Historically Thinking

In our latest in the series of conversations on intellectual humility and historical thinking, my interlocutor is Suzanne Marchand. She is Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. Her interests are within the realm of European intellectual history, but she has ranged more widely than that. Her books include Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton, UP, 1996); German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship (Cambridge UP, 2009); and Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton UP, 2020), which was the subject of a conversation on this podcast in Episode 190. She has recently been writing a lot about the reception and interpretation of Herodotus from the Renaissance to the present, work which soon promises to become a book. As is always the case with these conversations, and unlike more typical conversations on the podcast, we will be following a set format of questions…though these might be shaken off, from time to time, by either myself or the guest.

Following the outbreak of the American Civil War, the abolitionist movement underwent an “astonishing transformation”, which would in time alter the direction of the war, the shape of the postwar settlement, and destroy the abolitionist movement itself. As the movement’s moral outsiders found themselves becoming interest group insiders, not only their approach but also their message and ultimately their goals changed. Ideological differences became ideological conflicts, and personal animosities were soon blended into the mix.  This is the argument of Frank J. Cirillo in his new book The Abolitionist Civil War: The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union. Frank J. Cirillo is a historian of slavery and antislavery in the nineteenth-century United States. He has held positions at the University of Bonn, The New School, and the University of Virginia. This is his first book. For Further Investigation The photograph is of, from left to right: Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and George Thompson (an English advocate against slavery). The standard biography of Wendell Phillips is James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); Henry Mayer wrote a popular biography of William Lloyd Garrison titled All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery; for a wider focus, see the second edition of the classic study by Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 Numerous conversations on Historically Thinking have dealt with related issues. For an overview of abolitionism, see Episode 82: Abolitionism, A Long Conversation. The overlooked importance of Unionism was at issued in Episode 132: Armies of Deliverance and again in Episode 291: True Blue. The drive for black voting rights by American Blacks was the focus of Episode 294: Black Suffrage. And Abraham Lincoln's racial attitudes were the subject of a conversation with Michael Burlingame in Episode 242: Was Abraham Lincoln a Racist?

Henry Wallace was an Iowan, an accomplished geneticist who hybridized corn; an entrepreneur who co-founded Pioneer Hi-Bred to produce seed, still an agricultural behemoth; the third-generation of editors of an influential American newspaper; a mystic who had a mysterious guru; and a “liberal philosopher”, according to no less an authority than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  He was also at various times Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, Vice President of the United States, and a third-party candidate for President of the United States in the 1948 election. Like America, Henry Wallace contained multitudes.  With me today is Benn Steil, author of The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century. Benn Steil is a Senior Fellow and Director of International Economics at the Council of Foreign Relations. His previous books have been on the Marshall Plan, and on the financial arguments focused upon the Bretton Woods conference. In this book we have yet another study examining the central moment of the twentieth century–both chronologically as well as in many other ways–but from the extraordinary and idiosyncratic point of view of Henry Wallace.   For Further Investigation For more on Wallace's Midwestern ethos, see my conversations with Jon Lauck about the Midwest: here, way back in Episode 13 (!!!), and again in Episode 299: The Good Country Benn Steill's previous books are The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, and The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order Henry Cantwell Wallace (1866-1924): Secretary of Agriculture, father of Henry Cantwell Wallace  "A Magazine Called Wallace's Farmer" The connection between George Washington Carver, Henry Wallace, and Norman Borlaug

Some animals—like beavers, nesting ants, bees, and humans—actively reshape their environments to make them more favorable for their own species.  My guest today believes that the same is also true of nations. This, he argues,  is the true meaning of Woodrow Wilson’s phrase “to make the world safe for democracy.”  But animals also change as they are adapting their own environment. John Owen argues that liberalism has evolved in ways that are no longer conducive to its own survival; and meanwhile autocratic governments in Russia and China are actively reshaping the international environment to favor autocracy. He believes that the way to ensure democracy’s survival in the United States is to reimagine liberalism—to view it as less about disruption and perpetual openness, and more about commitment, community, and country.  John M. Owen IV is the Amb. Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and the Miller Center for Public Affairs, all the the University of Virginia. His latest book is The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order, and it is the subject of our conversation today. I should add that John is a friend, now of many years standing; and while he might be a thorough-going political scientist, and this is not a work of history, there is a lot of historical thinking in it—but, more importantly, I wanted to have a chance to talk to him for one uninterrupted hour about the book. We recorded the conversation in his study.

This is the first of my interviews with historians touching on questions of intellectual humility and historical thinking. Today conversation is with Jonathan Zimmerman. He is the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education and Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in 1993 from the Johns Hopkins University. His books have dealt with a variety of topics related to the history of education, including sex and alcohol education, history and religion in the curriculum, Americans who taught overseas, and historical memory in public schooling. Jonathan Zimmerman is also I think notable for the vareity of opinion pieces he has published across a range of American publications. Jonathan Zimmerman has been on Historically Thinking twice, in Episode 188, on the history of the apparently eternal inability of American college professors to teach, and in Episode 205, where we wondered (along with Eliot Cohen, another frequent guest) if there could ever be a civic history, a history for the common good. For Further Investigation Jonathan Zimmerman, The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America The Greater Good Science Center

We’re going to do something a little differently in today’s episode of Historically Thinking, in that it's not an episode of Historically Thinking. Instead I wanted to share with you a teaser of a podcast that I think you’ll like. It’s hosted by Jason Pack, our guest on episode 337, and it’s called Disorder. It’s produced by GoalHanger podcasts, the UK's number 1 podcasting company, makers of The Rest is History, hosted by friends of this podcast Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Disorder is hosted by Jason and former British diplomat Alexandra Hall Hall. The pod tackles small and easy questions like: how did the world get so disordered? What are the fundamental principles behind our current era of geopolitics? And how do seemingly disparate challenges from AI, to Climate Change, to Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, to Tax Havens, to Unregulated Cyberspace all interact with each other and feed into our era of Global Enduring Disorder? The first full season of episodes are out now – you can find them by searching Disorder or by following the links in the show notes. For me, the Disorder pod hits on many of the same themes as Historically Thinking (that is how a range of of seemingly disparate historical phenomenon are actually interlinked), but tackles this phenomenon through  conceptual investigation with the doers of geopolitics rather than via an interview based podcast with historians. So since I think you’ll enjoy it, I wanted to give our listeners a little taste of what Disorder sounds like. We are going to tune in to episode 11, where Jason and Alex spoke with Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's former Chief of Staff. They present an overview of  some humorous anecdotes from the Northern Ireland peace process and what they can tell us about what factors lead to successful negotiations and how we might be able to draw upon these lessons in the Middle East and Ukraine. You can find that episode in full as well as Jason's proposed plans for the post-war Govenance of Gaza by following the links in the show notes. Now over to Jason and Alex for that teaser… For Further Investigation Listen to the Disorder podcast here: Read Jason's ‘The Road to Middle East Peace Runs Through Doha’

“Founders” is a term that we typically use to refer to just a few men–usually the first four Presidents of the United States, plus Ben Franklin and–nowadays–Alexander Hamilton. We think of them as typical representatives of their age, which produced civic saints of wisdom and service to the new nation.  We don’t usually think about the other Founders, all those men and women who created the institutions, the politics, and the culture of the new republic–from Richard Allen to Judith Sargent Murray to John Jay. And we certainly don’t consider that an age which considered people like Washington to be heroic had points of contrast–the “many unscrupulous figures who violated the era’s expectation of public virtue and advanced their own interests at the expense of others.” Think of them as America’s Founding Scoundrels, whose plots and cons ended up shaping the nation sometimes as much as did the plans and hard work of the institution-builders.   David Head and Timothy J. Hemmis are the co-editors of a new book A Republic of Scoundrels: The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New Nation. Timothy Hemmis is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University Central Texas, where his teaching focuses on Early American History and American Military History. David Head is history professor at the University of Central Florida, and the author of A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution, which he and I discussed in Episode 145 of the podcast.   For Further Investigation I've previously on the podcast talked with Lorri Glover about "Founders as Fathers"; and we've also discussed the legal history of treason in the American Revolution with Carlton Larson. The following resources have all been suggested by David and Tim. The best place to read founders' mail is Founders Online William C. Davis, The Rogue Republic: How Would-Be Patriots Waged the Shortest Revolution in American History, (Boston, 2011). Edward Everett Hale, “The Man without a Country,” The Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1863, 665–679. Andro Linklater, An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (New York, 2009). Shira Lurie, The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the Early Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 2023). J. K. Martin, Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Hero Reconsidered (New York, 1997). David Narrett, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana–Florida Borderlands, 1762–1803 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015)

In his Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755,  Samuel Johnson did not define the words Saxon, Angle, or Anglo-Saxon. But Noah Webster in his 1828 American Dictionary defines Anglo-Saxon as "adjective. Pertaining to the Saxons, who settled in England, or English Saxons." Something had happened in between the two, and not just the American Revolution, and Johnson's and Webster's different views of that event–but that probably did contribute to the difference. And when Webster published his definition, the term was already taking on new connotations. Indeed, the term Anglo-Saxon has a rich and complicated history, right to the present moment. And so does perception of the peoples to which it refers…or does it actually refer to them? With me to discuss the history of the definition and the ideology of the term is Rory Naismith, Professor of Early Medieval English History at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Author of numerous books, including Citadel of the Saxons: The Rise of Early London, he was last on the podcast talking about medieval money in Episode 328.  For Further Investigation Content, S., and Williams, H., ‘Creating the Pagan English, from the Tudors to the Present Day’, in Signals of Belief in Early England: Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited, ed. M. Carver, A. Sanmark and S. Semple (Oxford, 2010), pp. 181–200 Foot, S., ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 6 (1996), 25–50 [on use of Anglo-Saxon and English terminology in the pre-Norman period itself] Frantzen, A. J., and Niles, J. D. (eds.), Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, FL, 1997) [a collection of essays - the introduction is probably the most helpful single thing] Horsman, R., Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981) [this is really good on the early modern and American side of the story] Kidd, C., British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), esp. ch. 4–5 and 9 [again, excellent on early modern Anglo-Saxonism] Mandler, P., The English National Character: the History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, 2006), esp. ch. 3 Niles, J., The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901 (Oxford, 2015) Rory Naismith observes, "There is also a welter of very polemical stuff on the web; for a selection, see below" Rubinstein, S., ‘Anglo-Saxon Extremists: the Strange Logic of the Activists who Insist the Term “Anglo-Saxon” is Racist’, The Critic, June 2023 Rambaran-Olm, M., ‘History Bites: Resources on the Problematic Term “Anglo-Saxon”’, a three-part series on Medium: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, 7 September 2020 Rambaran-Olm, M., ‘Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting “Anglo-Saxon” Studies’, History Workshop, 4 November 2019 Rambaran-Olm, M., and Wade, E., ‘The Many Myths of the Term “Anglo-Saxon”’, Smithsonian Magazine, 14 July 2021 Sewer, A., ‘“Anglo-Saxon” is What You Say when “Whites Only” is Too Inclusive’, The Atlantic, 20 April 2021 Williams, H., ‘The Fight for “Anglo-Saxon”’, Aeon, 29 May 2020 Wood, M., ‘“As a Racism Row Rumbles on, is it Time to Retire the Term ‘Anglo-Saxon’?” Michael Wood Explores the Controversy’, History Extra, 4 November 2019

From its opening in 1822, the Fulton Market was an essential part of life in old New York, selling vegetables grown on Long Island, fruit harvested in Cuba, lobsters taken from the waters of Maine, chickens raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and oysters–and fish–hauled forth from New York harbor itself. Over the decades Fulton Market became known as Fulton Fish Market, dominated by wholesale dealers in fish that came not only from New York Harbor, but from all over the world. What Chicago became for beef, New York became for fish. “A business that specializes in fish,” writes my guest Jonathan Rees, “has to regularize an inevitably uneven supply through a mixture of knowledge and technology.” Rees’s book The Fulton Fish Market: A History is therefore not simply the story of the creation, life, and decline of a New York place, but a description of that place where community, politics, economy, nature, and culture all came together on the New York waterfront. Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. This is his third appearance on the podcast; he was last on in episode 222 to describe the strange career of Harvey Wiley.   For Further Information Previous conversations with Jonathan were about refrigeration, and the purity and nutritional value of mass-produced food. It doesn't take too much of a guess to figure out why he's now writing about fish markets. Jonathan Rees and I talked briefly about Joseph Mitchell, a legendary New Yorker columnist not least because he eventually had a case of writer's block so massive that it transcended the metaphor "block". Here is Mitchell's book Up in the Old Hotel, in which the Fulton Fish Market is essentially a supporting character, if not primary character, and more on those thirty years without writing.

Beginning in 1940 a group of Polish diplomats based in Bern, Switzerland, orchestrated a program of forging passports and identity documents from Latin American countries. These were then smuggled into Nazi-occupied countries, where they were used to save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. When the Ładoś Group–named after its leader, Aleksander Ładoś, the Polish ambassador to Switzerland–ended its activities in 1943 it had saved possibly as many as 10,000 people from extermination, making it one of the largest conspiracies on behalf of the survival of the European Jews.  Roger Moorhouse describes the Lados Group and its activities in his new book The Forgers: The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation. His most recent book was Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (which won the Polish Foreign Ministry History Prize). He is also the author of Berlin at War (shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman Prize), and The Devils’ Alliance.   He is a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Warsaw. For Further Information As mentioned in the podcast, Episode 273 was an exhaustive examination of the life of Josef Pilsudski: father of modern Poland, socialist, Siberian exile, civilian, military thinker, bank robber, master diplomat, and dictator. Also a friend of the podcast, or so we hope. Some common terrain was also discussed in Episode 317, about the village of Oberstdorf in the Allgauer Alps. More on the Ładoś Group The featured image was generated with AI ∙ November 4, 2023 at 12:26 PM