Historically Thinking

For nearly five centuries Madrid has been the capital of Spain, and the focus of frequent contempt by foreign visitors, as well as the scorn and hatred of Spaniards. Prime Minister Manuel Azaña Díaz, born just 31 kilometers from Madrid, would write that in “Madrid there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to see. Madrid is a town without history. In Madrid, nothing has happened because in two centuries almost nothing has happened in Spain, and the little that has occurred has done so elsewhere.”  But as my guest Luke Steggeman writes, “Madrid is both heart and head [of Spain], as per the custom of medieval manuscripts where countries were sometimes drawn as bodies with heads and hearts and limbs.” Moreover, “The story of Madrid is the story of power: royal, military, religious, and secular, cultural and economic.” It is  also the story  of power gained, power lost, power regained, power seized, and occasionally power unused. Luke Stegeman is a writer and cultural historian. Unlike any previous guest on this podcast, he is not only a self-described rural Australian, but a boxing referee. His most recent book is Madrid: A Biography, which is the subject of our conversation today.   For Further Investigation San Lorenzo de El Escorial Museo Nacional del Prado Captain Alatriste: I don't often link to Wikipedia, but you should read the section "Adaptations", about why Pérez-Reverte wrote this series of historical novels. Benito Pérez Galdós

It is no longer the largest city in America, or the second largest, or even the fifth largest, but there are still those of us who love it. While modern American cities are all racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, it has always been so, from before it was even a city. Modern American cities, simply because of size, are also stages for a variety of conflicts, and this city has from its beginning enjoyed a good conflict. Modern American cities boil with debates over planning and land use, and such debates have always been a part of its history; as has been a perennial American suspicion towards the very existence of cities. Modern American cities are also places where the past is paved over, and oddly enough, given the depth of its history, this city has also made a habit of forgetting its past. This city is Philadelphia. From before the founding of the city by William Penn, the region that would become Philadelphia was diverse, and also in conflict. Penn famously designed it to be a “green country town”, but that design has gone through many alterations and changes. And while Philadelphia hosts some of the most significant spots in American history, it has also been good at eliminating and forgetting its own history. With me to discuss the history of the city of Philadelphia, what makes it like other American cities, and what makes it different from them, is Paul Kahan. A historian and graduate of Temple University–the most Philadelphian of educational institutions–Paul Kahan is author most recently of Philadelphia: A Narrative History. It is his seventh book.

For a few hundred years, the New World of the Americas was thought to be genuinely new. But in the course of the nineteenth century, Americans became increasingly uncertain about the ground beneath their feet. Canal building uncovered strange creatures like enormous crabs; seams of coal were determined to be fossilized forests. And while no living mammoths or mastodons were discovered in the lands west of the Mississippi, their bones were; and so were the bones of still stranger creatures, some of them just a few miles from Independence Hall in Philadelphia.  These and many other discoveries led to a still greater discovery, not simply of dinosaurs, or geological ages, or even of evolutionary biology, but a concept that lies beneath all of them, what the writer John McPhee has called “Deep Time.” In her new book How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution, Caroline Winterer roams about the continent, from Haddonfield, New Jersey, to Yosemite, uncovering how Americans began to realize that their continent and world was very, very old indeed.  Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas, political thought, and the history of science. Her previous books include American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason.    For Further Investigation I note with pleasure that How the New World Became Old has blurbs from past HT guests Marcia Bjornerud, Suzanne L. Marchand, and Adrienne Mayor Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983; repr. 2003). Martin Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (1992). Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (1998). Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (1987)

This podcast originally dropped on December 17, 2015.  If we had the reverb and the talent, we'd introduce this week's podcast like one of those guys touting a monster truck event on "SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY." Because this week we're talking about Big History–and calling it Big is actually kind of an understatement. That's because practitioners of Big History, like today's guest Craig Benjamin, begin a history survey not with Mesopotamia, or ancient China, or even homo sapiens squeaking past homo neanderthalis. No, they begin with the Big Bang...which happened quite some time before there were any humans around to enjoy the show. Big History says that, to understand human history--and humanity--it's first necessary to begin appreciating the size and complexity of the entire universe. In doing that, the argument goes, we will begin to improve ourselves morally and spiritually; or, failing that, we'll have a really fantastic general education course. Please note that these are two very different outcomes. With us to talk about these outcomes, and to give a lightning fast overview of Big History "from the Big Bang to you" is Craig Benjamin. He is associate professor of history at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan Craig is president (for just one-and-a-half more weeks, he tells me) of the World History Society; he's also a charter member of the International Big History Association. In fact, he's probably the second person ever to teach a course on Big History. As you'll hear, he's a great person to have a chat with; hope you enjoy it as much as we did. For Further Investigation The Big History Project: if you take the tests, you'll get a sticker. David Christian presents the history of the world in 18 minutes A definitive Big History Course, taught by Dr. David Christian Or how about these for a Christmas gift or two? Big History: Between Nothing and Everything

Generations of college students have probably imagined that his first name was Venerable, and his family name Bede. But Bede–that’s B-E-D-E–was his only name. He was a native of Northumbria, in the north of what we now think of as England. Apparently never going abroad, his life was spent within a few miles of his monastery, and probably just a few miles from where he was born. Yet this seemingly narrow and circumscribed life was full of intense intellectual activity. Bede authored dozens of works: teaching texts to be used for young boys entering the monastery, as he had done; biblical commentaries; arithmetical works; sermons and homilies; and lives of Northumbrian saints. Yet when he is remembered by historians, it is for his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, An Ecclesiastical History of the English People.  With me to discuss Bede as historian is Rory Naismith, Professor of Early Medieval History and Fellow of Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. This is his third appearance on the podcast; he was last on Historically Thinking in Episode 343 discussing whether we should talk about the Anglo-Saxons.   For Further Investigation This is one of our occasional podcasts on important historians. For others, see this one on Polybius, and this on another medieval historian, Princess Anna Komnene The remnants of the monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow The historical site formerly known as "Bede's World": now Jarrow Hall Anglo-Saxon Farm Village and Bede Museum, reopened after a short closure. FYI, in contemporary Britain it's probably true that Jarrow is best known for the "Jarrow Crusade" rather than for Bede A good companion to Bede is, amazingly enough, J. Robert Wright, A Companion to Bede: A Reader's Commentary on The Ecclesiastical History of the English People Rory Naismith also suggests: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People/Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: "This is available in very many translations, including those of Bertram Colgrave and D. H. Farmer. A scholarly edition, with facing-page Latin and English, is available from Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors." J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 1–48 G. Hardin Brown, A Companion to Bede (Woodbridge, 2009) P. Hunter-Blair, The World of Bede (Cambridge, 1970) H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (London, 1991) R. Shaw, The Gregorian Mission to Kent in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History: Methodology and Sources (London, 2018) A. Thacker, ‘Bede and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. S. DeGregorio (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 170–89 A. Thacker, ‘Bede’s Ideal of Reform’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. P. Wormald et al. (Oxford, 1983), pp. 130–53

It is the most influential book in the history of the world, a book that in many ways set the standard for what books would become, but it is also the book at the heart of a world spanning religion. It has never purported to be the words of God, but the result of a complex partnership between God and his creation, the result being a “divine words written by human hands.” This book is of course the Bible. On the grounds of sales and publications alone, it has been astonishingly successful. Due to a Niagara of translations and editions, dating back to the first centuries of the Christian religion, it has been a remarkably adaptive host for the ideas and emotions contained within it. My guest Bruce Gordon has written a biography of the Bible that focuses on its flow from the eastern Mediterranean into the farthest corners of the world, writing what he calls “the story of humanity’s grasp for the impossible: the perfect Bible.” A native of Canada, Bruce Gordon is the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School. Among his many publications are biographies of the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli, and of the Genevan reformer John Calvin, as well as a “biography” of the life of Calvin’s most important production, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. His most recent book is The Bible: A Global History, which is the subject of our conversation today.

In his long short story or very short novella entitled “The Man Without a Country,” Edward Everett Hale describes his protagonist Philip Nolan as a young man from the Mississippi Valley who “had grown up in the West of those days, in the midst of ‘Spanish plot’, ‘Orleans plot’, and all the rest. He had been educated on a plantation where the finest company was a Spanish officer or a French merchant from Orleans.” Nolan was, in other words, a young man who was used to foreign serpents in the western Eden. Little wonder, then, that in the story he participated in a conspiracy against a United States that he barely knew. In his new book Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison's America,  Tyson Reeder shows the reality behind a story published in 1863. For over forty years, James Madison was near the heart of American politics, perhaps entitled to be called the chief architect of both the Constitutional system and then of the party system that he had just a few years before decried. Intimately linked with both of these innovations were the influences of Spain, Great Britain and France, all eager to direct the young republic in ways that would benefit their interests in the Americas.  Tyson Reeder is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He was previously  an editor of the Papers of James Madison at the University of Virginia, and author of Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (2019). For Further Investigation This episode is connected to a great many other episodes in the last year, in one way or another. See Episode 366 with Andrew Burstein; Episode 352, on Tecumseh as a great American strategist; and Episode 344, on America's founding scoundrels

In Early Modern Europe, spying was not really a profession but it certainly was a verb. At times it would seem, from the dark suspicious years at the end of Henry VII’s life, to Cromwell’s protectorate and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, that it was a game that everyone was playing. And in an era in which anyone with a modicum of political power was, figuratively speaking, always looking over their shoulders for rivals, they were literally driven to read each other’s mail. But reading the mail has its difficulties. How to unseal and reseal a letter so that no one knows that you have opened it? And when you discover the letter is encoded, how to decipher it? And so the game of spy vs. spy went on in the seventeenth century, pretty much as it does now, save for a few technological developments.  With me to discuss the world of early modern spycraft, mostly in Britain, are Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman, coauthors of Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration. Nadine Akkerman is professor of early modern literature and culture at Leiden University,  and author of the acclaimed Invisible Agents. Pete Langman is an Oxford English Dictionary bibliographer, author of Killing Beauties, and a cricketer. For Further Investigation For more on early modern espionage, but conducted on highly professional basis, see my conversation with Ioanna Iordanou in Episode 142 Letterlocking How to open a locked letter without opening it How to hide a message in an egg "Making a wax seal, how hard can it be?" Cryptiana: Articles on Historical Cryptography

Colonel John Trumbull, Artist John Trumbull must be one of the only artists in the history of American art to insist upon being addressed by his military rank; he was Colonel Trumbull until he died. But it was not John Trumbull’s feats in battle or in managing administrative correspondence that won him fame among his contemporaries, but what he painted on canvas. Hanging in the rotunda of the US Capitol are four of the paintings in which he sought to preserve memories and paint a history of the American Revolution, but also teach something of the ethics appropriate to war; of democratic and republican virtue; of political  power flowing from a sovereign people; and of the need to relinquish that power when called to do so. To this day some of the most recognizable images of the Revolution are almost certainly something painted by Trumbull–most likely either The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, or the painting known simply as The Declaration of Independence. If occupying space rent-free in posterity's imagination is ever the ambition of an artist, then Trumbull succeeded, and then some.  With me today to discuss the life, art, and civic teaching of John Trumbull is Richard Brookhiser. Beginning with his 1997 book Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, Richard Brookhiser has written a shelf of books on the American founders, the most recent of which is Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution.  For Further Investigation Highly recommended: "Let This Be a Lesson: Heroes, Heroines, and Narrative in Paintings at Yale," a brilliant series of lectures on history painting by John Walsh, from which I've learned a lot. See particularly Lecture 7, on Benjamin West, and Lecture 8, on John Trumbull, focusing on his painting of the Battle of Bunker Hill. There are many HT episodes on related issues. You might be interested in Episode 163, on Joseph Warren, the first martyr of the American Revolution, whose death is the focus of Trumbull's first history painting; or Episode 176, which focuses heavily on the images of revolutionary victors created by Trumbull and his contemporaries (some of whom were his friends and acquaintances)

Richard Blakemore, an Associate Professor of Social and Maritime History at the University of Reading, delves into the fascinating world of piracy in his latest book. He explores why the late 17th and early 18th centuries became the iconic period for piracy. The discussion covers the complex dynamics of Caribbean piracy, including the blurring lines between piracy and privateering, and how politics shaped figures like William Kidd. Blakemore emphasizes the intricate relationship between piracy, colonial politics, and the legal perceptions that emerged during this turbulent time.