

In 2008 when Jonathan Zimmerman received a teaching award, his dean introduced him by telling the assembled audience what he books and scholarly articles he had written. He writes, “I don’t begrudge her for that, at all. What else could she go on, really? She had never been to one of my classes. And even if she had, how would a single visit—or two—help her say anything meaningful or important about my instruction? What other evidence could she invoke? What did she know about me as a teacher, really? What do any of us know about that?” The answer provided by his new book is…not very much, at all. In The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, he chronicles the ups and downs of teaching in American colleges: the great teachers; the lazy teachers; the complaints by students; the attempts at reform; the denial that such a things as mysterious as teaching are capable of reform; and then the recurrence of the entire cycle, until for the battered reader it seems that time has become a flat circle. Warning: reading the book might be for you like drinking one or three good dry martinis, stimulation and wit, soon followed by haze and depression.

Hello, in 1951 a young historian of science named Derek Price was examining a medieval manuscript in the library of Peterhouse College in Cambridge. When the pages of parchment were unbound from their 19th century binding, to his delight he saw the name “Chaucer”. But this was not a manuscript copy of the Canterbury Tales, or even a letter, but an instruction manual for a scientific instrument. In the end, as my guest Sebastian Falk explains, the manuscript turns out to have been authored not by Geoffrey Chaucer, but an obscure Benedictine monk named John of Westwyk. John’s life, and his scientific interests, affords us a window into the fascinating world of medieval European science, which Falk takes full advantage of in his new book The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. Using the few scraps of information about John that remain, Falk fills out at the rich context of medieval scientific investigation, from the colleges of Oxford, to John's own monastery of St. Alban's, and even to his participation in a crusade to (of all places) Flanders. Seb Falk is not only a historian of medieval science and qualified teacher, but at various times in his life a civil servant, lecturer, museum curator, yachmaster, marathon runner, mountaineer, and a Special Constable.

Based simply on the title, I never would have thought I would be recording a conversation with someone who wrote a book titled How  to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education.  It might sound like that book from a couple of decades book which encouraged readers to become like Leonardo—I have to admit that I never did learn to write with my left hand as a way of becoming ambidextrous and thus much more creative. But Scott Newstok is not just writing a self-help book. It's a series of meditations on certain features of education, many of them lost, and how they might be carefully rediscovered and appropriated. At the heart of it is a really great question, which has bedeviled the minds of many: how did Shakespeare get to know so much? Newstok knows that the answer is the way in which Shakespeare was taught, in both its drudgery as well as in its pedagogical creativity. By recapturing how Shakespeare was taught, we can learn a lot about how we teach, and how we might be better teachers–and students. Scott Newstok is Professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee; and a very nice guy, as I think you'll agree.

For generations, both Asians and Europeans have thought of the Silk Road has been thought of as a highway connecting east to west. But what if both Asians and Europeans have gotten the whole point of the Silk Road wrong. What if instead of connecting the two important ends of Eurasia by bridging the empty central bit, the whole point of the Silk Road was that it was really a network that connected the heart of Eurasia to its distant peripheries. And what if it was thanks to the influences that filtered down that network of roads, the societies at the peripheries were transformed over a period of millennia, with certain eras seeing very rapid changes indeed—particularly from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century My guest today is Pamela Crossley, the Charles and Elfriede Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth College, where she specializes in the quing empire and modern Chinese history. Her most recent book is Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World, published in 2019; and it is the focus of our conversation today.   For Further Investigation Akhilesh Pillalamarri, "The Epic Story of How the Turks Migrated From Central Asia to Turkey: How did modern Anatolia come to be occupied by the Turks? The historical story may surprise you." The Diplomat (June 5, 2016) Peter Golden, "The Turkic Peoples: A Historic Sketch" Global and Eurasian History: A research and reading guide created by the Rutgers University Libraries Sino-Platonic Papers: who can resist a website with such an intriguing title?

Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. Stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, obedient to their words So read, Herodotus tells us, an engraving on a memorial commemorating the Spartans who died at Thermopylae, fighting a Persian Army that ridiculously outnumbered them. It has become probably the best known battle of the ancient world. Napoleon, it must be said, could never understand why; after all, he pointed out, it was a defeat. But who were these people, who seem to have willingly committed suicide by fighting against overwhelming odds? What was the society into which they were born, the culture that curbed and directed them? What did they love? What did they hate? These and other questions are the focus of Andrew Bayliss’ new book, The Spartans, which summarizes, synthesizes, and adroitly assesses a mass of scholarship to provide us with a vision of what was Sparta. Dr. Andrew Bayliss is Senior Lecturer in Greek History in the Department of Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology at the University of Birmingham. He first remembers learning of the 300 Spartans and their stand at Thermopylae when he was 12. For Further Investigation Andrew Bayliss on video: a quick three-minute dip into "The Problem with the Spartans", or a long, long swim at 110 minutes with "Playing by the Rules? The Importance of Obedience in Spartan Society" Past HT guest Paul Cartledge is perhaps best known for his studies of ancient Sparta. Here's his classic The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece and Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World. For more on the Spartans (and much else besides), give a listen to the two conversations with the classical historian Jennifer Roberts. In Episode 116: The First Historian, we discuss Herodotus and his history of the Persian Wars.  Then in Episode 121: The War Between the Greeks, or, The Forever War, we have a conversation about the war in which Sparta and Athens fought, with all the Greeks choosing one or another side. For more on Thermopylae, you can read about it HT guest Tom Holland's book Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West, and in his translation of Herodotus.