Historically Thinking

In 1280 a enormous eruption disturbed the peace of the Chinese city of Yangzhou. It was “like a volcano erupting,” wrote one who experienced it, “a tsunami crashing.” Ceiling beams three miles away were thrown down, and tiles rattled on buildings as far as thirty miles away. The reason for this destruction was an explosion of gunpowder in Yangzhou’s imperial arsenal, which killed at least 100 men, and left behind a crater ten feet deep. How did Chinese scholars first develop gunpowder? And what does the development of gunpowder tell us not only about technological and military progress, but about innovation of all kinds, including political innovation? These are some of the questions at the heart of Tonio Andrade’s book The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History, published by Princeton University Press in 2016. Tonio Andrade is Professor of History at Emory University, where he researches and teaches in the areas of Chinese and Global history.

My great-grandfather Louis Corsiglia emigrated to the United States as a boy from Genoa, and he was a lifelong anti-imperialist Democrat. So it followed from those two things that a dictum of his was that “A Sicilian is no more an Italian than a Filipino is an American.” In its way, it’s a phrase from a lost world. If you know that Genoa is in the far north of Italy, and Sicily the uttermost south, then you get the picture. But what’s the connection between Filipinos and Americans? My guest Christoper Capozzola’s book Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century is a long answer to that question about conections. In 2011, the Obama Administration announced that the United States would be making a “pivot” to the Pacific. But as Capozzzola makes clear, the United States has always always been involved in the Pacific, and the Phillippines has always been near the heart of that involvement. Christopher Capozzola is professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology He has previously authored the award-winning Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen, and is a co-curator of “The Volunteers: Americans Join World War I, 1914-1919,” a traveling exhibition that originated at The National WWI Museum and Memorial—which devoted listeners to the podcast will know I think is one of the best history museums in the country. For Further Investigation Bound by War: the Instagram account Photography & Power in the Colonial Philippines: the US Conquest and Occupation (1898-1902) Photography & Power in the Colonial Philippines: Dean Worcester's Ethnographic Images of Filipinos (1898-1912) FilVetREP, the Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project

This week’s conversation is a rather unusual. There’s one guest, as there usually is, but this time there are two hosts—or, two people asking the questions. The guest is David Staley, whom longtime listeners to the podcast will recognized from Episode 111, where he talked about his book Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education, a collection of ideas about the kind of higher education we might have in America if we wanted to. What I didn’t really appreciate then was that David is the rare historian who is as interested in the future as he is in the past. Indeed, he’s written essays, and even an entire book about this, which is appropriately enough titled History and the Future: Using Historical Thinking to Imagine the Future. We’ve talked about history and the future before, in Epsiode 46 with Professor David Hochfelder, and since I’m deeply skeptical about this concept I thought it good to talk with David about it. And even more reason to, considering how in the summer of 2020 we are deeply uncertain about our future. The other fellow asking questions is an old friend of mine, Brent Orrell, who is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on issues of career and technical education, criminal justice reform, and prison education and reentry.  Indeed, he has a podcast about these issues called “Hardly Working” (here's a link to the latest episode, which has some very handy ways of subscribing). I thought that Brent would have a lot of great questions to ask David from a very different perspective, and I hope you agree that it was.

On January 15, 1817, a group of some of the most prominent African-American leaders called a public meeting at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, which had at that time one of the largest communities of free blacks in the United States. They had intended to support a plan for settling American blacks in Africa. But the audience of supposed supporters vociferously disagreed. They saw themselves as American citizens, and had no desire to go to an Africa which they had never seen. My guest Christopher Bonner argues that African-Americans did not seize onto American citizenship; they actually created it. Citizenship in the early nineteenth century was a malleable concept. African-Americans took advantage of that, and by contributing to the developing legal and political definition of citizenship were an essential part of transforming the legal order of the republic. Christopher Bonner is Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship, which is the focus of our conversation today.

In the movie The Third Man, Orson Welles delivered this sensational adlibbed speech: You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. This was unfair to Swabia, which invented the cuckoo clock, and to Switzerland, whose mercenaries had been up to their elbows in that bloodshed, transmuting blood into gold which flowed into Switzerland funding banks, dairies, clockmakers, and the multiplex knife. But Welles’ take on 16th century history is not that far removed from Catherine Fletcher’s new history The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West, which reminds us that the art of the Renaissance existed in a world of warfare; and that its literature thrived despite, or because of, deep religious passions. Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, and Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has previously published The Black Prince of Florence, a biography of Duke Alessandro de Medici of Florence, and has served as adviser to the set designers of the TV series Wolf Hall. For Further Investigation Michael Mallett and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars 1494-1559–a detailed account of the military side. BBC In Our Time: discussions on The Borgias and The Medici. Alexander Lee Machiavelli and Erica Benner Be Like the Fox–two recent contrasting takes on the thinker’s life and times. The Hidden Florence app for a virtual walking tour through Florence A virtual tour of the Palazzo Te in Mantua: Ali Smith, How To Be Both–a fascinating piece of fiction on the themes of gender and Renaissance art

In 1728, philosopher, theologian, and Anglican minister George Berkeley wrote these verses: The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime Barren of every glorious theme, In distant lands now waits a better time, Producing subjects worthy fame. Not such as Europe breeds in her decay: Such as she bred when fresh and young, When heavenly flame did animate her clay, By future poets shall be sung. Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last. As Michael Kimmage reminds his readers in his new book The Abandonment of the West: the History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy, in the 1860’s Americans took this poem as a kind of prophecy, so much so that they memorialized it with a painting in the United States Capitol, and named the new home of the University of California for the philosopher-bishop. How that idea of the West became enshrined in American architecture, politics, and diplomacy is Kimmage’s story—as well as how it has fallen out of all those things. Michael Kimmage is Ordinary Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the Catholic University of American in Washington, DC. From 2014 to 2016 he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio.

For generations historians have talked about "the ancient economy". When they want to be more specific, they have written of "the ancient Mediterranean economy." Given the diversity of the ancient Mediterranean world, that's not much more specific. Indeed, sometimes the search for unity has obscured the beauty of specificity, and even how economies and cultures changed over time. In his book The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome, J.G. Manning seeks to understand the economies of the ancient Mediterranean prior to the rise of Rome. But he's also meditating on theories of the origin of economies, and their interconnection both to one another and to the human and natural world around them.. It's not a large book, physically, but there is a great deal between its covers. Joseph G. Manning has 2009 been the William Kelly and Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of Classics and History at Yale University. He is also a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School and, believe it or not, Professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies in the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Author of numerous monographs and articles, he’s most recently published The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome, which is the subject of our conversation today.

On June 18, 1775, 245 years ago tomorrow, Abigail Adams took up her pen to write to her husband John, far away in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress: The Day; perhaps the decisive Day is come on which the fate of America depends. My bursting Heart must find vent at my pen. I have just heard that our dear Friend Dr. Warren is no more but fell gloriously fighting for his Country—saying better to die honourably in the field than ignominiously hang upon the Gallows. Great is our Loss. He has distinguished himself in every engagement, by his courage and fortitude, by animating the Soldiers and leading them on by his own example. A particular account of these dreadful, but I hope Glorious Days will be transmitted you, no doubt in the exactest manner. Joseph Warren was the family physician of the Adams Family, but he was much more . He was arguably the most important man in the Massachusetts rebellion, more so than John Adams, orr even John’s cousin Samuel Adams, or John Hancock. At the moment of his death Joseph Warren was indeed in many ways the most prominent of all the American rebels against the British crown. With me on the 245th anniversary of Joseph Warren’s death to discuss that death but also his life and afterlife of Joseph Warren is Christian DiSpigna, author of Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero. For Further Investigation Christian di Spigna's website "John Trumbull and Historical Fiction"–a splendid lecture, one of a series given at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2013 by John Walsh on "historical paintings" in the gallery. You'll have to watch the series to find out what a historian painting is, and I recommend that you watch them all. Walsh is a brilliant lecturer, who effortlessly conveys ideas, pathos, and context. Imagining the Battle of Bunker Hill–a lesson plan from the American Revolution Institute

Typically the "Scottish Enlightenment" is the term for the great burst of intellectual creativity, centered on Edinburgh and Glasgow and beginning in the 1720's. It saw advances made in philosophy, law,  economics, medicine, and geology,  by such great names as David Hume, Adam Fergusson, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and William Robertson–to name but a few. A typical view sees it as an unlikely event following "a century of relative turmoil" which was capped by the failure of the Darien colony, the Union of Scotland and England of 1707, and the Jacobite rebellions. However my guest today, Kelsey Jackson-Williams, argues that even amidst the turmoil of Scotland's late seventeenth century, there were still intellectual forces at work without which there would have been no subsequent intellectual explosion. But rather than centered on the Scottish cities and Lothian, this "First Scottish Enlightenment" was focused on  great houses in the northeast of Scotland, and on the city and university of Aberdeen. Rather than Presbyterian, it was Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and Jacobite. And, finally, it was primarily focused upon untangling the history of the kingdom of Scotland, as well as upon its literary heritage. For Further Investigation Kelsey Jackson Williams, The First Scottish Enlightenment: Rebels, Priests, and History The Website of Kelsey Jackson Williams Pathfoot Press: "dae ye ken yer ane leid?"

In early November 1831, Thomas Ruffin Gray was searching for a publisher. He had been one of those whites who had travelled from his home in Richmond to Southampton County, Virginia, to put down the most effective revolt of enslaved persons in the state's history. Gray later returned to Southampton to serve as defense lawyer for the alleged revolutionaries. From November 1 - 3, he interviewed Nat Turner, leader of the revolt, and supplemented that material with interviews of other participants and survivors. Following these interviews, Gray had quickly written the remarkable story; but in the end he had to ride all the way to Baltimore to get it printed. It sold 50,000 copies. In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History is in part Christopher Tomlins' meditation on how Turner's story has been told by generations of whites, most notably by Gray and by novelist William Styron. It is also Tomlins' meditation on the meaning and uses of history, and of the craft of historians. Most important, it is a deeply thoughtful reconstruction of what Nat Turner believed, and how he made sense of the world around him. As Tomlins writes, after years of wanting to write about Nat Turner, "I soon found myself writing about God." Christopher Tomlins is the Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent book was Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865.