Historically Thinking

Imagine, if you would, a world without either money or banks. How could anyone conduct business? How could anyone procure goods and services? How could you have a diversified economy? How could a person plan for the future?  This was the world of early America, prior the Revolution. One of the many changes brought about by that event was the creation of both money and banks. But neither of them worked in the ways that we now expect.  With us to explore this strange yet oddly resonant world of money and finance is Sharon Ann Murphy. She is Professor of History at Providence College, and author most recently of Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic, published by Johns Hopkins University Press as part of their series “How Things Worked.”

My guest today is Thomas J. McSweeney, Professor of Law at the William and Mary Law School in Willamsburg, Virginia. He earned both his JD and his PhD in History from Cornell University, and is the author of Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law's First Professionals, which is the subject of today’s conversation.

Most Americans think they know something about the Pilgrims, based on a dimly remembered High School textbook, or perhaps from a second-grade Thanksgiving pageant: that the men wore stove pipe hats with brass buckles, and carried blunderbusses; that they were the first settlers in America, had the first Thanksgiving, got on well with the Indians; that they were uniquely tolerant while others all around them were not; that they were the most important settlers of New England, or the most influential. And just about all of these things are wrong. With me to discuss the Pilgrims, their origins, beliefs, settlement, and their importance is John Turner, author of the new book They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty, published by Yale University Press. John Turner is Professor of Religious Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. His previous works include the award-winning Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, as well as The Mormon Jesus: The Place of Jesus Christ in Latter-Day Saint Thought, Artwork, and Sprituality.

Winston Churchill termed the Seven Years War (what Americans think of as the French and Indian War) the “First World War” since its battles took place from Germany to western Pennsylvania to Manila. If that title is accepted, then the “War of the American Revolution” was the Second World War, stretching as it did from the thirteen British American colonies to Europe to India; and thus the Napeoleonic Wars were the Third World War. But neither of those two previous wars could approach the size and scale of the cataclysm that were the Napoleonic Wars. As my guest Alexander Mikaberidze argues, they were the most consequential events between the Protestant Reformation and the Great War of 1914-1918. And like those events, the Napoleonic Wars had effect which continue to our own time. Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of European History at the Louisiana State University at Shreveport, where he is . He has been acclaimed as one of the “great Napoleonic scholars of today”, the author of what has been described as a “masterpiece” The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History, published this year by Oxford University Press. This his second appearance on Historically Thinking; our previous conversation, held five years ago on this topic, is one of our most popular.

Trees, as you may know, have rings. I don't know about you, but I remember the wonder I first felt when my Dad showed me tree rings. He explained that I could tell about the tree's life from the rings; the wide rings were from years of plenty of rain, and the thin ones from years of drought. Those tree rings turn out to be remarkably useful for not just telling us about a tree’s past, but about that of the world in which it grew. Which means, in a funny way, that trees can tell us something about what it meant to be human—and indeed what it means to be human, at least insofar as we can measure in trees the effects of our causes With me to discuss trees, their history, and human history, is Valerie Trouet. She is Associate Professor and University of Arizona Distinguished Scholar in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, and the author of Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings. Further Links Trouet Lab The amazing bristlecone pine A.E. Douglas, astronomer and dendrochronology pioneer

The Presidential Cabinet has, it would seem, been a reality of the American republic since soon after its foundation. Yet while executive departments are mentioned in the Constitution, the Cabinet is not. And while the heads of departments were present—or soon to arrive—in New York City when Washington took the first inaugural oath, they did not function as an institution until later With me today to discuss George Washington’s cabinet, its personalities and personality, its history, and its legacy, is Lindsay M. Chervinksy. Listeners to the podcast will remember that in Episode 118 she and I talked about this book and the research she had done for it, while carefully avoiding as best as we could actually discussing the material of the book. Now the book is done and published: it’s called, surprisingly enough, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, published this week by Harvard University Press. Apologies, by the way, for the artwork. It's precisely the same artwork used for Episode 118. Curiously enough, it's also the artwork used on the cover Lindsay's book. That's because it's seemingly the only depiction of Washington's cabinet. And it happens to be the cover of a cigar box whose manufacturer was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is why Henry Knox is named "Hendrick". A Dutch Calvinist cigar box cover depicting George Washington's cabinet; it's a strange and wonderful country.

My guest today is Christopher Miller. He’s Assistant Professor of International History at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he is co-director of the school's Russia and Eurasia Program. He is author of  the books Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (2018) and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy (2016). He's also the author of a very recent essay in The American Interest, “The False Promise of the Surveillance State.” In it he argues that while the Chinese Communist Party has "forged a surveillance state without peer...information alone provides no ironclad guarantee of the Communist Party's future."  Reviewing numerous historical examples, he argues that "because analysis is hard, and because predictions are vulnerable to falsification, surveillance chiefs prefer to devote resources to collecting rather than predicting.” It's a conversation that reaches back to several others over the last year, while examining something that's news behind the news.

Martha Graham has been described as the “Picasso of modern dance”; she was and remains an icon of modernist high culture. But she was also received at the White House by every President from Franklin Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush, and was a cultural ambassador sent abroad by the United States to demonstrate, as today’s guest writes, a “freedom of expression that was available only in a democracy in which artists were not tools of the state and thus not subject to totalitarian intervention or suppression, be it Nazi or Soviet.” Victoria Phillips is Lecturer in History at Columbia University, and author of Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy, published in January by Oxford University Press. Dr. Phillips has been a dancer, a portfolio manager on Wall Street; and is an editor of the journal American Communist History and of Dance Chronicle; and a member of the board of the Society of Dance Historians.

This is a crossover episode of Historically Thinking. That's because my guest today is Michael Robinson. He’s Professor of History at Hillyer College, of the University of Hartford. He’s the author of two books: The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture, winner of the 2008 Book Award from the Forum for the History of Science in America, takes up the story of Arctic exploration in the United States during the height of its popularity, from 1850 to 1910; and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent. So why is this is a crossover episode? Because Michael also has a great podcast called Time to Eat the Dogs, “a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.” It's eclectic and interesting, one of my favorites. We talk about Time to Eat the Dogs, how it came about, academic and historical podcasting, his first book The Coldest Crucible...and then we're on to talk about a big subject, the sub discipline of history called the history of science.

Giambattista Vico first published his masterwork The New Science in 1725. He revised it twice more before he died. It was intended to be nothing less than a reinterpretation of the history of human civilization, resulting in a new science of history. It’s influence was somewhat less than Vico might have hoped; it took more than a century and a half after its first publication, before the book emerged from obscurity. Arguably it was in the late 20th century that Vico’s influence was finally felt, and perhaps at no other time has his work been as widely read as it is now. Yet The New Science is not an easy work to read: obscure allusions, an unusual method, eccentric terminology, are all combined along with the occasional stunning aphorism or turn of phrase that land on the reader like a hammer. With me to discuss Giambattista Vico are the two most recent translators of The New Science, an edition published early this year by Yale University Press. Jason Taylor is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Regis College; and Robert Miner is Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University. As you'll see from the conversation, the picture above is actually very, very important.