Historically Thinking

On March 15, 1783, a group of some 100 officers of the Continental Army were gathered in the Temple of Virtue, a meeting hall built in their winter encampment near New Windsor, NY (a reconstruction is pictured above). They were there to “consider the late letter from our Representative in Philadelphia” read an unsigned note that circulated around the army’s camp and “what measure (if any) should be adopted, to obtain that redress of grievances, which they seem to have solicited in vain.” This was the crisis moment of what historians have taken to calling the Newburgh Conspiracy. But what was it? Who was conspiring, if anyone, and what were their goals? And was the American Revolution really in jeopardy at this moment? These and other question are addressed by David Head in his new book A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution. David Head is Professor of History at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. This is his fourth book.

In 1856, meditating on the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: When I came to gather all the individual wishes, with a sense of terror I realized that their demands were for the wholesale and systematic abolition of all the laws and all the current practices in the country. Straightaway I saw that the issue here was one of the most extensive and dangerous revolutions ever observed in the world. This week we discuss that most "extensive" revolution with Jeremy D. Popkin, the William T. Bryan Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. Professor Popkin is the author of numerous books, including on the press in revolutionary France; the Haitian Revolution; and the story of historiography. His most recent book is A New Age Now Begins: The History of the French Revolution, and it is the subject of today’s conversation.

On October 30, 1872, the wife of Presidential candidate Horace Greeley died. On November 6, Greeley lost in a landslide to President Ulysses S. Grant, winning only six out of 37 states in the electoral college. By November 13, he entered into an asylum for the treating of “mental and nervous disorders”, where he died on November 29. Yet the last month of his life was probably not the most eventful of Greeley’s life. For decades he had been the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, and known throughout the United States. Greeley was in many ways one of America’s first celebrities—he was famous to many for simply being Horace Greeley. But he was also, especially in his own eyes, a species of public intellectual, doing his often erratic thinking in full view of his public. And that was a public of tens of thousands, for whom the words of Horace Greeley were oracular in their import, if not lack of clarity; words which at times could shape public events. How those words did or did not shape events, and how Greeley succeeded and failed in his intellectual mission is at the heart of the arguments marshalled by James Lundberg in his book Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood.  James M. Lundberg is the director of the Undergraduate Program in History and an assistant professor of the practice at the University of Notre Dame.

Apologies for the delayed posting of this podcast. Some of us might not like our siblings, but this is ridiculous: “Your excellences must know that my ill-born brother, whose name will shortly be revealed to you…is a traitor to our motherland; he reveals the most important secrets of the negotiations of our councils to Zuane Pecchi, who lives in calle Sporca, inthe neighborhood of San Luca…and then Pecchi reveals them to his compatriot; who is the servant of the Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador…” This was not a secret denuciation to a block captain in a 20th century dictatorship, but one written in Renaissance Venice, to the the Heads of the Council of Ten, the masters of Venetian counterintelligence. (It was probably deposited in a special box reserved for such denunciations, like the one above.) And when you realized that the Republic of Venice’s foreign intelligence and cryptographic services  were no less developed than its internal secret police, it becomes clear that, as my guest Ioanna Iordanou writes, Venice had created “one of the world’s centrally organized state intelligence services.” Morever it shows how “organizational entities and managerial practices existed long before contemporary terminology was coined to describe them.” Interest in organizational entities and managerial practices is to be expected from Dr. Ioanna Iordanou, Reader in Human Resource Management at Oxford Brookes Business School in Oxford, England. She has investigated the pedagogic role of coaching and mentoring; and in the emergence of proto-modern organizations in the pre-industrial world. Related to this last is her research in early modern intelligence; and from this research has come the book Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance.

In late August, 1825, a sloop sailed down the Delaware Bay from the port of Philadelphia, bound for the Indian River in southern Delaware. Chained in its hold were five young African-American boys, the eldest of whom was about 14. They were being taken into slavery, kidnapped from the streets of Philadelphia, destined for the lower Mississippi River four months later. Their story is emblematic of what my guest Richard Bell calls the “Reverse Underground Railroad”, the network of criminals who kidnapped free African-Americans in the north and moved them south, into the insatiable maw of the slave economy. But unlike so many others, four of the kidnapped boys returned to the north. How they were taken, and how they returned, is the subject of Richard Bell’s Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home. Richard Bell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has previously written about suicide in the early American republic, and co-edited another on incarceration in early America. Richard Bell, welcome to Historically Thinking.

“There is a moment that comes to so many of us in the late afternoon on Christmas Day,” writes my guest Madeline Shanahan, “when we look at the postmeal dining table festooned with scrunched paper crowns, splattered with cranberry sauce and gravy, and graced with a half-eaten hacked-up plum pudding, and we are torn be- tween cracking on with the inevitable tidy-up and retreating to the sofa for a double Baileys and a snooze. In this moment we vow that we “will never eat again,” and our resolve lasts for an hour or so, until a box of Cadbury Roses chocolates is passed around and we somehow find room. If excitement and anticipation are the feelings almost universally shared by children at 5:00 a.m. on Christmas morning, being stuffed and exhausted are the ones that unite their parents come 5:00 p.m.” Christmas turns out to have always been about feasting, even from before the time that it was Christmas. Feasting is about excess; but feasting is also about fasting, and far removed from a world of dieting. Yet Christmas celebrations retain a cultural ethic of feasting, focusing on what were luxury foods: meats, sugary things, and alcohol. These used to be luxurious because they were expensive. Now they are luxurious because they taste forbidden. Madeline Shanahan has investigated the history of Christmas dinner as it has developed in the English-speaking world, and has shared her findings in her book Christmas Food and Feasting: A History. She has a PhD in Archaeology from University College, Dublin, and is Manager of Public History and Research for GML Heritage in Sydney. In this conversation we range far beyond the Dickensian Christmas, ranging from spiced beef in Ireland to seafood barbecues at the "Antipodal Christmas."

In the introduction to his new book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, my guest Tom Holland writes: “For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of “human nature”, but very distincitvely of that civilizations’ Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Chritianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.” Holland's goal is to make the reader stop taking the Christian Revolution for granted, and I think he succeeds brilliantly. It's not just that as a classicist he can explain the jarring dichotomy between the Roman and Christian ways of thinking about the world around them. Holland can just as effortlessly explain the links of "wokeness" to Christianity, and why progressives and evangelicals are so similar. Tom Holland is a classical historian, an award-winning and bestselling author of numerous books, a translator of Herodotus’ Histories, the maker of numerous documentaries—and co-host for a number of years of the best radio program on history, BBC Radio 4’s Making History.

“A recurring phenomenon traced in these pages,” writes Ted Gioia in his new book Music: A Subversive History, “a surprisingly consistent one, despite marked differences in epochs and cultures—finds innovations coming from disruptive outsiders who shake up the very same institutions that later lay claim to them.” This is just one of tens or hundreds of insights in Gioia’s book, scattered across its pages, including the importance of bells to music history; the sacrificial ritual of the musician’s death; and the reason for similarity in the music of societies who herd animals. And Gioia concludes this feast with a list of forty points that is titled “This Is Not a Manifesto,” which for me was pretty much the same as vowing not to think about dancing purple elephants for the next five minutes. Ted Gioia has written eleven books, and this makes at least the fifth book he’s written on music history. He is an noted and notable critic, and is also a jazz pianist, who in the 1980’s worked to establish a Jazz Studies program at his alma mater Stanford University.

Hello, on February 21, 1848, Congressman John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts had just cast a “nay” vote on a resolution thanking American officers and soldiers for the victories of the Mexican War. In the next moment he suffered a stroke. Lingering for the next two days in the chambers of the Speaker of the House, he died on February 23rd. His death was, for my guest Douglas Egerton, the beginning of the decline of the Adams family as both a political but also as a moral force in American life. This was not immediately apparent. As Egerton amply displays in his new book, Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., the patriarch of the third generation of Adams', was a formidable man. He was an early proponent of a movement that would become one of the foundations of the Republican Party, a powerful Congressman at the moment of the 1861 rebellion, and then perhaps the greatest ambassador in the history of American diplomacy. But his children, while brilliant and accomplished, were...different. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was the commander of a African-American cavalry regiment and a lifelong racist who became a supporter of the "lost cause" story of the American Civil War. So too did Henry Brooks Adams, the brilliant son who would eventually write of his confusion in the Autobiography of Henry Adams. And Brooks Adams, the baby of the family, wrote a series of books on the inevitable decline of commercial societies. Douglas R. Egerton is Professor of History at Le Moyne College. The author of numerous books his most recent were a documentary history of the Denmark Vesey affair, and Thunder At the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (2016), This is his second appearance on Historically Thinking; when he was last with us, he discussed Reconstructionm, based on the research of his book The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era (2014).

My guest today begins his newest book with this declaration of purpose. “This is a book about the taste of place and the styles and stories of cooking that define it. It is a book about how people talk about their lives and their histories through the stories that flow from field, marsh, kitchen, and table. This is a book about tradition—the human process of making sense and discovering invention through experience, lived, remembered, imagined…It is a book about how the taste of place expresses a love of place. This book originates in a particularl place, but it resonates with foodways far beyond its borders. The place in question is the Eastern Shore of Virginia.” Those are some of the first words in Bernard L. Herman’s new book A South You Never Ate: Savoring Flavors and Stories from the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Bernard L. Herman is the George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He has previoulsy published on numerous topics, ranging from the artist Thornton Dial to the development of the townhouse in early American city. And given when this podcast drops, it’s particularly appropriate that his 2012 Thanksgiving essay for the magazine Saveur was anthologized in a collection of the year’s best food writing.